Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Roundup Birth Defects: Regulators Knew World's Best-selling Herbicide Causes Problems, New Report Finds, at the Huffington Post:

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.

The hypothesis of Don Huber is going to be very significant.  More research will be required to test his hypothesis, but so far, I've heard that a number of researchers at Purdue signed a letter trying to debunk his claims.  The anti-Monsanto, anti-GMO crowd is going to hold on to this hypothesis until it is completely debunked.  If researchers can't or won't definitely prove that this hypothesis is wrong, they are going to start losing the public relations battle.  Maybe it won't matter, as weeds become more resistant to Roundup, but I think that group think without followup research, on both sides, is terrible policy.