In article , Alexander Pensky
wrote:

I'm not disputing whether or not Roundup is safe or
desirable to use in one's garden.
(I don't use it, personally.)

My point is that, of all the nasty synthetic chemicals you and
I might be tempted to use anywhere in our homes or gardens, some
are more dangerous than others, but NOT A SINGLE ONE has been
tested on human beings, and NEVER WILL BE, because that is NOT
an "accepted scientific method" for product safety testing. It
is in fact an UNETHICAL and ILLEGAL method of testing.

So, if you ever plan to use any product, whether Roundup or
anything else, you're just gonna have to trust the animal tests.

- Alex

This is not entirely true Alex. There are no valid models for human
allergy responses, or human headache responses, besides the fact that no
animal studies are regarded as having broad applicability to human
physiological responses even for things that can be measured without a
speaking subject who can tell the researchers what they are experiencing.
So herbicides & pesticides get tested as a matter of course on human
volunteers. "Only tests using human volunteers have the broad specificity
and relevance to human physiology needed to detect the wide range of
allergens & toxins that might result from unexpected side-effects of the
genetic engineering process" notes Dr John Fagan, who purports to be an
activist for safety in such human testing, but primarily argues like a
lobbyist trying to keep Congress from banning scientists from feeding
toxins to people desparate for the fifty dollars.

Human test subjects volunteered to breathe extremely high levels of toxic
fumes from the resins used in those yellow pesticide strips, trade-name
Vapona. It had already been done on dogs & all sorts of other mammals &
always found that when delivered as a gas it could not reacha toxic level
in the bloodstream, even though with long-term physical contact with the
resins one's liver can be completely destroyed. The manufacturers found
out all they could with animals then wanted to try it on people too, &
you'd be surprised how easy it is to get volunteers -- mainly unemployed
students & the homeless.

Not all scientists are proud to poison students & the homeless, but pretty
much all of them do need human subjects. To quote from a Wallstreet
Journal article, "In what became known within CibaGeigy [a Dow Corning
subsidiary] as 'The Directors' Study,' the company recruited six top
managers at its Greensboro, N.C., offices to swallow atrazine, a herbicide
used on corn & other crops, to determine its rate of elimination in
urine." The theory was that "top managers" could've said "No!" if they'd
wanted, & no one could afterward fault the company.

MDS Harris Laboratory in Lincoln Nebraska has conducted many pesticide
exposure studies on human volunteers, who are asked to ingest some of the
nastiest toxins imaginable, & do so for small amounts of money. In 1999
they conducted 14 human test studies on 10 toxic chemicals for the EPA, &
the EPA acquired 13 more studies of the same type from the United Kingdom.
"While some at the EPA, which regulates pesticides, see clear
value in these human studies, which are legal, many do not," said John
Carley, special assistant in the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs.

As for herbicides like glyphosate, same picture. While the majority of
studies of the effects of glyphosate on humans have been with people
exposed to RoundUp & other glyphosate products outside the laboratory (&
two studies have shown that it causes lymphic disease in humans), more
than a few studies have been done with volunteers willing to be exposed to
herbicidal poisons. Such studies were in fact MOST necessary because
Monsanto wants to "prove" it is safe to eat fruits & vegetables that have
been genetically engineered to survive glyphosate dosings. In fact
Monsanto has the lion's share of their future invested in the idea that
future crops will be so resistant to glyphosate, that all the weeds can be
poisoned by just dumping HUGE amounts of the toxins in agricultural
fields. So of course Monsanto is paying for & orchestrating a number of
studies the intent of which is to prove you can eat a lot of herbicide &
not get sick & die. Since INDEPENDENT studies show it to be linked to
lymphic cancer & to be a suspected mutagen, Monsanto also pays
editorialists to discredit all independent science, while promulgating
only their own science (which even in courts of law have been proven time
& again to have been falsified).

Any of us who do not radically seek out & pay more to restrict ourselves
to organicly grown produce are already the non-volunteer human test
subjects, with a few independent studies in progress to track how bad off
we get.

A Latin American study showed that RoundUp was dangerously toxic &
Monsanto responded in Latin America by providing an alternative
formulation they claimed was less toxic, but before the study could be
translated in the United States, Monsanto's propoganda machine had already
began getting the word out that Latin American scientists are nothing but
wetbacks & beaners who can't possibly do good science. Agriculture
Secretary Ann Veneman, formerly a paid Monsanta propogandist who got in
good with Bush, claimed Latin American scientists are so stupid that their
studies "were so poorly designed that they do not provide any conclusive
results." (Las Vegas Sun, 9.05.2002). Indeed according to all Monsanto
mouthpieces the only conclusive results anyone anywhere in the world ever
achieved was bought & paid for by themselves.

So if you'd like to eat some RoundUp for Monsanto or some similar kind of
poison, & get paid to do it, I'm sure you can find some lab somewhere
nearby that has Monsanto or Dow Corning or Dupont funding & they are eager
to have you volunteer. Obviousy it's not the sort of thing chemical
companies intentionally promote, but some of the places you can go first
if you want to get paid to eat herbicides & pesticides would certainly
include MDS Harris Labs & Maharishi U., but also the
wouldn't-you-think-they'd-know-better University of California in Davis.
Mike Russell, neurobiologist, was set up to test herbicides & pesticides
on human subjects specifically for Amvac, Zeneca & other chemical
companies who paid all the bills & salaries. Any impoverished desparate
sod can get paid a whopping $150 to $300 for a single day of exposure in
your eyes (you get paid more if you can hold out longest, so there's
clearly a sadistic aspect to the research). Even though some of the same
chemicals had plenty of independent studies that found they caused
vomiting, nausea, burning of the eyes & nasal membranes, & headaches,
Davis's non-independent findings with full funding from the chemical
companies actually managed to produce data that permitted them to publish
the declaration of "no ill effects whatsoever" (a real quote from one of
the published studies as quoted in a Nature Magazine investigative
article). The chemical companies had been extremely dissatisfied with
independent findings of the California's Department of Pesticide
Regulation, which findings the chemical companies dismissed because they
were done on cats. To counter the negative findings of dangerousness, the
companies bought & paid for a brand spanking new lab at Davis with the
express purpose of creating more chemical-friendly data, obtainable by
asking subjective questions of paid volunteers.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/