Friday, December 18
CHN P12, Universitätsstrasse 16, 8092 Zürich
15:00
Internal CSS meeting & Welcome by the Chair.
16:00
Presentation by CSS member Prof. Dr. Christopher Portier, Senior Collaborating Scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund and former member of numerous WHO/IARC scientific committees including the one that declared Glyphosate a 'probable carcinogen to humans'.
17:00
Questions & Discussion, followed by a Christmas Apéro.
Background
In November, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) concluded that glyphosate is “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans”.
The EFSA decision, based on the Renewal Assessment Report provided by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung BfR), ran counter to the finding earlier this year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) working group, the cancer arm of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic to humans". The IARC review linked glyphosate to dose-related increases in malignant tumours at multiple anatomical sites in experimental animals and to an increased incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in exposed humans.
Subsequently to the EFSA decision about 100 international scientists wrote an open letter to the European Health and Food Safety Commissioner, Vytenis Andriukaitis, strongly challenging the EFSA’s decision and the BfR report that it was based on. Corresponding author of the letter is Prof. Dr. Christopher Portier, who has contributed to the development of cancer risk assessment guidelines for national and international governments and agencies and was invited as specialist to the WHO IARC assessment of glyphosate.
On December 18, Dr. Portier discussed the major differences in the risks assessments conducted by the IARC working group, BfR and EFSA and the underlying regulations and mandates of the different evaluation bodies that ultimately led to the contradicting conclusions about the carcinogenicity of glyphosate.