August 10, 2017 — Lawyers for people with cancer have released documents proving that Monsanto was actually heavily involved in editing several “independent” studies on Roundup side effects.
The documents were recently posted online by lawyers for over 1,000 people with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who are involved in a federal Multi-District Litigation (MDL) in California.
The documents include email correspondence from William Heydens, Monsanto’s chief of regulatory science, and other Monsanto scientists who secretly organized, reviewed, and edited studies on Roundup.
Monsanto paid Intertek Group Plc. to publish those studies after glyphosate was upgraded to a “probable human carcinogen” by the World Health Organization’s cancer-research experts in March 2015.
In September 2016, Intertek published a review supplement titled “An Independent Review of the Carciongenic Potential of Glyphosate” in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology. Not surprisingly, it concluded that exposure to glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer in humans.
The problem is that Intertek’s study claimed their independent experts “were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company” and “neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.”
Those claims appear to be directly contradicted by dozens of pages of internal email correspondence between Intertek’s experts and scientists at Monsanto that plaintiff’s attorneys recently posted online.
Monsanto also made sure the studies were highly critical of the IARC. For example, when an epidemiologist from Denmark pointed out 6 statements that he thought should be removed because they were “inflammatory” criticisms of the IARC, he was vetoed by Mr. Heydens.
In another example involving a different “independent” study on birth defects that was published in 2011, Monsanto’s lead toxicologist, Donna Farmer, made substantial changes and additions to the rough draft. Although nearly all of Ms. Farmer’s changes made it into the final paper, her name was removed as a co-author and she was not listed in the acknowledgments.
Monsanto insists that the edits made by its scientists were merely “cosmetic.” The publishers for Critical Reviews in Toxicology are say they are reviewing the matter.
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