By Stephanie Seneff, February 26, 2014

Few people today are unaware of the fact that bees worldwide are suffering from a mysterious malady that threatens their very existence. Bee colony collapse disorder is a serious threat to agriculture as we know it, because many agricultural crops rely on bees for pollination [1]. People who are researching the topic are suspecting a new fungal disease or a virus infection or a mite. Or they claim that Imidacloprid, a member of the neonicotinoid class of insecticides, may be the culprit. While all of these factors likely play a role, I believe the principal underlying cause is glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide, Roundup. Not only that, but I believe the syndrome can best be characterized as “bee autism,” and it is the same disorder that is now afflicting one in fifty American children. If we stay the course, we can expect the autism rates in America to continue to climb in step with the disappearance of the bees.

Roundup is on few people’s radar screens, because Monsanto long ago convinced nearly everybody that it is a harmless chemical to humans, despite the fact that it is a broad spectrum herbicide. The claim is that we are protected from harm from glyphosate because our cells don’t possess the shikimate pathway, which is the biological pathway that glyphosate disrupts in plants. However, this pathway is responsible for the production of the essential aromatic amino acids – tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine – that our own cells are unable to synthesize, due exactly to the fact that they don’t possess this pathway. We rely on food sources and/or on synthesis by bacteria residing in our gut to maintain our supplies of these amino acids. All the microbes in our gut do have the shikimate pathway, and they need it to synthesize these essential nutrients for us. This also means that they are susceptible to harm from glyphosate exposure.

In a recent interview with Dr. Joe Mercola [2], Prof. Don Huber has explained how bee colony collapse syndrome can be linked to glyphosate. Deficiencies in critical micronutrients cause bees to be unable to metabolize sugar, due to a condition analogous to diabetes in humans. The disorientation that prevents them from returning to the hive can be explained as defects in socialization and communication following a deficiency in critical neurotransmitters such as serotonin, melatonin and epinephrine. These are all derived from the aromatic amino acids produced by the shikimate pathway. The sick bees suffer from an imbalance in their gut bacteria, favoring pathogenic forms over the beneficial lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, which they ordinarily depend upon for supplying many important nutrients in addition to the aromatic amino acids. Recent experiments on pigs have shown that glyphosate and GMO feed disrupt the gut bacteria, killing off the beneficial forms and allowing pathogens to overgrow, leading to inflammatory bowel disease [3]. Pathogenic fungi are remarkably resistant to glyphosate [4], so this could explain why diseases due to fungus are now afflicting not only the bees but many other species in both the plant and animal kingdoms [5].

Glyphosate chelates important minerals such as iron, zinc, manganese, cobalt, etc., which means that it ties these minerals up and prevents them from being absorbed and utilized [6, 7]. In our recent paper on glyphosate [9], Anthony Samsel and I explained how glyphosate can lead to diabetes in humans due to its depletion of essential micronutrients that are needed to synthesize sulfate. Sulfate, in turn, is needed to temporarily store glucose in the extracellular matrix of the cell, and its deficiency leads directly to diabetes [8]. Glyphosate disrupts a large class of enzymes called cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes [9], which perform many functions, particularly in the liver. One of these functions is to detoxify toxic chemicals, such as the neonicotinoids that bees are chronically exposed to. Thus, glyphosate has a serious second-order effect in that it makes many other toxic chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be, by interfering with the liver’s ability to break these chemicals down. Prof. Huber stated that bees suffer from 30% mortality by drinking water containing glyphosate at levels commonly found in our own drinking water. And it’s not only bees that we need to be worried about. Lady bugs, bats, starfish, frogs, and the monarch butterfly are all rapidly disappearing, and I believe glyphosate is the key factor in all of these die-offs.

Medical personnel have become acutely aware of a recent epidemic in vitamin D deficiency in the United States [10], and as a consequence vitamin D supplements are now being wildly overprescribed. I believe the explanation for this sudden deficiency is simply that glyphosate is suppressing the activation of vitamin D in the liver. What is measured typically is the form called calcidiol, or 25(OH)-D3. The conversion to this form from the original form produced in the skin in response to sunlight takes place in the liver, and the reaction is catalyzed by a CYP enzyme. Glyphosate’s disruption of CYP enzymes is the simplest explanation for this widespread problem, but the health consequences are serious, and taking a supplement is not going to solve the problem. What few people realize is that vitamin D protects from the loss of free sulfate by excretion in the urine [11], so vitamin D deficiency translates directly into systemic sulfate deficiency. Together with collaborators, I have written several papers showing the strong links between sulfate deficiency and autism [12, 13], and these were written before I had realized the direct link with glyphosate poisoning.

