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Experts have looked at the evidence condemning the weedkiller atrazine as a carcinogen and found it wanting.

A weight-of-evidence approach leads to the conclusion that there is no causal association between atrazine and cancer and that occasional positive results can be attributed to bias or chance, the scientists wrote in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention. Atrazine appears to be a good candidate for a category of herbicides with a probable absence of cancer risk. Atrazine should be treated for regulatory and public health purposes as an agent unlikely to pose a cancer risk to humans.

The four researchers were affiliated with the Tisch Cancer Institute, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Harvard...

All the news that's fit to scare. That was the thrust of this weekend's New York Times article by Charles Duhigg entitled "Toxic Waters: Debating Just How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass."

As president of the American Council on Science and Health, I have been following environmental and health media articles for some three decades -- seeing how they measure up in terms of "honors" for exaggerated risk, biased reporting, misrepresented science, and pure sensationalism. The Duhigg article is clearly a contender for the all-time worst.

Duhigg argues that the widespread use of the herbicide atrazine is polluting our supply of drinking water and putting us all -- but...

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently recommended that the allowable concentration of atrazine in water be increased to 100 parts per billion, up from its previous two parts per billion standard.

The new WHO safety standard greatly exceeds the U.S. EPA mandate that water contain less than three parts per billion, which “activists groundlessly say is still too much,” points out ACSH's...

During his long-overdue testimony before the House Committee on Agriculture in April, EPA Administrator Michael Regan complained about anti-pesticide groups tying up his Agency’s resources in lawsuits; but he and his Agency have only themselves to blame. The courts are forcing change because the EPA is clearly inviting them to do it – perpetuating its reputation for lack of scientific integrity in the process.

There is a long and ugly history at EPA of what has been dubbed “sue and settle,” or “regulation through litigation,” whereby regulators encourage legal challenges by environmental activists to their regulatory decisions. For example, anti-pesticide groups sued the EPA in the notoriously liberal federal Ninth...

Syngenta, maker of the herbicide atrazine, just announced a settlement with litigants in a case based on allegations that the widely used chemical caused water contamination despite the fact that it s beensafely used by farmers for over fifty years.

Some may wonder, if atrazine is so safe and important to American agriculture, why did Syngenta decide to pay off the plaintiffs?

Good question. While we here at ACSH recognize that the settlement was a matter of business, not science, we still think that this concession to opportunistic lawyers and activist groups is yet another...

In what ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross calls one of the worst studies ever, a team of researchers from the University of Texas School of Public Health reported in the Journal of Pediatrics that exposure to a widely used herbicide during pregnancy may raise the risk of a birth defect.

According to the findings, atrazine the most commonly used herbicide in the U.S. appeared to increase the risk of choanal atresia (an extremely rare congenital defect) by almost two-fold in pregnant women...

A lawsuit in the "judicial hellhole" that is Madison County, Ill., against the makers of the world's most widely used herbicide threatens to undermine our way of evaluating risks in this country. If the lawyers -- and the anti-chemical, anti-business activists -- get their way, American agriculture will be forced back to practices of the pre-industrial age. And that will be only the first step in the "environmentalist" agenda to roll back progress.

If you think that's an exaggeration, think again. A finding against Syngenta, which manufacturers atrazine, would set a very dangerous precedent, with repercussions for farmers and anyone who enjoys their bounty. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), unfortunately, has now loaned its weight to the activists' Luddite effort to...

Atrazine, the herbicide most responsible for the well being of the cornfields across so much of the U.S. countryside, has once again been deemed a non-threat to human health. Most recently, the respected ongoing Agricultural Health Study (AHS) found no link between exposure to atrazine and overall cancer risk. The new research, published in the typically chemophobic, anti-pesticide journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, draws on the AHS s prospective cohort of over 57,000 licensed pesticide applicators (and their families) and is an extension of an earlier AHS analysis of cancer risk among self-reported atrazine users with six years of follow-up. Among the...

HealthyFrogLook, there has never been any solid evidence at all that the most common herbicide (weed-killer) used in America atrazine actually harmed amphibians. On the other hand, atrazine has been estimated to have saved billions of dollars in increased corn crop yields over the many decades it s been widely used in the corn-growing heartland.

Nevertheless, since the dawn of the 21st century, a University of California professor of Integrative Biology, Tyrone Hayes, has led a one-man campaign impugning atrazine as a destroyer of frogs, allegedly causing limb deformities and hermaphroditism (ambivalent or reverse-...

America seems in the grip of chemophobia, the unfounded fear of chemicals. CNN recently served up specials entitled Toxic America and Toxic Childhood. The New Yorker had a piece fretting about the Plastic Panic. The President s Cancer Panel anguished about all the untested environmental chemicals many designated by them as carcinogens in our air, water and food. And there are more frightening (but scientifically baseless) chemical health scares to come.

For example, radical environmental activists now have the widely used herbicide atrazine on their radar screens. For them, new regulatory controls or an outright ban on the herbicide would be their dream come true. Why? Because as a May Wall Street Journal editorial put it, if (they) can take down atrazine...(they) can...