Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Pesticide formulations up to 1000 times more toxic than active ingredients tested for safety

(NaturalNews) The same university academic whose controversial research exposed the cancer-causing effects of genetically modified (GM) Bt corn and the Monsanto crop herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) has made another groundbreaking discovery, this time with regard to the understated toxicity of pesticides in general.

Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini and his team from Caen University in France recently found that the vast majority of pesticides sold on the commercial market are far more toxic than we have all been led to believe. As it turns out, all those "inert" ingredients make these assumed-to-be-harmless formulas hundreds, or even thousands, of times more toxic than their approved active ingredients.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal BioMed Research International (BRI), Prof. Seralini's game-changing study looked at nine major pesticides currently available to farmers. Eight of these nine pesticides, or nearly 90 percent, according to the data, were determined to be significantly more toxic than what government regulators have assumed based on assessments of just their active ingredients.

Like vaccines, virtually all pesticide formulas contain so-called "inert," or inactive, ingredients that act as adjuvants in boosting the overall efficacy of their primary active ingredients. In practice, these extraneous ingredients have automatically been assumed to be safe, or at least mostly safe, which is why regulators typically avoid testing them as part of the approval process.

But in nearly every instance, tested pesticide formulas were identified as being orders of magnitude more toxic than just their active ingredients because of all the added "inert" ingredients, something that regulators have routinely failed to consider. And in at least one case, a pesticide formula was found to be 1,000 times more toxic than its active ingredient in isolation.

"[Pesticides] contain adjuvants, which are often kept confidential and are called inerts by the manufacturing companies, plus a declared active principle (AP), which is usually tested alone," reads the study's abstract. "Most importantly, 8 formulations out of 9 were several hundred times more toxic than their active principle."

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