To the Editor,
Re: Fears based on misinformation, Letters, June 2.
I am a retired federal military intelligence analyst residing in Ottawa and I completely disagree with the views on chemicals expressed in this letter to the editor.
First of all, glysophate is not as innocent as the letter writer maintains. Moreover, the writer’s championship of Monsanto gives him away as a biased friend of the chemical industry.
Case in point is DDT as well. DDT was never banned for use against malaria; its overuse simply made it ineffective.
The most preposterous of the writer’s manifestations of excessive sympathies for the chemical industry is his praise of GMOs. It is patently untrue that GMOs have been properly researched and given a clear bill of health by independent science.
GMOs are most definitely not “the most highly regulated foods on the planet.” Moreover, environmentally caused cancer rates, including cancers afflicting young children, have substantially increased since the Second World War, coincidentally with the increased use of all kinds of chemicals.
Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency doesn’t have labs of its own and is paid by the industry for each pesticide registration. There are approximately 250 toxicologists (rat specialists) and only two epidemiologists (human specialists).
Conclusions of the PMRA are based on industry provided rat data. Rats have detoxification genes missing in humans.
Thus it is not surprising that the PMRA is very weak in examining independent epidemiological studies that deal with human rather than rodent health.
K. Jean Cottam
Ottawa