Reviews of glyphosate show no cancerous risk

Monsanto retained Interteck Scientific and Regulatory Consultancy this year to review the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) monograph on glyphosate.

A panel of experts presented its findings during the Society for Risk Assessment annual meeting.

The panel of experts decided that glyphosate does not show evidence of a potential human carcinogenesis. The IARC animal bioassay and genotoxicity evaluations suffered from a multitude of problems.

The panel said the evaluations “suffered from significant weaknesses such as: selectivity in the choice of data reviewed, failure to use all relevant biologic information to evaluate relationship to treatment in animal bioassays, and failure to use weight-of-evidence evaluations using all available data and appropriate weighting.”

A conclusion by the European Food Safety Authority agreed that “glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans." The Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency said in April, “the overall weight of evidence indicates that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a human cancer risk.” Finally, the Environmental Protection Agency said that 55 epidemiological studies found there is no evidence to show glyphosate causes cancer.