Tag Archive Glyphosate

Restrictions on Glyphosate sales in Telangana

Telangana Govt issued guidelines restricting the sale and use of Glyphosate herbicide in Telangana.

  • No Glyphosate formulation can be sold in the state till 30th October as no approvals are given by CBRC
  • Between November and May farmers can use Glyphosate in non cropped areas but sale is permitted only on specific recommendation of the authorised officer (ADAs/MAOs)
  • No retailer can sell any of the Glyphosate formulation without a recommendation slip from extension personnel
  • Extension personal should take responsibility of educating the farmers not to use Glyphosate in any crop
  • The Department of agriculture has to monitor and report any unauthorised sale/use. any failure to regulate will call for stringent action against the local ADAs/MAOs.

G.O. Rt No. 273 Dated 26.07.2019 (Glyphosate Formulations)

Bees Dying at an Alarming Rate Is Glyphosate the Cause? [Video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed9b-JIAa1Q

Bees
Bees are dying at an alarming rate, and scientists are doing everything they can to figure out if the main ingredient in Roundup®, glyphosate, is the cause. Monsanto’s most successful product is its Roundup Ready® seeds which have stirred a global commotion about the safety of animals and humans who ingest food that comes from GMO crops like soy and corn. Natural News, conducted a poll where 51 percent of readers expressed their disdain for Monsanto.
Readers polled in the Natural News survey must really care about bees, because they went as far as calling Monsanto “evil,” based on the altruistic motives the corporation claims to practice. People who question Monsanto’s motives point to the company’s pledge on its website that stands in complete opposition to the negative influence that Monsanto has on the global environment, “Benefits: We will use sound and innovative science and thoughtful and effective stewardship to deliver high-quality products that are beneficial to our customers and to the environment.” Monsanto considers its GMO crops such as, soybeans, corn, cotton, and canola to be its high-quality products. These crops are grown from seeds that have been engineered to withstand the toxic ingredient glyphosate.
One study presents evidence that links glyphosate to mutations in animals. Glyphosate found in water at 3 parts per million leads to “morphological changes” in amphibians. GMO soy is particularly exposed to high levels of glyphosate, and the threshold the EPA uses to evaluate the risk of this toxin keeps rising over the years. An article on the site Mother Jones points out that on average GMO soy tested for glyphosate contains an amount that hovers around 11.9 ppm. The maximum amount of glyphosate in GMO soy recorded was 20.1 ppm. The allowed average for the EPA is 20 ppm which is a high level according to Monsanto’s representatives who were quoted in 1999 as saying that a level of glyphosate at 5.6 ppm was dangerous.
Dr. Mae Wan Ho is conducting research to find the cause of cancer in farmers that use Roundup®. This type of study is one of many that has the potential to connect the cause of why bees are dying at an alarming rate to glyphosate. This research found a correlation between Roundup® and illness, “The incidence of numerous disease and adverse conditions has gone up in parallel with the increase in GM crops and the use of glyphosate herbicide since 1994, the first year of commercialization of GM crops.” The most controversial aspect of glyphosate use among farmers is that the EPA has dismissed most of the scientific research on the detrimental effects of Roundup®.
Dr. Don Huber, Emeritus Professor of Plant Pathology at Purdue University, is known for his research about Roundup’s® hazards. Dr. Huber has several publications on agricultural bioterrorism and supports an increase of research on glyphosate’s effects on humans, animals, and the environment. In his unpublished work titled, “Is Glyphosate a Contributing Cause of Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)?,” Dr. Huber hypothesizes, “The focus on insecticides and their acute toxicity may have resulted in over-looking the direct and indirect chronic effects of glyphosate as a contributing factor to bee colony collapse disorder.”
Even though bees are dying at an alarming rate, Monsanto is not supporting any claim that glyphosate could be the cause. However, many scientists are not backing down to the biotech giant and are building a collection of evidence that links the glyphosate in Roundup® and Roundup Ready® seeds to disease in humans and animals. The most challenging aspect of uncovering the true cause of Colony Collapse Disorder is whether or not scientists who are not funded by Monsanto can overcome the company’s attempt to squash any scientific evidence that does not comply with Monsanto’s mission.
By Reivin Johnson

