On 7 September the GMO-Free Europe conference took place in Brussels. The conference, hosted by the Green Group in the European Parliament, brought together people from the campaigning, scientific, food retail, legal, and policymaking sectors to discuss their opposition to the European Commission's proposal to remove regulatory safeguards, traceability and labelling from new GMOs made with so-called “new genomic techniques” (NGTs) such as gene editing. Scientists Dr Ricarda Steinbrecher of Econexus in the UK and Dr Margret Engelhard of Germany’s Federal Agency for Nature Conservation warned that new GMOs pose risks to health and the environment that must continue to be assessed. Dr Engelhard cited research revealing that the vast majority – 94% – of new GMO plant applications fall into the Commission's “NGT category 1”, meaning that they would escape risk assessment for health and the environment, as well as traceability and labelling. GMWatch

 

 

Regarding the re-authorisation of glyphosate in the EU, France is probably going to follow the opinion of the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA), which considers that "there is no area of critical concern, either for the environment or for human health", and the European Chemicals Agency, ECHA, and vote in favour of renewing the authorisation at the next meetings of the European committee responsible for ruling on this issue, the SCoPAFF, arguing that it is following the opinion of "the scientists". However, in 2021, the French medical research agency Inserm published a report in which it presented a very different analysis from that of EFSA and ECHA on several points concerning the toxicity of glyphosate. In particular, Inserm's analysis suggests that glyphosate "appears to have" endocrine disrupting properties, which runs counter to EFSA's conclusions. Generations Futures

 

 

A flagship project for the controversial practice of hunting viruses among wildlife in South East Asia, Africa, and Latin America to prevent human outbreaks and pandemics is being quietly dropped by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after criticism over the safety of such research. For more than a decade the US government has been funding international projects engaged in identifying exotic wildlife viruses that might someday infect humans. Although critics have raised concerns over the potentially catastrophic risks of such virus hunting activities, hundreds of millions of dollars in unabated funding have symbolised a commitment to the effort. The shuttering of the project, as described in a new congressional budget document and during interviews with scientists and federal policy makers, marks an abrupt retreat by the US government from wildlife virus hunting, an activity that has also been funded by the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. The turnabout follows early warnings raised by sceptics — including officials in the Biden White House — that the $125m (£99m; €115m) “DEEP VZN” programme could inadvertently ignite a pandemic. BMJ

 

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