Category Archives: Glyphosate

Glyphosate is dangerous because it mimics glycine – Samsel and Seneff

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Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have published a fresh paper on glyphosate, fifth of the series – listed below. Here the scientists show how glyphosate is an analog (mimic) of glycine, one of the most prevalent of the 21 amino acids that form the basic building blocks of life. Thus, by being a mimic of a molecule that is required for building a lot of our parts, such as proteins, glyphosate is able to slip through our immune system and creates a havoc in our biology. By “our biology” I mean all life, anything that is living.

Here Anthony Samsel is seen speaking with me, in two parts. The term ‘mimic’ is used by me, Samsel, being a proper scientist, uses the world analog.

This is among the most important of informations you will find, to understand glyphosate and how it gets into our proteins and hurts us at a cellular and biological level, which is different from its toxicity, or its ability to cause immediate harm at the chemical level.

Reference

Links to Anthony Samsel’s five peer reviewed papers can be found at ResearchGate, by typing in his name and browsing through his publications. Alternately, they can also be downloaded from here:

Its for reasons like this that I had initiated three parallel efforts to deal with Glyphosate at the public level and a few more on a personal level.

The public ones are:
Asking the Canadian Government to place all safety test documents and raw data on glyphosate on public domain. This should include each and every document that helped the government to reach the decision that glyphosate was safe. I created two different petitions on this:

  1. A petition on change.org.
  2. One more on Canadian House of Commons e-petition platform.

Apart from those, I am involved in creating a grassroots movement, which is more global in its approach, for people to demand to their local healthcare services and governments, to start testing of local food on a monthly basis for presence of glyphosate and to make the data public. A third petition to this specific goal is created where the decision makers would be anybody in charge of the local healthcare service, or local public servant involved with health, or local mayor or governor or premier.

3. Here is the third petition.

If you believe in this, you might consider signing some of these petition, and share, or get involved in identifying more potential decision makers, for the third petition.
Tony Mitra
tony.mitra@gmail.com

Monsanto Tribunal missing the bus?

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There is a Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague in mid October, where world’s notable Monsanto haters are tentatively expected to be present.

 

It looks like a grand event. The concept is novel. A group of international judges will sit and hear presentations from a number of International notables, about the crimes of Monsanto. The judges will then pass judgment, even if it is symbolic. At the end of the two day affair, the international participants are supposed to get a sort of legal expertise and guideline on how Monsanto might be legally challenged in different countries, and prevented from further damaging the planet.

The participants are who is who in the global list of folks that one way or another have resisted either Monsanto directly, or the biotech industry, and are sort of well known in the field. Names such as Seralini or Kruger from Europe, Vandana Shiva from India, Shiv Chopra & Percy Schmeiser from Canada, Steve Marsh from Australia, Don Huber & Stephanie Seneff from the US are in the provisional agenda, and are expected to present their evidence to the judges, on Monsanto’s wrongdoings. Even a few ambassadors are to be in attendance.

While I wish this endeavour all success, I could not help notice that the whole thingamajig  essentially misses the bus.

Monsanto has been used as a convenient punching bag by all sorts of organizations and people, without much success. To me, targeting Monsanto is what the Biotech Industry would like us to do. Why ? Because such an effort will always be little more than symbolic. Further court cases against Monsanto will only enrich a few legal pockets. Why? Because Monsanto does not necessarily break the law, but rather influences Governments to bend the rules to favour the corporation. In fact, the only legal cases that have sort of succeeded, and thus provided some jurisprudence in the GM technology issue have been against Governments and not against Monsanto.

Monsanto is just a corporation and most Corporations will do whatever it can, to make a profit, irrespective of the human or environmental Cost. In that, it is not very different from the Pharma industry that wishes to push unnecessary vaccines down your throat, or corporations like Nestle that might wish to grab pubic water, oil giants wanting to steal someones fossil fuel reserve, or the military industrial complex pushing armaments across the world and promoting continuous warfare.

