With links to the Church of Scientology, anti-vaccine glyphosate litigator Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Organic Consumers Association, US Right to Know, and Environmental Working Group, this former Reuters reporter has spearheaded the effort by organic promoters to discredit GMOs, glyphosate, and other agri-technological tools positioned to feed a growing global population and address climate change. Heres her story and why she does it.
Corey Booker has a new-found campaign: Capitalizing on public concerns about the weedkiller glyphosate (also sold under a now-expired patent by Monsanto as Roundup), claimed by its critics to cause cancer. Last Tuesday (June 19), the New Jersey Senator, head of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, participated in a webinar highlighting its alleged dangers.
The event was organized by a group called Farmers Footprint, which promotes regenerative and organic agriculture. If you believe the host, this panel was crafted to put dialogue over consensus and allow for the nuance and present all the different perspectives on how glyphosate affects planetary health.
That would have been a constructive conversation to have. Thats the opposite of what happened. To say that the webcast was rigged would be an understatement. No farmers, soil expert or independent regulators were invited. No epidemiologists or toxicologists. Just activists, including someone who goes under the name Glyphosate Girl. And, of course, Booker. And in case you werent sure about where the host stood on the glyphosate controversy, if you scrolled down on the event page at the hosts site, there was this:
The glyphosate attack seminar traces to an article by Carey Gillam in the UK The Guardian earlier in July. The piece reported on the routine release of years-old Centers for Disease Control data, which Gillam claimed (although the figure is not cited in the CDC release) found that 80% of Americans had traces of glyphosate in their urine.
Gillams piece was quickly disseminated by the usual leftwing channels but also became a favorite of the far right, from the Gospel News Networkto The Epoch Times, which makes the case that the government is untrustworthy. Shes beloved by activists, particularly those reflexively critical of Big Agriculture and advocates of organic farming. She was drafted by Farmers Footprint to moderate and guide the webinar.
The event went as would be expected. Glyphosate is a hidden killer. The agricultural industry conspires to hide the facts. The US EPA and other global agencies that have determined the herbicides is safe as used are part of a global conspiracy.
Booker bit. Three days later, he released a statement co-signed by eight Democratic senators, urging the US Fish and Wildlife Service to sharply restrict the use of glyphosate and other long-approved pesticides on National Wildlife Refuges without even suggesting what safer alternatives could be substituted. (There arent any.)
The original report and the seminar were panned by independent scientists. Why? Isnt the presence of a weedkiller in the human body something to be concerned about?
On the surface yes, but the article doesnt really address that threat, which turns out to be minimal to non-existent. Scientists were particularly critical by such exaggerations as disturbing and tied to cancer claims that most independent scientists would reject as hyperbolic or outright incorrect.
As independent scientists Geoffrey Kabat and Kevin Folta wrote in separate articles on the GLP, the numbers as reported by the CDC underscore the relative safety of glyphosate not its possible harmfulness. Micro-traces at infinitesimally small levels in the parts per billion (equivalentto 1 drop of impurity in 500 barrels of water or 1 cent out of $10 million) are no cause for concern. The human body always has potentially harmful substances but at levels too low to be actually harmful. For example, human tissues and blood normally contain small amounts of various radioactive isotopes, which are harmless at the levels at which they occur. Any lab could identify thousands of purportedly toxic chemicals
Specifically, our kidneys are designed to eliminate potential toxins. The presence of micro-traces of any of thousands of toxins in our urine, including glyphosate, is a reassuring sign that our body is functioning properly. The level of glyphosate found in this study is detectablebut negligible and harmless, as regulatory agencies worldwide have determined.
While science was not on the agenda, the article and panel did provide a star turn for Gillam. In her current position, she partners with the Environmental Working Group, an organic-industry funded activist and litigation-focused organization in producing a blog called The New Lede. She refers to herself on her LinkdedIn page as a modern-day Rachel Carson for her groundbreaking work in exposing decades of corporate secrets and deceptive tactics by powerful pesticide companies, including the global giant Monsanto.
In fact, Gillam has had a rocky professional history. Scientists call her a one-woman science wrecking ball who misunderstands chemical risk and systematically exaggerates the dangers of a weedkiller that the global regulatory community has unanimously determined is safe as used, both to human health and the environment. Well have more on glyphosate, the article, Gillams history, and The New Lede as we go along.
If you are not familiar with the global conversation surrounding glyphosate, it has become a touchstone in the debate over the future of farming. The weedkillers proponentsupwards of 98% of the worlds farmers and every major independent regulatory or oversight agency in the world, (19 of them), subscribe to the science that the weedkiller is safeboth in the environment and as it shows up in micro-traces in food.
