Members of EPA glyphosate panel chosen

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4, 2016 - EPA has finalized the membership of the panel that will examine the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate.

The list of scientific experts was posted without fanfare on EPA’s Scientific Advisory Panel website today. The agency also has posted the agenda for the meeting, which will take place Oct. 18-21 at the Office of Pesticide Programs building in Crystal City, Va.

The panel includes four members of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Scientific Advisory Panel, along with nine members appointed specifically for the glyphosate panel. Those nine people are known as the Science Review Board.

The four SAP members on the panel are: Session chair James McManaman, professor and chief of the section of Basic Reproductive Sciences at the University of Colorado, Denver; David A. Jett, director of the National Institutes of Health’s CounterACT Program; Joseph Shaw, associate professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University; and Sonya K. Sobrian, associate professor at Howard University’s Department of Pharmacology.

The Science Review Board members are listed below. (Biosketches are available from EPA here):

• Kenny Crump, a private consultant in Ruston, Louisiana
• Laura C. Green, President and Senior Toxicologist at Green Toxicology, Brookline, Mass.
• Peter F. Infante, managing member, Peter F. Infante Consulting, Falls Church, Virginia
• Kristi Muldoon Jacobs, acting director, Regulations Implementation Staff, Office of Dietary Supplement Programs, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, FDA, College Park, Md.
• Barbara L. Parsons, research microbiologist, Division of Genetic and Molecular Toxicology, National Center for Toxicological Research, FDA, Jefferson, Arkansas
• Kenneth Portier, vice president, Statistics and Evaluation Center, American Cancer Society, Atlanta, Georgia
• Aramandla Ramesh, associate professor, Department of Biochemistry & Cancer Biology, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tennessee
• Daniel Zelterman, Professor of Public Health (Biostatistics), Department of Biostatistics, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut
• Luoping Zhang, Professor in Toxicology, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California

The meeting will kick off Oct. 18 with presentations from EPA, followed by public comments at 5 p.m. The next day, Oct. 19, will be devoted entirely to public comments. On Oct. 20 and 21, the panel will consider the strengths and weaknesses of various studies on the association between glyphosate and solid tumors, leukemia, and Hodgkin lymphoma and the agency’s conclusion regarding these cancer types—along with a number of other issues.

EPA released an issue paper in advance of the SAP meeting that said the evidence shows that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and the most heavily used herbicide in the world, does not cause cancer in humans.

“The available data at this time do no support a carcinogenic process for glyphosate,” the report said.

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