WASHINGTON -- Industry regulators have known for years that Roundup,
the world's best-selling herbicide produced by U.S. company Monsanto,
causes birth defects, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The report, "Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in
the dark?" found regulators knew as long ago as 1980 that glyphosate,
the chemical on which Roundup is based, can cause birth defects in
laboratory animals.

But despite such warnings, and although the European Commission has
known that glyphosate causes malformations since at least 2002, the
information was not made public.

Instead regulators misled the public about glyphosate's safety,
according to the report, and as recently as last year, the German
Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, the German
government body dealing with the glyphosate review, told the European
Commission that there was no evidence glyphosate causes birth defects.

Published by Earth Open Source, an organization that uses open source
collaboration to advance sustainable food production, the report comes
months after researchers found that genetically-modified crops used in
conjunction Roundup contain a pathogen that may cause animal
miscarriages. After observing the newly discovered organism back in
February, Don Huber, an emeritus professor at Purdue University, wrote
an open letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack requesting a
moratorium on deregulating crops genetically altered to be immune to
Roundup, which are commonly called Roundup Ready crops.

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