This month’s meeting in Lyon, France, of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – the branch of the UN’s World Health Organization that studies the relationship between environmental and lifestyle risk factors and cancer – focused on pesticides. The committee concluded that of the five pesticides evaluated, three were “probably carcinogenic,” a 2A classification, despite the fact that neither the U.S. EPA nor the European Chemical Agency had classified these pesticides as such. A classification of 2A is one step removed from a Group 1 classification – “Carcinogenic to humans.” One of the newly-tarred pesticides was glyphosate, an herbicide. Glyphosate is a component of Roundup, Monsanto’s widely used weedkiller, which has been in common household (as well as agricultural) use for decades. Read more.