The real culprit and the root of all these evils, including that of Monsanto, is political corruption in Government. It might start with Obama downwards in the US, Trudeau down in Canada, and so on. It is our Governments that are suspected of working against the interest of the people, and passing laws that allow free reign to corporations including Monsanto.

Therefore, without any mention at all of Government level political corruption, this entire Tribunal, to me, is a waste of time, and an effort to keep the public barking up the wrong tree.

When a the problem is rooted in political corruption and an onset of fascism, it can only be solved by grabbing this rotten political bull by the horn. It is my belief that ecocide will not be stopped by lawyers targeting Monsanto. It will, if at all, be done by the people going after corrupt Governments.

I wish the wise people attending this tribunal will ponder on that, and perhaps let the attendees know that a mock tribunal is, after all, only a mock one. As long as it keeps targeting Monsanto, and keeps focus away from corrupt politicians and irresponsible Governments – nothing will change, and this tribunal itself will be little more than a pompous circus and an attempt to misguide the people. And misguided is exactly what corrupt politicians, Governments, Monsanto and the biotech lobby would like people to be.

Vaccine-glyphosate link exposed by Anthony Samsel

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Scientists Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have just gotten the fifth peer reviewed paper on Glyphosate published. Its named “Glyphosate pathways to modern diseases V: Amino acid analogue of glycine in diverse proteins”. The interview on that has been covered in the previous blog.

The latest bombshell to come from Anthony Samsel is from the sixth paper, which is not yet published, but whose supporting data is already making waves – various popular vaccines are contaminated with glyphosate.

How? Well, vaccine makers sometimes use animal byproducts in vaccines, products such as chicken egg protein or gelatine that comes from bones. And if those vaccine makers are using animals that come out of factory farms, chances are they are fed GMO and glyphosate laced feed. If so, they would pick up Glyphosate into their system just as we humans do. Therefore, egg protein and gelatine made from these animals may also contain glyphosate, which in turn would then contaminate the vaccines that use these products. Finally, people, or animals, vaccinated with these products would have glyphosate directly injected into them, and will in due course have glyphosate initiating a cascade of diseases.

Anthony Samsel was not passing opinion on this. Rather, he collected vast samples of these popular vaccines and got them tested by multiple labs in USA for presence of Glyphosate, and found, as he suspected, the vaccines to be largely contaminated by it.

This 5 minute video covers only that part of the talk.

He has already alerted his Senator, as well as various Government and international organizations such as CDC, FDA and WHO.

What is the situation with Canada? It depends on where the vaccine makers have their plants. I don’t know if they have many in Canada. But the issue remains the same. Vaccine manufacturers might be using animals from factory farms, and may never have considered the issue of glyphosate contamination.

For Canada, the most important task would be to take samples of all vaccines and have them tested for presence of glyphosate.

For Canadians, it should trigger a grassroots movement demanding postponing all mass vaccination till we have the issue sorted and till we have forced the vaccine makers to use animals fed organically and tested to be glyphosate free.

I intend to use the content of Anthony Samsel’s letters, add my bit on Canada, as well as video such as this one, to alert our Canadian counterparts.

I request all readers of the blog to share it, and also consider writing to your local representative in the Government, or to the medical establishment, to consider taking a serious second look at this new information of glyphosate poisoning of some of the popular vaccines. The idea is not to ban vaccines per se, but to force the producers to use animals that are not fed GMO and glyphosate laced feed to start with, and to clean up their vaccines. Vaccines are meant to protect people, not poison them or make them sick.

Sample letter sent by Anthony Samsel

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

Reference

Links to Anthony Samsel’s five peer reviewed papers can be found at ResearchGate, by typing in his name and browsing through his publications. Alternately, they can also be downloaded from here:

 

The link between Glyphosate & our RNA

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Scientists Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have just gotten the fifth peer reviewed paper on Glyphosate published. Its named “Glyphosate pathways to modern diseases V: Amino acid analogue of glycine in diverse proteins”.

In this regard Tony Mitra interviewed Anthony Samsel, to cover the newly emerging scientific findings on Glyphosate and how it can and does hurt creatures including humans.

