Poison Papers (suite) : les ingrédients secrets de l’écocide

Vu la crise des oeufs contaminés en Europe, je pense qu’il est crucial de revenir sur les révélations publiées dans Poison Papers. Imaginez l’ampleur de la contamination en chaîne puisque les œufs entrent dans la fabrication d’une multitude de produits alimentaires usinés. Par contre, la filière des coupables n’est pas difficile à retracer... Tous les chemins mènent à l’industrie chimique.

L’agent chimique en cause est le fipronil, une molécule interdite dans le traitement des animaux destinés à la chaîne alimentaire. Des éleveurs néerlandais de volailles ont fait appel à Chickfriend, une société spécialisée dans l’éradication du pou rouge, qui en a utilisé dans son produit.

   Le fipronil a été mis au point en France par la société Rhône-Poulenc en 1987 et mis sur le marché en 1993. Il est ensuite devenu la propriété d'Aventis à la suite de la fusion de Rhône-Poulenc avec Hoechst, puis a été revendu à Bayer en 2002 et finalement à BASF en 2003. Une controverse s'est développée dans les années 2000 quant à son écotoxicité qui semble plus importante qu'annoncée par les fabricants pour les abeilles domestiques et peut-être d'autres apidés sauvages (importants pollinisateurs).

   Depuis 2013, l'Autorité européenne de sécurité des aliments (Efsa) considère qu'il présente «un risque aigu élevé» pour la survie des abeilles quand il est utilisé comme traitement des semences de maïs. Cet usage a été interdit en juillet 2013 par la Commission européenne. Wikipédia https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fipronil  

L’Office suisse de la sécurité alimentaire (OSAV) a expliqué dans un communiqué que «les quantités constatées jusqu’à présent ne mett[ai]ent pas en danger la santé des consommateurs».

Si l’OSAV est aussi corruptible que l’EPA, alors bonne chance!
Voyez l’article THE SWAMP (1).   

Les 27 pays qui cultivent des OGM. Au total, les OGM sont cultivés dans les 27 pays qui figurent sur cette carte. Et 10 de ces 27 pays (en rouge sur la carte) représentent, à eux seuls, 98 % de la superficie mondiale des cultures transgéniques. La carte fait donc clairement apparaître que la géographie des OGM est dominée par le continent américain, le sous-continent indien et la Chine. Pour protéger leurs innovations, les multinationales font breveter les gènes qu’elles ont décodés ou modifiés. Le vivant peut désormais être breveté, appartenir à une personne ou à une entreprise, tout comme les inventions industrielles. Aujourd’hui, dans le monde, à l’exception de la Chine où la recherche est publique, la totalité des OGM commercialisés sont détenus par des firmes privées. Et Monsanto détient 90% de ces brevets. Le marché mondial est tenu par très peu de firmes agrochimiques. Il y a donc une très forte concentration. On trouve d’abord l’américain Monsanto, également leader pour la production d’un désherbant commercialisé sous le nom de Roundup. On peut citer aussi Pioneer Hi-Bred, qui est une filiale de DuPont de Nemours aux États-Unis; le suisse Syngenta et les allemands BASF et Bayer Crop Science, en Europe. (ARTE)

Le Canada est un cancre 

La majorité des OGM sont développés pour leurs tolérances aux herbicides, pour leurs résistances aux insectes ou pour les deux. Le Canada est le cinquième producteur mondial d’OGM derrière l’Inde, l’Argentine, le Brésil et les États-Unis. Au Canada, la commercialisation d’une dizaine de plantes GM a été approuvée : maïs-grain, canola, pomme de terre, tomate, courge, soja, lin, luzerne, coton, betterave à sucre, papaye et pomme. En mars 2015, deux pommes résistantes aux brunissements ont été autorisées pour l’alimentation humaine.

   En mai 2016, la commercialisation d’un saumon transgénique à croissance accélérée a été approuvée. Ce saumon, développé par AquaBounty Technologies (dont l’actionnaire principal est Intrexon Corporation), a été modifié pour grandir quatre fois plus vite. Il contient des gênes d'autres animaux, notamment d'anguille. Selon de nombreuses publications scientifiques, dont l’étude publiée en 2002 dans la revue American Society of Animal Science, l’hormone de croissance, produite par transgénèse, aboutit à plusieurs dégâts collatéraux. Ainsi, ces animaux ont une tendance supérieure aux autres à devenir diabétiques et les poissons d’AquaBounty devront probablement être vendus sous forme de filets ou dans des plats cuisinés du fait de leurs difformités. Il s’agit du premier animal GM destiné à la consommation humaine commercialisé au Canada. Nous sommes les cobayes; il n'a pas encore été approuvé aux États-Unis - on attend d'avoir des résultats de recherche plus poussés.

