Round Up the Usual Suspect

Are you concerned about getting cancer from using weed killers? Unless you’re drinking rum and Roundup, or gin and glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) in Rick’s Café Américain, I wouldn’t be too concerned yet about IARC’s indictment of the popular weed killer.

On the main page of the National Institutes for Health’s National Cancer Institute(NCI), they talk about the burden of cancer in the U.S. and suggest that 2 out of every 5 people will be diagnosed with cancer and one out of three people diagnosed will die from it. Fortunately, they get their U.S. data from American hospitals. 

They also give statistics for the world using data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). This is an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO).

In order for something to be a health hazard, including cancer, you must know first that it is a hazard (and how potent a hazard it is) and how much you are exposed to. Virtually everything is a hazard. Drink too much water too quickly, and you will die (hyponatremia). Exercise is really good for you but, again, too much can kill you. Similarly, if you are exposed to massive amounts of many chemicals or radiation, you can get cancer. 

In fact, half of the chemicals tested by normal regulatory agencies at or near the “maximum tolerated dose” appear to be carcinogens. As one author says, “It's a complete mistake to assume that half of all chemicals cause cancer, unless you're soaking your feet in solvent while doing ice-cold shots of fungicide.” In fact, the European Food Safety Agency, the European Chemical Agency and EPA found that glyphosate was in the half tested at high dose that didn’t cause cancer.

Enter IARC. IARC does not consider exposure. They do what they call “Hazard Analysis” and only look to see if a chemical, particularly in animals, can cause cancer at very high dose levels. Those are levels that no humans are exposed to. It is a secretive organization that uses no independent peer review, picks and chooses which studies to include, and doesn’t justify its decisions. It is not only cited by the NCI, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) published a paper in 2015 in which they concluded “ The IARC Monographs have made, and continue to make, major contributions to the scientific underpinning for societal actions to improve the public’s health.” 

The American Cancer Society says on their website, “In general, the American Cancer Society does not determine if something causes cancer (that is, if it is a carcinogen). Instead, we rely on the determinations of other respected agencies, such as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, part of the World Health Organization) and the US National Toxicology Program (NTP).”

IARC’s evidence also winds up in American courtrooms with Roundup (glyphosate) being the most recent victim. Bayer/Monsanto settled for $11 billion, and some attorney’s have said, “Even though glyphosate-based Roundup will be taken off the retail market at the end of this year, there could be thousands of former Roundup users who will be diagnosed with NHL [non-Hodgkin Lymphoma] and become Roundup plaintiffs over the next decade.”

An independent review funded by the Center for Truth in Science (I am on their board) concluded that there is “low confidence that any of the studies demonstrated a causal link between glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

Back to IARC. I pulled out about 60 of the 1,000+ chemicals and activities that IARC reviewed and found to be cancer hazards (they only found one that is not). 

You can scan the list and draw your own conclusions about IARC’s “findings.”

Meanwhile, even without exposure evidence, we are, as Captain Renault (Louis) ordered in Casablanca, “round(ing) up the usual suspects.”

Partial List of IARC’s Cancer Causing Activities and Chemicals

  • Alcohol

  • Printing inks

  • Coconut oil

  • Aluminum Production

  • Processed meat

  • Potassium bromate

  • Burning wood

  • Pulp and paper manufacture

  • Crude oil

  • Boot and shoe manufacture and repair

  • Rock wool

  • Saccharin

  • Carpentry

  • Sunlamps

  • Polyethylene

  • Chimney sweeping

  • Sunlight/sunbeds

  • Carrageenan (edible seaweed)

  • Chlorinated drinking water

  • Chinese salted fish

  • Ginko biloba extract

  • Burning coal

  • Soot

  • Coffee

  • Tea

  • Dental materials

  • Orthopedic implants

  • Diesel exhaust

  • Very hot beverages

  • Cell Phones (extremely low frequency)

  • Wood dust

  • Electric fields

  • Styrene

  • Firefighting

  • Acetaminophen (common OTC drug)

  • Manufacturing glass

  • Cyclamates

  • Fluorescent lighting

  • Vitamin K substances

  • Furniture making

  • Tannins in wine

  • Gasoline

  • Talc

  • Frying foods

  • Red 3 food coloring

  • Second hand smoke

  • Carbon nanotubes

  • Leather dust

  • Diazepam (drug for seizures and anxiety)

  • Logging

  • Formaldehyde

  • Night shift work

  • Phenobarbital

  • Estrogen

  • Urethane in wine and whisky

  • Oral contraceptives

  • Caffeine

  • Asian pickled vegetables

  • Chloroform

  • Paving and roofing

  • Isopropyl alcohol

Richard Williams