How Roundup weedkiller can promote cancer, new study from India reveals

1. How Roundup weedkiller can promote cancer, new study reveals
Sayer Ji
GreenMedInfo, 11 Nov 2013
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/how-roundup-weedkiller-can-promote-cancer-new-study-reveals-1?page=1
[Links to sources and graphics included at weblink above]
Roundup herbicide (glyphosate) is in our air, rain, groundwater, soil and most food in the U.S., and an increasing body of research reveals it has cancer-promoting properties.
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research have recently confirmed the carcinogenic potential of Roundup herbicide using human skin cells (HaCaT) exposed to extremely low concentrations of the world’s best selling herbicide.
The researchers previously reported on glyphosate’s tumor promoting potential in a two-stage mouse skin carcinogenesis model[i] through its disruption of proteins that regulate calcium (Ca2+- ) signaling and oxidative stress (SOD 1), but were unable in these investigations to identify the exact molecular mechanisms behind how glyphosate contributes to tumor promotion.
The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal ISRN Dermatology,[ii] sought out to clarify the exact mode of tumorigenic action, finding the likely mechanism behind glyphosate’s cancer promoting properties is through the downregulation of mitochondrial apoptotic (self-destructive) signaling pathways, as well as through the disruption of a wide range of cell signaling and regulatory components. Cell proliferative effects were induced by concentrations lower than .1 mM, and as low as 0.01 mM, which is four orders of magnitude lower than concentrations commonly used in GM agricultural applications (e.g. 50 mM). The fact that lower concentrations were more effective at inducing proliferation than higher concentrations (which suppressed cell growth), indicates that Roundup is a potent endocrine disrupter, and further highlights why conventional toxicological risk assessments are inadequate because they do not account for the fact that as concentrations are reduced certain types of toxicity — e.g. endocrine disruption — actually increase.
The researchers used the product Roundup Original (glyphosate 41%, polyethoxethyleneamine (POEA) ≅15%—Monsanto Company, St. Louis, MO, USA), and observed the following changes to human skin cells induced through exposure to this chemical mixture:
*Significant increases in cell proliferation (via disruption of CA2+ levels, i.e. decreased levels)
Increases oxidative stress, as measured by levels of ROS (reactive oxygen species)
*Cell-cycle dysregulation, marked by an accumulation of cells in S-phase (hallmark feature of cancer)
*Increased proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), a marker for increased cell proliferation
*Increased Bromodeoxyuridin (BrdU), a marker for increased cell proliferation
*Decreases in the level of the protein IP3R1, an indication of resistance to cell death
*Increases in Bcl-2 protein, a tumor promoter gene product
*Decreases in Bax proteins, a tumor suppressor gene product
*Caspase suppression (associated with prevention of cell death)
*Changes in the expression of the Ca2+- binding family of proteins (S100 family) S100A6/S100A9, associated with various cancers.
It is important to emphasize that while the researchers observed cell proliferation-associated changes in the expression of the Ca2+- binding proteins S100A6/A9 following glyphosate exposure to human skin cells, the implications of these findings reach beyond the skin cell lineage. They explained that related modifications of the expression pattern of S100A6/A9 protein have also been found in “hepatocellular carcinoma [15], lung cancer [16], colorectal cancer [17], and melanoma [18].”
The study included a diagram (shown below) representing graphically the multiple ways in which glyphosate disrupts cellular structure/function to contribute to uncontrolled cell proliferation.
The researchers summarized their findings as follows:
“In conclusion, in this study, we demonstrated that glyphosate may possibly exert proliferative effect in HaCaT cells by activating Ca2+ binding proteins to promote the imbalance of intracellular Ca2+ homeostasis and lessen SOD1 to increase ROS generation. This effect was partially reversed by treatment with antioxidant NAC indicating connections between oxidative stress and hypocalcaemia. Reduced Ca2+ levels enhance Bcl-2 and decrease Bax, subsequently leading to decrease in cytochrome c to stimulate further decrease of caspase 3 via the downregulation of IP3R1 level, thus halting apoptosis. The present study for the first time provides insight into the mechanism of glyphosate-induced neoplastic potential in mammalian skin system.”
It should be noted that their observation that the carcinogenicity of Roundup may be suppressed by the antioxidant n-acetyl-cysteine (NAC), which is a precursor to the cellular detoxifier and antioxidant known as glutathione and a readily available dietary supplement, has important implications, owing to how widespread exposure to Roundup herbicide has become, both through environmental exposures in air, soil, rain and groundwater, as well as in the tens of thousands of unlabeled products containing GM ingredients contaminated with physiologically significant levels of this chemical.


2. Emptying of Intracellular Calcium Pool and Oxidative Stress Imbalance Are Associated with the Glyphosate-Induced Proliferation in Human Skin Keratinocytes HaCaT Cells
Jasmine George and Yogeshwer Shukla
ISRN Dermatology
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 825180, 12 pages
Full text available free at:
http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/dermatology/2013/825180/
Proteomics Laboratory, Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (CSIR), Mahatma Gandhi Marg, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh 226001, India
Abstract
We demonstrated that glyphosate possesses tumor promoting potential in mouse skin carcinogenesis and SOD 1, calcyclin (S100A6), and calgranulin B (S100A9) have been associated with this potential, although the mechanism is unclear. We aimed to clarify whether imbalance in between  levels and oxidative stress is associated with glyphosate-induced proliferation in human keratinocytes HaCaT cells. The  levels, ROS generation, and expressions of G1/S cyclins, IP3R1, S100A6, S100A9, and SOD 1, and apoptosis-related proteins were investigated upon glyphosate exposure in HaCaT cells. Glyphosate (0.1 mM) significantly induced proliferation, decreases , and increases ROS generation in HaCaT cells, whereas antioxidant N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) pretreatment reverts these effects which directly indicated that glyphosate induced cell proliferation by lowering  levels via ROS generation. Glyphosate also enhanced the expression of G1/S cyclins associated with a sharp decrease in G0/G1 and a corresponding increase in S-phases. Additionally, glyphosate also triggers S100A6/S100A9 expression and decreases IP3R1 and SOD 1 expressions in HaCaT cells. Notably, Ca2+ suppression also prevented apoptotic related events including Bax/Bcl-2 ratio and caspases activation. This study highlights that glyphosate promotes proliferation in HaCaT cells probably by disrupting the balance in between  levels and oxidative stress which in turn facilitated the downregulation of mitochondrial apoptotic signaling pathways.