Ne vous fiez pas aux beaux saumons de la pub d'AquaBounty... 

Vous en avez déjà peut-être mangé sans le savoir, et conséquemment sans votre consentement, car au Canada l’étiquetage des OGM se fait de façon volontaire. Ottawa a carrément dit non à l’étiquetage. «Je ne suis pas surpris», confie Thibault Rehn, porte-parole du groupe Vigilance OGM, qui milite pour l'affichage obligatoire des OGM. «Nous sommes vraiment déçus, poursuit-il. Justin Trudeau voulait diriger un gouvernement ouvert et transparent, et ce n'est visiblement pas le cas dans le dossier des OGM. Les Canadiens demandent l'étiquetage depuis 20 ans.»

Or qui dit OGM, dit Monsanto, Roundup, glyphosate, 2,4-D (un des ingrédients actifs de l’Agent Orange), et plus.

D’où l’importance de faire circuler les histoires sordides de l’industrie chimique partout dans le monde. Merci Internet. 

When enough is enough, justice comes.

Présentation officielle du projet Poison Papers par les initiateurs.

https://www.poisonpapers.org/the-poison-papers/

The “Poison Papers” represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Taken as a whole, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press. These papers will transform our understanding of the hazards posed by certain chemicals on the market and the fraudulence of some of the regulatory processes relied upon to protect human health and the environment.

   The Poison Papers are a compilation of over 20,000 documents obtained from federal agencies and chemical manufacturers via open records requests and public interest litigation. They include internal scientific studies and summaries of studies, internal memos and reports, meeting minutes, strategic discussions, and sworn testimonies. The majority of these documents have been scanned and digitized by us for the first time and represent nearly three tons of material. The regulatory agency sources of these documents include: the EPA, the USDA Forest Service, the FDA, the Veterans Administration, and the Department of Defense. Chemical manufacturers referenced in the documents include: Dow, Monsanto, DuPont, and Union Carbide, as well as many smaller manufacturers and the commercial testing companies who worked for them.

   The Poison Papers are a project of the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy. The Poison Papers were largely collected by author and activist Carol Van Strum.

   The Poison Papers catalogue both the secret concerns of industry and regulators over the hazards of pesticides and other chemicals and their efforts to conceal those concerns.

   Corporate concealment is not a new story. What is novel in the Poison Papers is abundant evidence that EPA and other regulators were, often, knowing participants or even primary instigators of these cover-ups. These regulators failed to inform the public of the hazards of dioxins and other chemicals; of evidence of fraudulent independent testing; even of one instance of widespread human exposure. The papers thus reveal, in the often-incriminating words of the participants themselves, an elaborate universe of deception and deceit surrounding many pesticides and synthetic chemicals.

   The chemicals most often discussed in the documents include herbicides and pesticides (such as 2,4-D, Dicamba, Permethrin, Atrazine, and Agent Orange), dioxins, and PCBs. Some of these chemicals are among the most toxic and persistent ever manufactured.

   Except for PCBs, almost every chemical discussed in the Poison Papers is still manufactured and sold today, either as products or as product contaminants. Recent research from Australia, shows that many newly-synthesized chlorinated chemical products, including the herbicide 2,4-D, remain contaminated with dioxins. Notably, 2,4-D has just been authorized by EPA for use on Dow’s new GMO 2,4-D-tolerant soybeans.

   Some of the 20,000+ documents in this repository have surfaced over the years. Many have never been either read or publicly written about. The Poison Papers therefore offer a unique opportunity for researchers, the public and the media to discover much more about what was known about chemical toxicity, when, and by whom.

Chemical Lowlights — Some of what the Poison Papers Reveal:

Secrecy – They disclose EPA meeting minutes of a secret high level dioxins working group that admitted dioxins are extraordinarily poisonous chemicals. The internal minutes contradict the Agency’s longstanding refusal to regulate dioxins or set legal limits.

Collusion – They demonstrate EPA collusion with the pulp and paper industry to “suppress, modify, or delay” the results of the congressionally-mandated National Dioxin Study, which found high levels of dioxins in everyday products, such as baby diapers and coffee filters, as well as pulp and paper mill effluents.

