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Correlations are not causation, but when they plot out as clearly as Stephanie Seneff has plotted them out with regard to autism and glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer,  they are impossible to ignore. 

 

Seneff is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who has been running around the country showing a fairly dense slide show about the correlations attached to ghyphosate. On Thursday evening, she was in Groton, MA, at a special panel presentation about GMOs, sponsored by Groton Wellness and its founder, food rights activist and holistic dentist Jean Nordin-Evans. I was one of the panelists at the presentation, but as far as the audience was concerned, Seneff was the main act, in large measure because of the correlations she demonstrated, and the discomfort she aroused. 

 

Once she had completed her presentation, all of the 70 or so people in attendance were squirming, likely because they now had serious misgivings about serving their kids, or themselves, anything with corn or soy, which are nearly all genetically modified (GMO)  and thus tainted with Roundup and its glyphosate. (These GMO crops are bred to resist damage from Roundup, which destroys the weeds around them.) 

 

If glyphosate is as harmful as Seneff’s correlations suggest, then its poisonous effects extend nearly everywhere–to all soft drinks and candies sweetened with corn syrup and all chips and cereals filled with soy, not to mention cattle and chicken fed soy. But it isn’t just corn and soy, it is wheat as well, since it is nearly all sprayed with Roundup just prior to being harvested, according to Seneff….which means all non-organic bread is tainted. 


Not surprisingly, Monsanto argues that glyphosate is safe; it has a page linking to denials and assertions at its web site that glyphosate isn’t harming people. 

 

The key slide in Seneff’s presentation is the one above, showing the uncanny correlation between heavy use of glyphosate (via Roundup), begun in 1990 and increased sharply each year following, and the explosion of autism, such that we have gone from one in 5,000 children being diagnosed back in 1975 to one in 68 today. 

 

“At today’s rate, by 2025, one in two children will be autistic,”  Seneff said Thursday. Presumably, if Roundup and glyphosate accelerate their spread in the U.S. and around the world, the predicted one-in-two autism cases could happen even sooner. 

 

Among Seneff’s key points: 

 

-Glyphosate sickens by killing beneficial gut bacteria and stimulating the loss of key minerals like cobalt, iron, and manganese. 

-Glyphosate is present in unusually high quantities in the breast milk of American mothers, to the tune of 760 to 1,600 times the allowable limits in European drinking water. 

-Urine testing shows Americans have ten times the glyphosate accumulation as Europeans. 

-Children with autism have biomarkers indicative of excessive glyphosate, including zinc and iron deficiency, low serum sulfate, seizures, and mitochondrial disorder.  

-The number of adverse reactions from vaccines can be correlated as well with autism and glyphosate, though not quite as closely. 

-The same correlations between applications of glyphosate and autism show up in deaths from senility. 


The problem here is that the products most heavily treated with Monsanto’s Roundup—corn, soy, and wheat—are pervasive within our food chain. “In my view, the situation is almost beyond repair,” Seneff said after her presentation. “We need to do something drastic or we risk the demise of the human race and a mass extinction unparalleled by previous events.”