Pari I: Click the below mage of the tractor to watch the video

[youtube 0C7E25lBCg4]

This is a 28 minute video.

Pari II: Click the below mage of the tractor to watch the video

[youtube BPhfJx0o38o]

This part covers 38 minutes, of which the last five minutes covers the issue of many popular vaccines being contaminated by glyphosate, and the resultant effort to alert national and international institutions of this new found danger.

Samsel stands out at being the very first among all scientists, to draw our attention to the fact that Glyphosate is a different kind of killer chemical and pure toxicological test does not do it justice. The chemical does not have high acute toxicity, and therefore has been approved by EPA. However, it has this unique property of being an analog of (mimic of) glycine, an amino acid that is part of a building block of all life. Therefore, when an organism such as a human, needs to create cells or other structures to replenish dead or damaged ones, it picks up some of the amino acids from our food, which circulates in our blood stream. Due to Glyphosate being an analog of Glycine, it is mistakenly picked up by our body, assuming it to be glycine, and thus our RNA takes it and reconstructs complex structures/peptoid that to go into various parts of our body as proteins we need. Unfortunately, Glyphsoate does not behave like Glycine and ends up creating trunkated, misfolded or defective proteins, which in turn triggers illnesses of diseases of a vast variety, depending on where in our body it happens to be.

This behavior of Glyphosate was not known, and therefore not recognized by either Monsanto or EPA or other scientists, and hence it has been ignored for decades. But not any more.

Samsel has gotten hold of tens of thousands of pages of hitherto sealed safety tests done on Glyphosate by makers such as Monsanto and DuPont through a legal understanding with EPA, and has been revisiting the test data and finds evidence of his claims, which forms the basis of his papers.

He has has one serious meeting with EPA already, sort of educating them of how this amino acid analog of glycine can enter our body where it should not, and harm living creatures, bypassing our immune system, and how the safety test results provide the proof of it, if one looks at the right place.

EPA has recently started calling GLyphosate an amino acid, instead of just a herbicide, which is a major improvement.

They are scheduled to have a serious four day internal meeting in the next few months, to discuss this issue. It is possible that they will allow Anthony Samsel to participate in that meeting, perhaps electronically from long distance, to answer questions or clarify any confusion etc.

Meanwhile, if you google “Glyphosate pathways to modern diseases” you should find increasing mention/links of these studies and papers published on some of the social media such as from Dr. Mercola etc.

Regarding the glyphosate contaminated vaccines, a series of letters have been sent to Senator, CDC, FDA and other health organizations as well as WHO. I myself aim to send letters to Canadian Government and medical institutions shortly.

Scientists such as Seralini has found the toxicity of the combined package of RoundUp herbicide to be more toxic than just Glyphosate. His supporters would like the focus to remain there, and not be side tracked by new findings where Glyphosate alone can do serious harm to living creatures by being absorbed into our biology in place of Glycine. The fact that Glyphosate needs to be assessed by a yardstick other than toxicology, is something that has not sunken in for the approving authorities, the Government, or the scientific diaspora yet.

Competition and jealousy also clouds up science research.

Reference

Links to Anthony Samsel’s five peer reviewed papers can be found at ResearchGate, by typing in his name and browsing through his publications. Alternately, they can also be downloaded from here:

