U.S.EPA says glyphosate does not cause cancer

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently released a paper indicating the widely used herbicide glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer, conflicting with a controversial report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

“The available data at this time do no [not] support a carcinogenic process for glyphosate,” the EPA issue paper says.

A Scientific Advisory Panel on glyphosate will meet Oct. 18-21, under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. That panel will have 90 days to write another report, which the EPA will review and take 60 days for public comments. The EPA hopes to publish a public and environmental health assessment in spring 2017.

Glyphosate is the most widely used agricultural chemical ever used in the U.S., according to an October 2015 study published in Environmental Sciences Europe. It’s one of the ingredients in Monsanto’s “Roundup” weed killer.

IARC released a report in March 2015 saying glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic.”

In October 2015, the EPA briefly released a report, labelled “final report,” saying glyphosate is not likely a carcinogen. But the agency quickly took the report down, saying it was a draft that was not meant to be published.

Three EPA scientists were involved in the IARC study, which led Republicans on the House Science Committee to ask Administrator Gina McCarthy for more information about why the study was taken down. The Department of Health and Human Services denied a conservative group’s Freedom of Information Act request for email communications between its scientists about the IARC study.

The European Food Safety Authority released a report in November 2015 that also said glyphosate is probably not a carcinogen. In 2016, the United Nations and World Health Organization, New Zealand Environmental Protection Agency, and German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to the European Chemicals Agency put out reports that similarly cast doubt on the pesticide’s potential carcinogenicity.

The latest EPA paper sides with those agencies in relatively confident terms.

“Overall, animal carcinogenicity and genotoxicity studies were remarkably consistent and did not demonstrate a clear association between glyphosate exposure and outcomes of interest related to carcinogenic potential,” the paper says. “In epidemiological studies, there was no evidence of an association between glyphosate exposure and numerous cancer outcomes.”