Toxicology Expert Speaks Out About Roundup and GMOs

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by mello, Nov 4, 2013.

  1. mello Registered Member

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    Dr. Don Huber is likely the leading GMO expert in the world. He is an award-winning, internationally recognized scientist, and professor of plant pathology at Purdue University for the past 35 years.

    His agriculture research is focused on the epidemiology and control of soil-borne plant pathogens, with specific emphasis on microbial ecology, cultural and biological controls, and the physiology of host-parasite relationships.

    His research over the past few decades has led him to become very outspoken against genetically modified organisms (GMO) and genetically engineered (GE) foods and the use of Roundup in agriculture in general.

    He’s really one of the best scientists we have in the GMO movement for documenting the dangers of genetically engineered foods.


    http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/10/06/dr-huber-gmo-foods.aspx?
     
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  3. mello Registered Member

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  5. mello Registered Member

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  7. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Wow 90 scientists said that? Out of how many hundred thousand?
     
  8. mello Registered Member

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    Point is there is no consensus. We need just one if one having good arguments. Yet we have them many.
     
  9. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I bet I can find one scientist who still endorses geocentrism.
     
  10. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    from http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/15059-glyphosate-is-toxic-to-dairy-cows
    A new study shows that glyphosate (Roundup) is toxic to the normal metabolism of dairy cows.
    In the new study, researchers led by Dr Monika Krüger found that all cows investigated at eight Danish dairy farms excreted glyphosate in their urine.
    The researchers found increased blood serum levels of parameters indicative for cell toxicity in cows at all farms. Correlations between levels of glyphosate and some of the measured blood serum parameters demonstrated that glyphosate is toxic to the normal metabolism of dairy cows.
    Interestingly, the researchers found that levels of the essential trace minerals cobalt and manganese were "much too low in all animals for proper function and immune response (in comparison with reference levels)".
    They said this could have been a result of glyphosate's strong effect of binding (chelating) cobalt and manganese in the soil, making them unavailable to plants and the animals that eat them.
    Cobalt deficiency in animals leads to appetite loss, poor growth, wasting, failure to thrive and eventual death.
    Manganese deficiency in animals causes birth defects in newborn animals, notably skeletal deformities, and stillborn foetuses.



    Well, that study makes it sound like Glyphosate isn't too good for you.
    Can anyone supply evidence that Glyphosate residues are not harmful?
     
  11. mello Registered Member

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  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634
    Heck, organic foods aren't proven safe either. Who knows what all those odd natural pesticides and fertilizers will do to your gut bacteria, which have evolved over decades to eat food grown with chemical fertilizers?

    Might organic foods be bad for children? No one has ever proved they aren't. Why put children at risk with organic foods when safer foods are available?
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    There is quite a bit of evidence that the foods eaten by hundreds of millions of people for tens of thousands of years are safe. There is no evidence that any safer foods are available.

    In normal agriculture, moving from long established and thoroughly investigated practices that have worked well, to new and untried and largely uninvestigated practices, is done gradually and piecemeal and with fallback options.
     
  14. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Goodness me! "Pope Discovered to be Catholic, Shock Horror Probe".

    Surely nobody would ever have dreamt of suggesting that glyphosate, a common weedkiller, is NOT harmful to animal life, would they? All you have to do is read the instructions on the packet! If there is a worthwhile debate here at all, surely it must be about what residual level of glyphosate, after a treatment has been carried out, is safe and therefore for how long livestock need to be excluded from a treated area.

    Whatever next? That dinosaurs are thin at one end, get thicker in the middle and are thin at the other end?
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    There are a couple of other serious issues, beyond landscape residue and exclusion of livestock (most glyphosphate is applied to areas never visited at all by livestock).

    One of those issues is the mechanism of resistance engineered into glysphosphate resistant crops: it consists of binding the stuff and sequestering the resulting compound within some of the cells of the resistant plant. Clearly anything eating and digesting those cells is going to release those compounds, and what happens next is largely unknown as of yet - there is good evidence that bacteria in the human gut break the compound, potentially releasing the weedkiller itself free of the complex into the small intestine. No one knows what the long term effect of that would be on, say, a growing child.
     
  16. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    That sounds serious. But acc. Wiki, Round Up Ready wheat has been approved by the FDA after a lot of trials including use for animal feed. So if what you say is true, would this not have shown up? Or can you direct me to a source where I can read more about it?
     
