“It does what it’s supposed to do, but my god it’s doing something to us as farmers”
Now that the World Health Organization has deemed Roundup chemicals like glyphosate “likely to cause cancer,” it should come as no surprise that people are experiencing the outcome suggested in such a statement. In one of many cases, one farmer is blaming the biotech industry for his wife’s cancer.
Though a CropLife Australia representative who heavily lobbies for the pesticide industry is quoted in an article attacking the WHO as “irresponsible,” this farmer believes his wife’s cancer is directly related to the Roundup chemicals she has been exposed to.
Concerned scientists have been calling for more stringent chemical hygiene on farms ever since it was found to be detrimental to human health. Farmer, Ronn Snape, would agree. He is a beef producer in New South Wales, and his wife has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Snape recalls a recent meeting with their doctor:
“When we sat down with our specialist haematologist up in Canberra, before he asked who we were, or what we did as in income, he said ‘farmers lymphoma’.
He said ‘what’s your occupation?’ and he went on to say farmers were over-represented amongst people with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
Snape’s doctor thinks his wife’s cancer had something to do with his job as a farmer as well.
Now Snape is seriously questioning the chemicals that he has been using on his farm –namely glyphosate.
“We were assured by the chemical manufacturer at the time that this was so safe you could drink it, well bugger me, it’s not safe and as farmers, we have to have a look at our chemical hygiene a lot better than what we are doing,” he said.
Snape admits that “we are just so blasé as farmers sometimes.”
Though he says the chemicals are killing weeds, it is possible the chemicals are also killing his wife.
“It’s shocking for me because I was the one that was using it.”
In a previous one new review and a series of meta-analyses of 30 years-worth of research has found that Monsanto’s RoundUp could be causing blood cancers in the lymph glands, specifically non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
Snape didn’t realize when he started using glyphosate that it would have such a profound effect on his family.
In the WHO article there are three studies cited that suggest that people exposed to glyphosate had a higher incidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
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