Pesticide linked to cancer found in top German beers
Edited by walterp on February 25, 2016. Posted in Gesundheit
The Environmental Institute in Munich conducted the tests on the
14 beers with the highest sales figures in Germany and found that all
of them contained traces of the pesticide.
The results showed that Hasseröder, a brewery in Saxony-Anhalt, had the
highest intensity of the pesticide – with 29.74 microgrammes of the
chemical per litre of beer.
The lowest levels on the other hand were to be found in the Bavarian
Augustiner beers, which had a comparatively low 0.46 microgrammes of the
pesticide in every litre of its amber brew.
But even this quantity is over four times the legal limit for drinking
water which is set at 0.1 microgrammes per litre, Spiegel reports.
Coming in the year of the much celebrated 500th anniversary of the famed
Beer Purity Law, the results couldn’t be worse timed, and could tarnish
German beer’s worldwide reputation for quality as well as taste.
But the Association of German Brewers (BfR) denied on Thursday that the
reported figures posed any risk to people’s health.
While saying that it had not seen the results of the testing, the BfR
claimed that the reported levels of the pesticide lie well below what is
currently considered to pose a health risk.
“For an adult to consume unhealthy amounts of Glyphosate, he would have
to drink around 1,000 litres of beer a day,” the BfR said in a
statement.
“According to current scientific understanding, a Glyphosate level of 30
micrograms per litre doesn’t pose any health risk,” they continued.
Fierce scientific debate
Debate is currently raging among health experts as to whether
Glyphosate, made by controversial American agrochemical giant Monsanto,
is safe to use.
In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) labelled Glyphosate
“potentially carcinogenic.”
But the EU food safety authority Efsa came to a different conclusion,
announcing it was “unlikely that Glyphosate poses a cancer risk to
humans” – a conclusion which some researchers described as
“scientifically unacceptable.”
With Monsanto’s licence to sell the pesticide running out in the summer,
the European Commission will have to once again consider whether the
product is safe for use in the EU.
The Environmental Institute in Munich say that the chemical could have
been carried into the beer through hops or the cereals which are part of
the ingredients, pointing out that “large scale use of Glyphosate is a
daily part of crop production” in Germany.
The breweries must now look into “how Glyphosate could make it into
their beer and to make sure that in the future their products are free
from traces of pesticide,” the institute warns.
The beers which were tested were on sale in German supermarkets in
December 2015 and January 2016.
http://ruturl.com/vdA
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Germany link:
https://pod.disroot.org/people/4af4f500510501341ab42394a4e7c018
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