French Pesticide Researcher Seralini Announces New Plan to Study Cancer Victims Suing Bayer

In the GMO world, there is no researcher more famous than the Normandy professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, who studied the effects of genetically modified organisms in rats and found GMO's cause cancer. It put him in Monsanto's sites and the agrochemical giant sued him 7 times for his research - and lost 7 times. But more recently he's taken on a new target - the herbicide Roundup, used on crops that feed more than a billion people around the globe.

NEW RESEARCH TO FOCUS ON ROUNDUP IN CANCER VICTIMS

From left to right: Dr. Michelle Perro, Gilles-Eric Seralini, Ruth Weistreich of
the Westreich Foundation, Jerome Douzelet and Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America

At a private gathering in the San Diego area on Tuesday, Seralini, a molecular biologist, announced he's launching a new initiative to study the 8,000+ plaintiffs currently suing Bayer/Monsanto over cancer claims. (A San Francisco judge awarded the first plaintiff, DeWayne Johnson of Vallejo, damages of $40 million after a jury found the claim justified). It's research that could be game changing.

The lawsuits claim that glyphosate and other ingredients in Roundup caused the victims to get non Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a form of cancer. Monsanto and Bayer claimed the product was safe and never put warning labels on the products.

Seralini said his newest research, using mass spectrometry to analyze the contents of Roundup's unlisted ingredients, suggests that Roundup contains petroleum byproducts and arsenic, which has long been banned as a pesticide. The product formulation may be as much as 1000% more toxic than glyphosate alone, Seralini said.

In his 2018 study, published in Toxicology Reports, he and his co-authors write:

"The toxic effects and endocrine disrupting properties of the formulations were mostly due to the formulants and not the glyphosate. In this work, we also identified by mass spectrometry the heavy metals arsenic, chromium, cobalt, lead and nickel, which are known to be toxic and endocrine disruptors, as contaminants in 22 pesticides, including 11 glyphosate-based ones. This could explain some of the adverse effects of the pesticides."

Formulants in Roundup are not inert, according to Seralini's study

"We used to see arsenic poisoning used by the Egyptians, or to kill kings, or in Madame Bovary. But here we are seeing chronic intoxication," he said.

Seralini

Roundup's ingredients, he said, are a case of "double fraud. They list glyphosate as the active ingredient, but in fact petroleum residues [POEA] and arsenic are the real ingredients," he said.

Historically arsenic was in the earliest known vineyard pesticides in a mixture known as Paris Green, dating back to 1775.

It was widely used, but often faked; in the late 1800's in California, many Paris Green mixtures were bogus concoctions that didn't work due to a lack of effective ingredients.

In an historical echo - a reversal of sorts - Seralini's research on Roundup suggests similar ingredient deceptions are not limited to the past, but quite active in the present. With Roundup, users get far more than what they paid for with ingredients that are far more toxic than those listed on the label.

In 1901, in California, growers pressured legislators to create the California Dept. of Pesticide Regulation to prevent fraudulent, ineffective Paris Green products from being sold on the market. However, by 1926, scientists could see that arsenic caused illness, and the state agency began testing for arsenic residues on fruits and vegetables. By 1934, arsenic residues were no longer allowed.

"It was used in the concentration camps," Seralini said "as a poison."

"One of the hallmarks of arsenic poisoning is skin cancer," he said, alluding to the fact that DeWayne Johnson's cancer was a particularly virulent form of NHL that produced skin lesions over his body.

Concurring, Douzelet, co-author of the book The Taste of Pesticides in Wine urged the audience of more than 100 people, to stop pointing the finger at glyphosate and instead target the formulated Roundup product. "Roundup is the real poison," he said.

WINE AND PESTICIDES

In wine testing, Douzelet said that his research showed that there were virtually no residues in organically grown wines, but that conventional wines contained residues in excess of 11,000 times the regulated limits for tap water.

Douzelet, who worked with 71 great tasters in France on research on the taste of pesticides, said Roundup dilutions in water - at the same percentage as in wine - tasted "like petroleum. It produces a burning sensation on the tongue," he said.

"Synthetic chemicals block the capillaries on the tongue," he said, advocating for wines that "use natural yeasts, living yeasts, and living microbes."