“The glyphosate file illustrates to the point of caricature the conflict between regulatory agencies and scientific institutions”

2023-09-24 05:15:08

Skepticism about the dangers of global warming or vaccine hesitancy in the face of Covid-19 show this unambiguously: distrust of collegial scientific opinions, transparent and based on scholarly literature, carries significant risks for society. There is no better fuel for this distrust than situations in which authorities vested with apparently similar scientific authority answer the same question in opposite ways. Back in the news with the reauthorization project presented on September 22 to the member states of the European Union (EU), the glyphosate file illustrates to the point of caricature this type of conflict, the public display of which is detrimental to the image of science.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers The European Union divided over the Commission’s proposal to reauthorize glyphosate for ten years

For several years, there has been total disagreement between regulatory agencies and scientific institutions on the toxicity of glyphosate. Between, on the one hand, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (EChA), and on the other, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), the views seem irreconcilable. “Strong evidence of genotoxicity” (CIRC), “probably not genotoxic” (EFSA, EChA), “probable carcinogen” (CIRC), “average presumption of a link” with non-Hodgkin lymphomas (Inserm), “probably not carcinogenic” (EFSA, EChA)… everything is consistent.

Who, in public opinion, follows the controversy closely enough to know that the data considered by each side are not the same? Who knows that Inserm and the IARC base themselves on the scientific literature – that is to say all the studies published after peer review (or peer review) in scholarly journals –, and that regulatory agencies, considering more than 95% of this literature as unreliable or irrelevant, base their opinion (in accordance with the law) on the regulatory tests provided by manufacturers?

The precedent of Bisphenol A

These subtleties undoubtedly escape the majority of public opinion. All that remains is the deleterious background noise of dissensus, which feeds relativism and distrust. Supposed to be a scientific exercise, regulatory expertise in reality sometimes works against science. “The assessment made by these European agencies does not correspond to any scientific canonsummarizes toxicologist Laurence Huc, research director at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, in an interview with Mediapart. For the biologist that I am, this process is a fraud. »

You have 54.37% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.