Hawaiian coffee growers sue Monsanto over glyphosate's dangerous side effects

February 24, 2016 By: L. J. Devon, Staff Writer

(NaturalNews) The former owners of Dragon's Lair Kona Coffee Farm in Honaunau, Hawaii, will no longer be fooled by Monsanto's clever marketing of glyphosate. Christine and Kenneth Sheppard's lives have forever been changed by the side effects and horrifying scientific failure of glyphosate, which has become the most widely applied herbicide worldwide.

According to the paper, Trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally, published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe, the amount of glyphosate used around the world since 1974 surpasses 18.9 billion pounds. 19 percent or 3.5 billion pounds of glyphosate has been used exclusively in the USA since then, where Roundup Ready crops such as soy, corn, canola, alfalfa and cotton now dominate agriculture. Christine Sheppard worked directly with glyphosate for nearly a decade.

Monsanto's marketing for glyphosate is all smiles, but the dangerous side effects of glyphosate are real. Monsanto claims that glyphosate kills an enzyme that is only found in plants, not in humans or animals. Monsanto fails to mention that glyphosate is killing that same enzyme that exists in the microbes in the human gut. That's the dirty secret, and that's why glyphosate is registered as an antibiotic. Glyphosate inadvertently kills the beneficial microbes in the soil and destroys the human microbiome, making it easier for disease processes to take hold in nature, in the fields, and in the human body. As glyphosate infiltrates the food supply, the microbes that support healthy digestion and immune system function are being wiped out.

Coffee farmers who are fighting cancer and cancer treatments are now going after Monsanto
From 1995 to 2004, Christine Sheppard used Roundup on her commercial coffee farm in Hawaii. In 2003 she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and was forced to sell her farm to pay for expensive cancer treatments.

Still alive, Christine and her husband Kenneth are now going after Monsanto Co., accusing the agribusiness of falsely concealing the risks of glyphosate that ultimately led to her cancer. The civil suit states that Monsanto "knew or had reason to know that its Roundup products were defective and were inherently dangerous and unsafe when used in the manner instructed and provided by defendant. ...

"Monsanto assured the public that Roundup was harmless. In order to prove this, Monsanto championed falsified data and attacked legitimate studies that revealed its dangers. Monsanto led a prolonged campaign of misinformation to convince government agencies, farmers and the general public that Roundup was safe."

The Sheppards' civil suit was filed Feb. 2 in U.S. District court in Honolulu. Their attorney, Michael Miller, told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald: "She's been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a very serious form of cancer that's gone to Stage 4. She's had enormous treatment and now is in remission, but is in fear of it coming back. So, we're seeking a fair amount of damages—her medical expenses, her pain, her suffering and her mental anguish. And we'll ask a jury to put a number on that at an appropriate time."

Monsanto has been in hot water ever since the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans." Glyphosate's slow destruction of the human microbiome creates the conditions within the body for disease processes to start. Good bacteria play a role in protecting the gut wall and the purity of the blood. The destruction glyphosate causes paves the way for other toxins to break through the gut wall and poison the blood as they circulate through the body.

Speaking recently with Health Impact News, Dr. Don Huber talked about his experiences consulting with agricultural workers in El Salvador. "I spent some time consulting in Guatemala, and just across the border in El Salvador, we find that one out of four sugar cane workers has end stage kidney failure [because of glyphosate exposure]. These are young men. This is a death sentence for them. We see the same type of kidney disease here in the US [because of glyphosate from Roundup], but we just have more access to kidney dialysis and kidney transplants. Then you see the situation in Washington State with anencephaly (babies being born without brains) and the large number of stillbirths. Human fertility [in the United States] dropped another 25 to 30 percent in just the last 5 years."

Sources include:

EcoWatch.com

EcoWatch.com

HealthImpactNews.com

Monsanto.com

MDPI.com

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