  17. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    proven safe.
    do you understand what that says?
    it essentially says these GMOs have not been around long enough to assess long term trends.
    i imagine there are a host of GMOs that are not safe, some are probably downright lethal.
    what GMOs are you talking about? food?
    it's my opinion that GMOs, the edible kind, are safe for human consumption.
    there ARE other issues about GMOs that needs addressed though.
     
  18. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Modern organic farming methods are not traditional farming methods. They use pesticides, fertilizers etc that are natural as well - but this does NOT mean that humanity has used them for tens of thousands of years. As a simple example, many organic farmers use high doses of the organic pesticides Rotenone and pyrethrin to provide pest control. These have not been used for tens of thousands of years, and they are much less effective than industrial pesticides - which means that farmers need to use higher dosages to achieve the same result.

    Are high doses of pesticide bad for you? Again, no one has proven that they aren't.
     
  19. Pete It's not rocket surgery Registered Senior Member

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    Well, "kills plants" doesn't necessarily translate to "harms animals". Even chemicals that harm one animal don't necessarily harm another. Glyphosate works by blocking a particular enzyme that plants use to make aromatic amino acids. Animals don't have that enzyme, and have to get aromatic amino acids in their diet.

    It seems that toxicity of Roundup (and hence the instructions on the packet) is actually more relevant to the surfactant used to make glyphosate stick to the plant leaves: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15862083
     
  20. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks, I did not know that.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    As a simple example of the fundamental dishonesty of the GMO promoters, that rivals the claim that all domestication breeding is "genetic engineering".

    Modern "organic" growers overall use far smaller quantities, of far less toxic stuff, far less frequently, in ways with which we have far more practical and cultural experience, than industrial farmers using GMOs. GMOs increase the use of the chemicals involved, and the farming practices that rely on them. http://www.enveurope.com/content/24/1/24 Suggesting otherwise, innuendo as a rhetorical technique, is not really something that should be excused or forgiven on a forum like this one. It's not a reasonable "error".

    Along those lines, glyphosate was one of the "nicer" industrial ag chemicals, properly used - its being abused, overused, and eventually (soon) rendered useless by the current GMO ag is a shame as well as a hazard. Bt likewise - until recently one of the "organic" pesticides, a more benign pesticide used in spot applications, its effectiveness is being destroyed by GMO broadscale ag. It has no "organic" replacement, and its industrial replacements are nastier altogether.

    The genetic engineers have been picking up the more benign chemicals, rather than the very most effective ones, to begin with - which shows they are conscious of the fact of risk here, and aware that they are not in control of this stuff. But that increases the loss, when we lose them.

    This is true of the residue toxicity - the stuff one could in theory wash off. But with the glyphosate resistant GMOs there is also the incorporated toxicity - the stuff produced by the misinserted and broken and side effect code and auxiliary code within the plant, the stuff sequestered in the course of resistance metabolism, etc, inside the food.

    Some of the bacteria in the human gut seem to be capable of metabolizing various glyphosate compounds and derivatives and salts and so forth - with consequences as yet unexplored. In addition, glyphosate apparently chelates some minerals, suppress nitrogen fixing bacteria, and so forth, in the soil; and although it does not kill them glyphosate seems to reduce nutrient accumulation and disease resistance in the engineered plants - so that things like manganese and nitrogen become deficient, and things like Fusarium fungus excessive, in GMO crops. Also, yield takes a hit.

    In high enough doses glyphosate poisons people directly, of course. But that is not the worry.
     
  22. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not. I am saying that organic farmers use pesticides like Rotenone and pyrethrin to provide pest control. We have not had 10,000 years to adapt to those chemicals. Are they 100% proven safe? No.

    Are they probably safe ENOUGH? Yes.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    So the question was why you were posting that.

    The topic of the the thread is the unusual, hidden, misrepresented, and comparatively quite large hazards of our GMO agriculture in the US. The focus seems to be the medical threats to people who eat food derived from the genetically engineered crops currently on the market - a small but significant subset of the risks of these things.

    Obviously the much smaller, openly acknowledged, and long familiar hazards of ordinary agriculture - including the "organic" approach - exist. So if that is all you are claiming, there is no controversy and no relevance. Does your post have the slightest relevance to the thread topic?

    Because if you are trying to frame up some kind of equivalence in the relative hazards, and sneak in GMOs under the cover of a misrepresentation of their familiarity and established level of risk, that would be extremely bad faith in argument - Fox News level rhetorical trickery. And that's what it looks like.
     

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