Tag Archives: PCB

99% of U.S. PCBs produced by Monsanto, and MON knew they were toxic

Monsanto knew PCBs were toxic as it manufactured almost all of them, much like Roundup now. Monsanto drenched the town of Anniston, Alabama in PCBs and never told them. Guess where that pipeline through Georgia from Alabama to Florida starts? That’s right: Anniston, Alabama.

According to CDC Toxicological Profile for Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs), November 2000, “Approximately 99% of the PCBs used by U.S. industry were produced by the Monsanto Chemical Company in Sauget, Illinois, until production was stopped in August 1977.”

By Michael Grunwald in Washington Post Tuesday, January 1, 2002; Page A01, Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution: PCBs Drenched Ala. Town, But No One Was Ever Told ( original URL no longer works), Continue reading →

Cancer in the Air, Food, and Water

Lyndsey Layton writes in the Washington Post that:
An expert panel that advises the president on cancer said Thursday that Americans are facing “grievous harm” from chemicals in the air, food and water that have largely gone unregulated and ignored.
Somebody noticed!

The President’s Cancer Panel called for a new national strategy that focuses on such threats in the environment and workplaces.

Epidemiologists have long maintained that tobacco use, diet and other factors are responsible for most cancers, and that chemicals and pollutants cause only a small portion — perhaps 5 percent.

The presidential panel said that figure has been “grossly underestimated” but it did not provide a new estimate.

“With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action,” the panel wrote in a report released Thursday.

Federal chemical laws are weak, funding for research and enforcement is inadequate, and regulatory responsibilities are split among too many agencies, the panel found.

The problem is not too many agencies. Here’s the problem: Continue reading →

The World Inside Monsanto

In a review of the 2008 film, The World According to Monsanto,, Kimberley D. Mok remarks:
The film documents the beginnings of the company as a chemical start-up in the early 1900s, producing saccharin, caffeine and vanillin. As we watch Robin Google up unclassified documents and interview a bevy of officials, scientists and farmers, we see that today’s Monsanto is a giant multinational wielding its considerable financial, political and marketing clout to influence government officials, ruthlessly sue farmers using patent laws – all the while surreptitiously lobbying to keep their potentially toxic products unlabelled or falsely advertised.

Monsanto claims that their genetically modified seeds will solve the food crisis, especially in developing countries, where it will provide significant economic benefits, higher quality and better yield. Nevertheless, the film compellingly shows the unsettling possibilities of genetic contamination of conventional or local varieties of seeds by their genetically-engineered cousins, pointing to a horrific future where global plant biodiversity is nil and farmers are not able to grow anything but genetically contaminated food.

The future? Already Monsanto seeds grow 93% of soybeans and 80% of corn in the U.S. and people claim “we couldn’t do agriculture in Argentina” without RoundUp. The Biotechnology Industry Organization even claims that the popularity of herbicide-resistant crops showed their value outweighs any associated detriments.

Any associated detrimeents, such as birth defects or sickness in animals and humans.

Nevermind that organic farming yields are often better than with agrochemicals.

Surely the company that brought us DDT (banned by U.S. Congress 1972), Agent Orange (Agent Orange Act of 1991 makes U.S. veterans exposed to it eligible for treatment and compenstation), and PCBs (“CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy”) wouldn’t soak the world in anything toxic?