Kickstarting a grassroots movement on testing our food

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This is a movement in need and in waiting.
This was not possible a year or two ago, cause we did not have enough labs, but is possible today.Here is something this movement is NOT about:
Its NOT about debating if glyphosate is safe or unsafe to be in our food.
Its NOT about what the “science” might say about it.
Its NOT about passing new laws by federal or provincial Government about labelling.
Its NOT about if our farmers can or cannot do without Glyphosate.
So, what is it about ?
Its about people’s right to know if Glyphosate in in their food and how much.
Its about recognizing that labelling GMO does to give the full picture since non GMO crops are now desiccated with glyphosate and people can be more poisoned by some of these non-GMO crops than even GMO crops.
Its not about labelling – its about measuring and disclosing the contamination.
In order to kick start the movement, which should have a corresponding petition on change.org, it would be necessary to influence people that this is supposed to be a people’s movement that needs more than arm-chair activists.
Signing petition and sharing them on Facebook is not the goal. The goal is to appeal, for each of us, to our respective municipalities, to set aside a budget and start testing food, both locally grown and/or sold in stores, for glyphosate content, using Canadian labs, and to make the results public.
Irrespective of the debate, the science and the politics around Glyphosate/ RoundUP, the people will decide if they like some of the food brands that have more glyphosate or they like other brands that have less. Its about people’s right to choose without ever having to explain to any politician or scientists why they prefer to have one kind and not the other. That is their right.
Municipalities do not have the authority to get involved in scientific debate. Their job is to fulfil people’s wish. People wish to know which brands of their bread or other food items have how much glyphosate – and the MUnicipality’s job is to provide the answer. Thats it.
In order to kick start this effort, we wish to have a short 10-15 minute video where committed grassroots activists are ready to discuss this under a camera. Once it is done, we shall make more from others around our country that have found novel ways to approach their municipalities. How some of our compatriots manage to get our largely do-nothing municipalities to get off their hind quarter and start testing food.
Anyhow, for the first brainstorming, idea-exchanging video, I am inviting like minded and committed food security activists from nearby to respond, so we can arrange a date, time and venue, to get this off the ground.
Mind – we are not looking for arm-chair activists, but real people committed to approach municipalities and stubborn enough to be at it.
Interested parties please contact. My email – tony.mitra@gmail.com. my phone 604-649 7535.
Thank you

Relevant links:

E-413

PARLIAMENT of CANADA E-Petition on Glyphosate safety

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The open platform petition on cage.org to have the Government disclose hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate has run full circle. It generated nearly 23,000 supporters, around 98% of them being Canadian. The petition had over thirty updates. The total volume of supporting material went well over a thousand pages.

The documents were handed over to Delta MP Carla Qualtrough, to carry it to Ottawa and hand over to Health Canada with a request to respond to the demand that the safety data on Glyphosate be made accessible to Canadians.

There has not been any further feedback, if indeed the documents were or were not handed over to Health Canada.

That silence, and absence of feedback, encouraged me to consider a second petition, this time on the House of Commons Government E-Petition platform, one that the Government presumably will not be able to stay silent on.

Creating an E-Petition on the Canadian House of Commons platform is a wholly different animal than creating one on change.org. It needed an MP as a sponsor, and five initial supporters. Luckily, Fin Donnelly , NDP,  Port Moody—Coquitlam BC, agreed to sponsor the petition.

And now the petition has been accepted, translated into bilingual by the Government, and put up on line for 120 days to collect signatures. The Petition is open for signature until November 22, 2016, at 9:40 a.m. (EDT).

Our task now would be to get as many support signatures as possible for this petition, as a start. ON a second front, I am asking folks to write to their MPs, for their support to this petition on the floor on the parliament, and to make this issue, of illegal withholding of safety data from disclosure, while approving Glyphosate to enter our food system, to be a topic of a debate and a national dialog.

[youtube fXG4zSh0Mto]

Link to E-4113 Petition : https://petitions.parl.gc.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-413

Your support will be appreciated.
Thank you.
Tony Mitra

The road ahead on glyphosate

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We have so far gone around the country, speaking about the dangers of chemical dependent agriculture, forestry and weed control in public places. We have had meetings with politicians, and joined marches against Monsanto. We have written to ministers and contacted labs about testing of Glyphosate in food.

And yet, Canada, its land, air, water, soil, flora, fauna and people are all getting systematically poisoned through introduction of batches of killer chemicals that are deemed safe by our Government, but whose safety documents are kept hidden from public scrutiny, which essentially makes the approval of these chemicals potentially illegal.

We have a petition asking Ottawa to release all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate to the people of Canada, with over 22,000 supporters. The details of this petition has been handed over to Minister Carla Qualtrough on April 27, to be hand delivered to the Minister of Health in Ottawa.

