Glyphosate safety case gets boost from N.B. doctor
Environmental and food groups taking Health Canada to court to challenge a decision to approve the renewal of a pesticide that contains glyphosate have found a measure of validation for their case in the views of a New Brunswick doctor.
Neurologist Alier Marrero believes his patients suffer from a suspicious illness, according to a news report, and he has pleaded with the Canadian government to conduct environmental testing he thinks will show a connection to the herbicide glyphosate.
“What I would love to see is Health Canada taking action on this report from this neurologist and actually deal with his findings that there was exposure and that it is potentially associated with these neurologic incidents,” said Toronto lawyer Laura Bowman, who represents Ecojustice, a Canadian nonprofit environmental law organization that filed the lawsuit against Health Canada earlier this year on behalf of four groups.
The groups have been lobbying Health Canada for years to do just what Marrero has asked.
Bowman said one “infuriating” public comment on the published observations from Marrero asserted that his findings would have to be compared with exposures to the general population.
“We’ve been trying to get Health Canada to do biomonitoring of the exposures of the general population for decades and they have constantly refused to do it,” Bowman said. “We have been trying to get Health Canada to monitor the amount of glyphosate in drinking water for decades and they refuse to do it, so how could you ever compare these incidents with background exposure? We don’t know what the background exposure is.”
Glyphosate is a widely used herbicide most commonly applied as a weed killer. First introduced by Monsanto as the active ingredient in their herbicide, Roundup, the product is used by many, including farmers on crops and home gardeners in their backyards.
Glyphosate is registered in Canada for spraying on the following crops after they’ve started growing: wheat, barley, oats, chickpeas, flax, lentils, mustard, dry beans, canola (GM), peas, soybean (GM), and fava beans.
NO MYSTERY ILLNESS
For more than two years, dozens of New Brunswickers have experienced a distressing array of neurological symptoms, initially prompting speculation they had developed an unknown degenerative illness.
The New Brunswick government investigated, determined there is no mystery illness and closed the investigation, the media report affirmed. An independent oversight committee commissioned by the province determined the patients in the cluster were most likely misdiagnosed and were suffering from known illnesses like cancer and dementia.
The government cast doubt on Marrero’s assertion after he had referred dozens of cases from befuddled doctors.
On behalf of the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence Canada, Friends of the Earth Canada
and Safe Food Matters, Ecojustice filed its judicial review application in Federal Court in January.
The groups argue that the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) of Health Canada has a duty to only renew registrations for pesticide products if it can determine with reasonable certainty that no harm will occur to human health and the environment.
MAD DOG PLUS
In December, Health Canada renewed the registration for the herbicide Mad Dog Plus, which contains glyphosate as its active ingredient, for five more years.
“Health Canada received many incident reports regarding glyphosate,” Bowman said. “They span a whole wide range of different types of effects.”
Bowman said she is not aware of specific incident reports that are similar to Marrero’s “but I will say that the science on the neurological impact of glyphosate has become much more dire in the past few years and that is part of our litigation.”
Bowman said a number of products containing glyphosate
were set to have approvals expire at the end of last year.
“Our clients sent a letter to the PMRA outlining the new evidence on neurological impacts of glyphosate and asked the PMRA to consider that evidence and not renew the product if they didn’t have confidence that they had reasonable certainty that no harm would occur,” Bowman said.
“As far as we can tell, the PMRA actually didn’t review any of it (evidence) before renewing the product.”
‘AWARE OF THIS INFORMATION’
As part of the litigation, Bowman said Ecojustice recently received a record from the PMRA about what information had been considered before the products were renewed.
“It’s just like a one-sentence memo that says we are aware of this information,” she said. “That seems to be the sum total of their review before they renewed the product.”
Bowman said Ecojustice cannot use Marrero’s assertions in the current case, which she expects to be heard before year’s end, because the
PMRA approval in question preceded his findings.
“We can’t use it for the past PMRA decision but there are more products that will be up for renewal at the end of this year,” she said.
“The evidence continues to constantly mount that glyphosate causes serious harms to human health,” Bowman said. “Health Canada has an obligation to look at these incidents and to look at new science as it comes out and confirm that they have reasonable certainty of no harm or they shouldn’t be renewing the products.”
Bowman said there are hundreds of glyphosate products and registrations are amended all the time.
Bowman said Health Canada is decades behind on the science of pesticides.
“Health Canada is egregiously slow in keeping up with the science and they have also admitted that that’s the case,” Bowman said. “It takes them 20 or 30 years to update the threats on each pesticide. Glyphosate was last looked at in 2015 to 2017 and unless we are successful in our lawsuit, it will likely not be looked at again until the 2030s.”