Are You Eating, Drinking and Breathing Monsanto's New Agent Orange? Sayer Ji Special to Salem-News.com
(NEW YORK) - In a groundbreaking study published in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry last month, researchers found that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide ³Roundup,² is flowing freely into the groundwater in areas where it is being applied.
The researchers found that 41% of the 140 groundwater samples taken from Catalonia Spain, had levels beyond the limit of quantification indicating that, despite manufacturer¹s claims, it does not break down rapidly in the environment, and is accumulating there in concerning quantities.
Why Is Groundwater Contamination An Important Finding? Groundwater is water located beneath the ground surface, that supplies aquifers, wells and springs. If a chemical like glyphosate is mobile enough to get into the groundwater and is intrinsically resistant to being biodegraded (after all, it is being used to kill/degrade living things not the other way around), significant environmental exposures to humans using the water are inevitable.
Keep in mind that glyphosate is considered by the EPA as a Class III toxic substance, fatal to an adult at 30 grams, and has been linked to over 20 adverse health effects in the peer-reviewed, biomedical literature.
This groundwater contamination study adds to another highly concerning finding from March, published in the journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, where researchers found the chemical in 60-100% of all air and rain samples tested, indicating that glyphosate pollution and exposure is now omnipresent in the US. When simply breathing makes you susceptible to glyphosate exposure, we know we are dealing with a problem of unprecedented scale.