Apart from that, we have also asked Minister Qualtrough to try and arrange some public funds to start public testing local food and water in her own constituency, Delta, BC, for Glyphosate.

Jane Philpott

We have so far not achieved any measurable success. There is no response from the minister of health about disclosure of the safety documents. There is a separate access to information act application from me to the Ministry of Health asking for the same safety documents, which too are languishing, as the ministry drags its feet over the issue.

I might send her another letter, but there is no compulsion for the minister to respond to it and from the pace of follow ups, it may well be that Canadians shall not hear any feedback from the ministry, let alone disclosure of the safety documents, or a review of the approval of Glyphosate for Canadian agriculture.

As a result, I have started preparing another petition, this time not on change.org but on the Government web site using Government’s own official template. It is addressed also to the Minister of Health (Health Canada), and asks for public disclosure of safety documents for Glyphosate.

However, there are some steps that need to be taken before such a petition can be submitted. One of them is to have a sponsor, among the current Members of Parliament. I would have asked Mr. Alex Atamanenko to be the sponsor, if he was still an MP. Unfortunately he retired from politics last year. Next, I thought of asking MP Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. However, I have written to her in the past and never received any reply, and feel unsure of her willingness to help in this cause. I should ask my own MP first, honourable minister Carla Qualtrough, and I have done so in an email. However, I do not wish to feel her pressured in an awkward situation with her colleagues in the Government, so I do not know what her response would be.

As a result, I am kind of in the hunt, for a suitable MP that might take up this cause for Canadian people.

The draft petition

I invite readers to suggest a suitable MP. More importantly, if they personally know a good MP that could be interested to sponsor it, I encourage them to check with the MP first and let me know.

I have not done such an official petition before, so do not know if the system allows more than one sponsor, but believe it might. So, if more than one MP is willing to support this cause, I shall be very keen to contact them. I am thinking of approaching some of the other party members such as NDP and CP. Any help would be appreciated.

There is one more issue at hand – which is to try and push the movement for grassroots activism for people to get their local municipalities to set aside funds and start testing local foods and water for Glyphosate and to make the results public. I shall come to that hopefully in the next blog.

My blog itself had been hacked, taken down, and access denied. But all that has thankfully been solved after many days of off-and-on struggle. Allt things finally became OK yesterday, June 7th, in the evening. Hence today I have my first update again.

Send your suggestions to me.

Thank you.
Tony Mitra

Meeting with a minister

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Meeting the Canadian Federal Minister Carla Qualtrough, regarding Glyphosate
April 27, 2016
1:30 PM

Delegation members were:

1. Tony Mitra (myself) creator of the petition.

2. Dr. Thierry Vrain – genetic engineer & retired Agriculture Canada scientist

3. Kenneth Young, Canadian army veteran

4. Richard Sweeting, retired orthopaedic surgeon

5. Eliza Olson, President, Burns Bog conservation society

6. Liz Walker, President, White Rock & Surrey Naturalist & Director, Citizens for Safe Technology

7. Richard Miller, glyphosate sufferer & promoter of growing clean food at home.

RECAP OF THE MEETING

First speaker
First speaker was Dr. Thierry Vrain, retired genetic engineer, soil biologist and ex-Agriculture Canada scientist. He spoke about the history behind glyphosate, and recent studies that point to possible problems with Glyphosate. He took about 8 minutes and handed over printed documents on many of the studies to you.

Second speaker
Second to speak with Kenneth Young, Canadian army veteran and spokesperson for military use of toxic chemicals and effect of exposure on humans, including agent orange. He spoke of the Stockholm convention on organic pollutants. He took 6 minutes and handed over his talks in writing to you.

