Farmers do not cause disease

To the editor:

Regarding Kamyar Enshayan's Nov. 1 guest column 'Look at environmental factors in cancer fight”:

I and 89,000 other farmers, farm spouses and commercial pesticide applicators are your canaries for farm pesticides. Unlike the miner's canary that succumbed to toxic air, we're a living contradiction to Enshayan's guest column.

The University of Iowa and North Carolina University have been studying this pesticide-exposed group of 89,000 for the past 23 years in order to discover possible links between pesticides and disease. They're finding no links to disease from any of the farm pesticides vilified by Enshayan. In fact, they report their study group to be healthier than the average American.

Enshayan warns that the World Health Organization named glyphosate (Roundup) as a probable carcinogen. The WHO unwittingly hitched their reputation to a French study that used a strain of rats known to be predisposed to tumors, declined to reveal the dose of glyphosate given to the rats, plus numerous other scientific improprieties. That study was condemned by the European Food Safety Authority.

EPA's pesticide reviews are very thorough and very expensive, which severely reduces a chemical company's profits from new products. This is counterintuitive to Enshayan's accusation that chemical companies control (manipulate) regulation.

Enshayan asserts that farmers don't need herbicides. However, no-till and cover crop systems are two conservation tools that depend on herbicides. Substituting tillage for weed control and cover crop termination creates erosion, releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, plus it destroys organic matter which in turn increases runoff and flooding.

Curt Zingula

Central City