NZs Environmental Protection Authority in a muddle over weed killer.

Christa from The Brook

This Blog from The University of Otago. Public Health Expert posted on August 16, 2017 describes how NZ EPA chose not to accept the assessment of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).
IARC established that the herbicide glyphosate was a "probable carcinogen". Instead the NZ EPA commissioned its own report which found that glyphosate is “unlikely to be genotoxic or carcinogenic”. The full text can easily be found on-line by entering the title of this post.

Why is this especially important for us in Nelson?
Because there are many similarities between, what the EPA has done in this instance and what has happened and is still happening right here in Nelson with the application of 26 tons of Brodifacoum laced bait onto our Brook Valley.
Read the Footnote (below) and by simply replacing some of the names involved, you can see where this is leading. In the case of Brodifacoum the international science is steadfastly ignored. So are peer reviewed NZ scientists who have been warning about this particular poison for decades.
The Brook Sanctuary wrote its own glossy brochure to down play all the negative effects of this poison, so much so that many people now believe they could eat a few pellets and not be the worse for it.
The code of practice for the use of Brodifacoum was written by the boss of Orillion, the very company producing the poison pellet baits. NZ research papers demonstrating in some cases horrifying numbers of by-kill are never mentioned. Brodifacoum bio-accumulation has been demonstrated with great regularity by the fact that it has been found in a large variety of non-target species and that list is still growing.

See what Bruning and Browning have to say about what happened with Glyphosate and it is easy to compare!

Footnote: * Bruning and Browning note particularly that the NZ EPA report considers just “glyphosate chemistry and not glyphosate-based formulations that are used in ‘the real world’ and that are obviously of the essence”; that it “makes every effort to discredit a finding by the NZ EPA’s own authority on cancer, the IARC”; that it “appears to give exclusive consideration and weight to industry-paid and industry-supported studies and reviews as well as arguably out-dated and industry-developed guidelines”; that it ignores the NZ EPA’s own manual ‘Thresholds and Classifications under the HSNO Act 1996’ where IARC is listed as “one of the two respected sources for information on carcinogenicity”; and finally that it “fails to address twenty-first century scientific understanding of the factors that pre-dispose to risks of cancer development – ignoring new data from toxicology and cancer biology.”