Third Speaker 
The third and main speaker was myself, taking 20 minutes to cover the following five items:

i) Handing over of the petition documents in two copies of DVD drives for Health Canada, and one flash drive for the Honourable minister, with about a thousand pages of pdf documentation and 15 videos.

ii) My background, such as

Going around Canada with Dr. Thierry Vrain to speak about problems with Glyphosate based agriculture;

Discovering over two years ago that Canada did not have a lab to test our food or our body fluids for presence of Glyphosate.

Writing to the then Health Canada minister Rona Ambrose to do something about getting a lab for Canadians. Receiving no response;

Alex Atamanenko, MP from NDP taking up my cause, eventually getting Health Canada to respond to me, which I found to be non-committal;

Two years down the line, some labs are now beginning to offer glyphosate testing. I feel satisfied as far as that goes, that I was on the right side of history on that issue;

I am now into the next phase of my effort – to get some layer of our Government to start testing local food, soil and water for the people, since labs are now available, and making that results available on public domain.

iii) It is my belief that keeping biosafety data of glyphosate hidden from the people is illegal, and my reasons for this belief – i.e. my own personal communication with Health Canada through Access To Information Act applications, as well as legal precedence set in the supreme court of India. It is because of this belief that I made the public petition for Canadian Government to disclose all safety records it has in its possession based on which it decided to approve the use of Glyphosate for Canadian agriculture. Should the minister wish to contact the relevant advocates or litigants in India about the precedence setting case, I am ready to help introduce the Minister to the relevant persons.

iv) UN convention on biodiversity and Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. These were created by the world body to help member nations put in place responsible safeguards to prevent damage, destruction, extinction or contamination of local biological diversity from inadvertent or faulty introduction of LMO (living modified organism, which is UN’s way of saying GMO, or genetically modified organism). 170 nations have ratified it. Canada has not. We stand out like a pariah nation in this regard and our biological diversity is being stolen from under our feet as a result.

I presented example of how India put in place specific laws that prevents foreign nations of corporations from studying, tampering with or patenting living organisms from India without specific permission from the Government, and how Monsanto was found to be violating this law, and how a court case in India obliged the Government to sue Monsanto for biopiracy as a result. I also gave example of Canola, a Canadian invention, that was a great product, but today 96% of all Canola grown in Canada are Monsanto’s patented version. In my view this is a good example of how our biological heritage is being stolen from under our feet. I request Honourable minister Carla Qualtrough to speak directly with our PM Honourable Justin Trudeau and request him to drop in at the secretarial office of this convention in Montreal, which is in his own constituency and near his own home, and find out how Canada compares with the rest of the world on Cartagena Protocol. The office is at:

Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity

413, Saint Jacques Street, suite 800 

Montreal QC H2Y 1N9 , Canada

Tel: +1 514 288 2220

Fax: +1 514 288 6588

E-Mail: secretariat@cbd.int

Web: www.cbd.int

v) Last, I made an urgent request for the minister to find ways to allocate some funds for the people of her constituency, the township of Delta, to start testing some of our soil, water and food for presence of Glyphosate and to place such data on public domain. She said she would see how and if public funds can be used for this. I did ask her to make this happen, since public funds should be used to tackle issues of public safety, and help Delta to lead the rest of Canada on this important public interest initiative.

Fourth speaker

Next to speak was Richard Sweeting, retired orthopaedic surgeon and he spoke about manmade chemicals, history of deceit and suppression of evidence on past chemicals by the same company that today sells RoundUp and Glyphosate. He spoke about how long it took for folks to disclose that smoking was bad for health, and how many of these chemicals disrupt our endocrine system and how science and safety data on these chemicals should always be publicly available. He spoke for about 4 minutes or so.

Fifth speaker

Richard Miller spoke briefly, who had personally suffered for over twenty years through exposure to glyphosate and GMO without apparent cure and without any solution from the medical establishment, cured himself eventually in only ten days, going to 100% organic.