One UN sub-agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), singularly strayed from the consensus and issued a hazard analysis, which does not evaluate real-life exposure [all 19 of the other agencies did a risk analysis, which evaluates the actual likelihood of getting cancer under real-life conditions; for an explanation, read this]. It concluded that the weedkiller poses a theoretical hazard to everyday applicators who apply it over many years or decades but drew no conclusion as to its trace risks in food.
[View hyperlinked GLP infographic to review the findings by the global agencies].
Nineteen of the 20 independent agencies reviewed IARCs hazard data in 23 studies and found its findings incomplete and its research methods shoddy or inadequate. As Health Canada recently noted (2019) after reviewing claims that glyphosate causes health problems:
No pesticide regulatory authority in the world currently considers glyphosate to be a cancer risk to humans at the levels at which humans are currently exposed.
That hasnt stopped the debate over the weedkiller from percolating in the media and in legislative halls, pitting the global regulatory and science community against activist groups who target synthetic agricultural chemicals (many of which are safer with less consequences to the environment, flora and fauna then organic alternatives). Risk in chemicals is challenging for most people to assess, which is why extremist activists like EWG and Gillam view targeting pesticides as the public-relations Achilles heel of mainstream agriculture as they seek to promote organic and regenerative farming.
Contradicting what the discussion on Gillams webcast suggested, exposure to glyphosate traces in our urine is not unusual almost any common toxic chemical shows up in parts per billion. As the chart below illustrates, Vitamin D is potentially hundreds of times more threatening. Glyphosate is less toxic than table salt. The caffeine in your morning cup of Joe is 22 times more toxic than the weedkillerbut like glyphosate, toxic caffeine is excreted from our bodies, harmlessly. Thank you, kidneys!
Since ancient times, it has been known that the dose makes the poison. Chemical risk comes down to how much we are exposed to and how long. And as Dr. Kabat reported in his article, the state-of-the art National Cancer Institutes Agricultural Health Study, which tracked farm workers exposed to glyphosate over decades, showed no association of glyphosate with any of more than twenty types of cancer.
So, despite the noise created by Gillam and activist groups, no reputable oversight or assessment agency in the worldnot oneconsiders trace levels of glyphosate as noted in our urine at the levels cited by the CDC as potentially harmful.
A recent similar urine analysis report, drawing on the same CDC database, on another herbicide conducted by a group called the Heartland Study was exposed in this article by Cornell microbiologist Dr. Kathleen Hefferon. It had similar methodological flaws and serious academic ethical breaches. The analysis was led by glyphosate litigation consultant Charles Benbrook [Read GLP profile of Benbrook]. Benbrook, an economist with no formal background in toxicology, is known in legal circles as an anti-chemical consultant for hire when organic clients want removed from the market).
The CDC report would have been a footnote in a mountain of mostly useless data until it was weaponized by Carey Gillam.Besides her skewed analysis that ran in The Guardian, she placed it at her partner organizations accompanied: on EWGs site (which exaggerated the data, claiming CDC found 87%); and on vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedys Childrens Health Defense e-mag, The Defender, for which Gillam writes regularly and has a dedicated column page. (The Defender is committed to defending children from getting life-saving routine vaccines, including COVID vaccines.)
Carey Gillam has been the most visible and relentless critic of agricultural chemicals for a decade. What is her background? What follows is a more accurate primer on her background.[Read GLP backgrounder of one of Gillams books here]
Gillam has a history as a longtime Monsanto antagonist and critic of conventional agriculture. She was affiliated with Reuters for 17 years, much of it covering food and farming in the Midwest. According to Freedom of Information documents, she left under a cloud after being confronted by her editor in 2015, after years of complaints from independent scientists about her lack of editorial balance and her embrace of anti-GMO conspiracy propaganda. Her anti-GMO activist friends were well aware that editors at Reuters had challenged her for apparently compromising journalistic standards and ethics.
When contacted by the GLP, Gillam denied being forced out under pressure from Reuters management, claiming she has paperwork to support her claim, but she refused to share it.Shortly after leaving Reuters, Gillam was named research director at US Right to Know, where the constraints of objective journalism that she reportedly challenged were no longer in place.
Tomorrow, we will examine Carey Gillams work as a frontperson for the anti-GMO industry and the web of pro-organic corporations and activist groups that profit from her advocacy.
Jon Entineis the foundingexecutivedirectorof theGenetic Literacy Project, and winner of 19 major journalism awards. He has written extensively in the popular and academic press on media ethics, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and agricultural and population genetics. You can follow him on Twitter@JonEntine.The GLP discloses all major contributors and conflicts of interest, and outlines its donor policy on itstransparency page.
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Part 1: Carey Gillam Reporter turned organic propagandist who twists science in her campaign to discredit biotechnology and conventional agriculture...