Deception – They provide important new data on the infamous Industrial Bio-Test (IBT) scandal. By the late 1970s, it was known that more than 800 safety studies performed by IBT on 140 chemicals produced by 38 chemical manufacturers were nonexistent, fraudulent, or invalid. The Poison Papers, however, show that EPA and its Canadian counterpart, the Health Protection Branch (HPB), colluded with pesticide manufacturers, to keep invalidly registered products on the market and covered up problems with many IBT tests.

Cover-up – The papers also show that EPA staff had evidence that this IBT scandal involved more independent testing companies and more products than ever officially acknowledged.

Concealment – The papers show that EPA concealed and falsely discredited its own studies finding high levels of dioxin – 2,3,7,8-TCDD – in environmental samples and human breast milk following routine use of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (Agent Orange) by the federal Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Intent – They show Monsanto chief medical officer George Roush admitted under oath to knowing that Monsanto studies into the health effects of dioxins on workers were written up untruthfully for the scientific literature such as to obscure health effects. These fraudulent studies were heavily relied upon by EPA to avoid regulating dioxin. They also were relied upon to defend manufacturers in lawsuits brought by veterans claiming damages from exposure to Agent Orange.

~~~

(1) Evaggelos Vallianatos a publié un article intitulé THE SWAMP le 4 août 2017 (HUFFPOST). À noter qu’il a travaillé pour l’EPA. Full article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-swamp_us_5984c3bde4b00833d1de27c4

Excerpts

Let’s assume you are interested in public and environmental health. Let’s assume further you accidentally enter a huge laboratory in suburban America. The receptionist is a chemist. She informs you the lab has been testing all kinds of chemicals, including pesticides and drugs to make certain these chemicals don’t cause unreasonable harm to people and the environment. You ask the receptionist who founded the lab and she cheerfully recites that a distinguished biochemist from an ivy university came up with the idea to satisfy government demands for safety. Then the receptionist leaves you alone, telling you to wait to talk to one of the scientists who knows more about the lab.

   You wait but no one shows up. You decide to explore the place. You enter a large room with the infrastructure of a lab: tables loaded with knives, glass tubes, chemicals, and equipment for operations and pathology studies. You immediately react, wishing to get out of the room. An awful stench is hanging in the air. A broken water sprinkler is throwing water over cages full of mice, rats, and dogs. Rats are running into a swamp: water mixed with animal excrement covering the floor. Then, astonishingly, you see a technician holding a canister of sleeping gas running after rats. You back off in horror and reenter the reception room where the calm receptionist is on the phone calling the police for an intruder, you.

   This could be the beginning of a science fiction drama: madmen running a dangerous lab funded by the government and industry.

   However, this is no science fiction at all. It happened in a series of large facilities known as Industrial Biotest headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois. The time IBT did its dirty work covered most of the years from the 1950s to the 1970s. [...]

   But testing pesticides and other chemicals at IBT was primarily a fraudulent affair. The lab had the appearance of a scientific testing facility. In fact, it was a swamp of filth and corruption. It had nothing to do with science. The animals were the front. The scientists were the props.

   The animals ate feed poisoned by the chemical seeking government approval. However, it did not matter what the poisoned food did to the animals. The technicians-scientists doing the testing simply trashed the animals that developed tumors, cancer, or other disease. Then the technicians speeded up the execution of the studies by making up data. [...]

   This story of fraudulent testing explains the unreliability of company evidence in support of their “registered” (approved) pesticides. The swamp tradition of testing pesticides continues to this day.

   EPA shut IBT down in 1983. EPA also shut down several other IBT-like labs.

   But what EPA did not shut down was the fraud behind IBT. [...] EPA has been ranking pesticides more important than public and environmental health.

   For example, Monsanto’s best-selling weed killer glyphosate came out of the IBT swamp. This is something I did not know while serving at EPA. I learned about it from a stream of Monsanto documents that saw the light of the day because so many people have been suing Monsanto for cancer from exposure to glyphosate. [...] 

   Monsanto has been making so much money from glyphosate that it has become paranoid and immoral in its defense of glyphosate. Yet, lucidity sometimes prevails and the truth comes out. [...] 

   Roundup is a carcinogen. It includes glyphosate, carcinogens like formaldehyde, and other chemicals, some of which may be more toxic than the IBT-tested glyphosate. The pesticides law classifies these toxic materials as “inerts.” [...] 

Drain the swamp – now. No more deception, cover-up and collusion. ...