There was then a short follow up talk with Mr. Jude Welsh,  the Parliamentary affairs director for Minister Carla Qualtrough, who was listening in from Ottawa, about what they were to do as a follow up of our talk and presentation. I then reminded the Minister that I had asked for three things, which were:

a) That the minister hands over the petition document to Health Canada and ask it to respond, hoping to get the safety data on Glyphosate released.

b) I had asked Honorable Carla Qualtrough to impress upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to drop into the Secretarial office of the UN convention on biodiversity and ask about Canada’s position in comparison with the rest of the world on Cartagena Protocol

c) And I asked the Honorable Minister to help Delta lead the rest of Canada by arranging for periodic testing of local food, soil and water for presence of Glyphosate and make the result available to the people.

The Honourable Minster had wondered if the current liberal Government had been approached for the biosafety data on Glyphosate. I responded saying I opened a fresh Access to Information application with Health Canada the day after the Justin Trudeau government came to power , for Health Canada to disclose to me all safety documents it has read before approving glyphosate, and got a few written confirmation from Health Canada, acknowledging that I have the right to such data, and that they have over 130,000 pages of it, but has still been dragging its feet and I have not seen any of it, which is why the petition was created to get the public to ask the Government to release the data.

Attached video is a audiovisual rendition of the same recap, done by Mistry Britskaya. My thanks go to her.

[youtube XHkrWKoRG20]

Updates on Glyphosate Petition

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Hello friends,

It has been an exhilarating time since I opened two separate channels for my Government, in Ottawa, Canada, to address the issue of rising use and presence of the weed killer RoundUp and in particular the chemical Glyphosate in our environment, and the fact that the people do not have either access to information on how much of the toxic chemical is in our food, water and soil, or access to the safety test that is supposed to prove that the chemical and the formulation is actually safe for people or for the environment.

This matter has now reached a turning point since Canada is now having a lot of labs accessible to the public that will test our food for Glyphosate, something that was not the case a few years ago, and something on which I had already butted head with the previous Government under Harper, and where my letter was carried by the then MP Mr. Atamanenko to the then Health Minister Ms Rona Ambrose, to respond to. This is a good sign that labs are now beginning to offer this service.

One of my current multi-channel dialogue with the Government included an application to Health Canada, which is Canada’s way of describing the Ministry of Health, to disclose to me if it actually has seen safety test data on Glyphosate, and if so, to disclose to me all such data and reports. This application was made through the official system known as “Access To Information” act of the Government of Canada. Similar acts are also known as “Freedom of Information” act or “Right to Information” act elsewhere, such as in Canadian provincial Governments or elsewhere in the world.

Another parallel effort was the creation of an online petition for Canadians to support a motion, for our Government to disclose all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate or RoundUp, to the Canadian people, so that people can independently verify if the product is safe and if the Canadian Government has been diligent in its study and analysis. Further, it is the right of the Canadian people to see such documents and it is in effect be illegal to deny public access to such data.

Why exhilarating? Well, first of all, the correspondence that generated from the “Access to information” act appeal, confirmed a few things,

  • that the Canadian Government has in fact seen a lot of safety test data and documents
  • that they are in possession of over 130,000 pages of such material
  • that I indeed have a right, as a citizen of Canada, to see such data

And in spite of that, the Government has unfortunately been dragging its feet, citing reasons why it needs more time to provide me with the information requested. One of the reason is that they need to cross check with the parties that conducted that safety test, if the details may be divulged to me and under what condition.

The very facts that the Canadian Government acknowledges it has the data, and that I have a right to it, are positive development. That I cannot see it yet unless third parties that provided the data agree to the arrangement – is in my view illegal. If such data cannot be shown to the people, then the product (Glyphosate) cannot be approved for use among the people either. That is how I read the law.

The second part – the petition, has 30 updates so far, has generated almost 23,000 support, over 98% of them being Canadian. This is far and away more support than I had anticipated. For a country with a very small population of 35 million, this is an unprecedented level of support on a subject not so easy to understand and one that has not been covered by the mainstream media at all. The sheer volume of support, I suspect, has influenced my MP Carla Qualtrough, who also happens to be a federal minister, to agree to see me on April 27th for 45 minutes, so I can hand over all the documentation on the petition, which runs to over 1,000 pages, to her in a CD or a flash drive, to be taken to Ottawa and handed over the Health minister.