Due in part to the fact that glyphosate came out from under patent at the turn of the century, its use in agriculture has exploded over the past fifteen years. A more important factor may be the widespread adoption of “Roundup Ready” GMO crops – soy, corn, canola oil, sugar beets, alfalfa and cotton. While the claim was that these Roundup Ready crops would lead to a reduced need for herbicides, the actual facts show the exact opposite. Data on the usage rates of Roundup on corn and soy crops in the US show a steady rise over the past fifteen years, directly in step with a rise in the incidence rates of autism, obesity, and kidney failure, as shown in Figures 1-3. These data are readily available on the Internet from U.S. government sources. Plots for similar correlations with a host of other diseases associated with the industrialized world, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, and hepatitis C, are available on the Web [14]. In our paper, Anthony Samsel and I outlined how the direct biological effects of glyphosate can lead to many of these diseases. Glyphosate is the only one among all the pesticides in use today whose usage rate is skyrocketing directly in step with the alarming increase in all these diseases and conditions. Increased resistance on the part of weeds to Roundup is the usual explanation for the increased need for glyphosate application. The agrichemical industries somehow didn’t see this coming.

Gluten intolerance, or, more specifically, celiac disease, like vitamin D deficiency, is another condition that seems to have sprung up out of nowhere over the past five or ten years. Most major grocery stores now carry a “gluten free section,” catering to those who cannot tolerate any wheat in their diet. Is there something about the way wheat is grown that has changed recently that could account for this phenomenon? While, thankfully, farmers have refused to grow GMO “Roundup Ready” wheat, this does not mean that the wheat is not being exposed to glyphosate. Quite the contrary! Increasingly, farmers are adopting the practice of desiccating wheat just before the harvest with glyphosate. The claim is that this has many benefits, because it causes the wheat to “go to seed” as it responds to the poison, increasing yield, and it reduces the amount of residue that needs to be cleared prior to next year’s crop. It’s easier on the combine, and it allows a head start on weed control for the following year. But it almost certainly means that glyphosate is ending up in the wheat that’s harvested to make bread and pasta. Figure 4 shows that there’s a strong correlation between the incidence of celiac disease and the use of Roundup on wheat over the past two decades.

A similar practice of ripening sugar cane crops with Roundup is also being increasingly adopted in recent years, and I think this accounts for the alarming epidemic in failure among young men working in the sugar cane fields in India, Sri Lanka [15], and Central America [16]. Due to its ability to preferentially kill beneficial bacteria in the gut, glyphosate leads to an overgrowth of Clostridium pathogens in the gut, such as C. difficile and C. botulinum [17]. C. difficile produces a toxic phenolic compound called “p-cresol” which is a well-established causative agent in kidney failure [18]. p-Cresol is also found in the urine in autistic children. C. difficile is increasingly becoming a serious threat in hospitals in the US and around the world [19], and I think this may be due to the fact that its natural resistance to glyphosate gives it a growth advantage over other microbes. In September, 2013, the Sri Lankan government decided to ban glyphosate due to its implications in kidney failure. El Salvador followed suit in February, 2014. I sincerely hope other countries will soon follow their lead.

In my opinion, there is sufficient circumstantial evidence that glyphosate is causing a great deal of harm to warrant alarm. The evidence comes not only from extremely strong correlations with the steady rise in incidence rates of multiple human diseases in recent years (Pearson correlation coefficients as high as 0.98), but also from a direct link between glyphosate’s known effects on biological systems and the known pathologies found in association with these diseases. It is long past the time when more rigorous research should have been done with long-term studies on the effects of glyphosate in animal models. All of the studies done to date only lasted for at most three months, and the insidious effects of glyphosate do not become apparent over such a short time interval. The study by Seralini et al. that was recently retracted without adequate justification [20] was a step in the right direction. It showed serious health effects in liver and kidney as well as mammary tumors and early death in rats exposed to GMO feed and glyphosate over their entire life span. The main reason given for retraction was that the numbers were too few for adequate statistical power. Surely the U.S. government can afford to launch a more extensive study repeating those experiments? Can they afford not to?