I asked if I might bring a delegation of six other persons, to which the Minister Qualtrough’s office that I may. The petition itself can be visited by clicking on the image below.

It has many interesting updates. One of which is a comment by India’s noted supreme court advocate Mr. Prashant Bhushan, who is representing petitioner Ms Aruna Rodrigues in her public interest litigation against the Government of India on account of GMO, where legal precedence is already set, that obliges the Government to disclose biosafety data of transgenic products to the people before the product is to be approved for release. In other words, intellectual property rights, or agreement on Confidentiality or or non-disclosure clauses cannot be used to trump public safety. Click below for that video.

My request to the Honourable minister is going to be in three parts, of which one would be to personally carry the petition documents to Ottawa and hand over same to Health Canada and to ask them to respond. The second is to have a personal talk with Prime Minister Trudeau, requesting him to drop in at the secretarial office of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, located in the same home turf of the Prime Minister, in Montreal, and to ask the staff in that office about how Canada is doing in comparison with the rest of the world with regard to Cartagena Protocol. The third is to look into ways to kick start testing of local foods in Delta, her constituency, for presence of Glyphosate.

[youtube d5TQHzroqDs]

 I have added information on a few UN platforms for Canadians in the latest update. These are:

There is also an effort on my part to convert a condensed form of the petition material and references into an interactive e-book on Apples’s iTune store and/or Amazon’s Kindle for around $3 in the next few weeks.

There are perhaps a few more updates that will go into the petition before it is closed. These might include:

  • A talk with the president of the Canadian Farmers Union
  • How to engage citizens into coaxing our Municipalities to start testing local food, water and soil, for presence of Glyphosate and to make the data public.
  • An update on the coming meeting with Minister Carla Qualtrough about this petition.

Stay tunes and feel free to add your comments below.

Thank you.

Tony

Did Canada include Glyphosate in its study of Environmental Chemicals?

Posted on by

To a few scientist friends
+++++++++++++++++++
Dear friends,

I trouble you again in search of some truths or information from three reports that Health Canada (ministry of health, Canada) has published of studies on various harmful manmade environmental chemicals and how much of each has been found in humans. The studies started in 2007 for the first report, and ended with the publication of the third report in 2015.

Two of these three reports are available from Health Canada web site, and one is available by personal request made to Health Canada. I have all three of them and have been going over them repeatedly, to find if the Government considers Glyphosate to be a harmful environmental chemical (as a herbicide) and if Canadians have been tested for its presence in their body fluids.

I have found mention of other substances such as 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, Atrazine, Dicamba, and many many other pesticides and herbicides, as well as metals such as Uranium, Lead and Arsenic. But I failed to find a single mention of Glyphosate or RoundUp.

There are mentions of organophosphates, but I am unsure if it includes Glyphosate and how much of it has been found in humans.

Ultimately, I decided to pass the three reports, the first (2007-2009), the second (2009-2011) and the third (2012-2013, published 2015) to you for some help in finding if Glyphosate is at all represented in Health Canada’s ten year study on environmental chemicals and human exposure to them.

The three reports are:

1. report-rapport-eng.pdf
2. HumanBiomonitoringReport__EN.pdf
3. chms-ecms-cycle3-eng.pdf

I would very much appreciate if any of you can advise me if these three definitive reports by Health Canada on Canadian citizen’s exposure to environmental chemicals does or does not include Glyphosate.

I wished to also pass some of these to Nancy Swanson, but since she changed her email, I am out of touch with her. Perhaps one of you will pass this to her, in case she might offer to help.

The reason I ask this is – I intend to do something about it in case Health Canada has neglected to test Glyphosate in Canadians. I do not know yet what I would do, but that would depend on if and how much these reports have or have not covered Glyphosate.

By the way, the first and the second report covers the generic topic of “pesticide” and the third, the most recent one, does not.

I apologize again for troubling you all.
I do not know where else I could go.

Thanks and best wishes
Tony Mitra

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