CFS Launches Class Action Lawsuit against Monsanto

By the Center For Food Safety

Last week, CFS and Pacific Northwest wheat farmers launched a class action lawsuit against Monsanto for the escape of Monsanto’s illegal GE wheat in Oregon. Support our work to hold Monsanto accountable!

You probably read the news that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced that unapproved, genetically engineered (GE) wheat was found contaminating an Oregon farmer’s field. The GE wheat, known as Roundup Ready, was developed by the Monsanto Company to withstand direct application of Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide, and was never approved for sale. 

The discovery of unapproved Roundup Ready wheat in a farmer's field in Oregon, years after Monsanto terminated field testing, is just the latest example of Monsanto's inability to keep their engineered genes under control. Until Monsanto and USDA begin to take gene flow from field tests more seriously, we can expect GE contamination to continue to cause havoc.

CFS is not standing idly by hoping Monsanto and USDA do the right thing. We are taking action. Last week, Center for Food Safety and Pacific Northwest wheat farmers filed a class action lawsuit against Monsanto. Center for Food Safety and Pacific Northwest wheat farmers are representing the broad class of farmers affected by this contamination, seeking monetary compensation for farmers who have lost export markets, and forcing Monsanto to take measures to clean up the contamination and ensure it never happens again. 

This is a pivotal moment for the food movement, and we can’t do this work without your support! Together we can stand up to Monsanto and hold them accountable.

As we’ve warned for over a decade, GE crops simply can’t be controlled once they’re released into the environment. Past transgenic contamination episodes involving GE corn and GE rice triggered over $1 billion in losses and economic hardship to farmers, and recalls of food products containing illegal GE corn. CFS has been there every time, fighting in the courts, in the halls of Congress, and in communities to protect our food, our farms, and our environment from these risky GE crops.

With your support, we’ve been working to hold biotech companies like Monsanto accountable and tighten regulations over their experimental GE crop field trials for over a decade. And we’ve had a lot of successes -- like our past litigation over similar field trials in Oregon and Hawaii for other GE crops in which we won substantial victories over USDA and industry for their field trial abuses and failures. Because of this litigation, we now have the legal ability to challenge the legality of field trials, and USDA can no longer ignore their environmental and socioeconomic impacts. We’ve even forced USDA to publicly admit new field trial contamination incidents, like this one, that they otherwise tried to keep secret. 

We can do so much more, but we need your help to succeed. Please make a donation to support our groundbreaking lawsuit today!

Center for Food Safety

660 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, #302

Washington DC 20003

phone (202) 547-9359 | fax (202) 547-9429

Contact Us: office@centerforfoodsafety.org

Myriad Loses Patent to Breast Cancer Genetic Test

By Richard Smallteacher,

CorpWatch Blog

June 13th, 2013

Myriad Genetics has lost its right to be the exclusive U.S. commercial provider of genetic screening tests for breast cancer or ovarian cancer. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which sued the company, claimed that the patent would limit scientific research as well as health care options for women.

Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes significantly increase the risk of cancer. By discovering the location of the genes, Myriad was able to develop tests to detect the mutations for which it charged over $3,000. No other company was allowed to do research on the genes without permission from Myriad.

In a unanimous decision released today by the U.S. Supreme Court, all nine judges agreed with the ACLU.

“Myriad did not create anything,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the decision. “It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Groundbreaking, innovative or even brilliant discovery does not by itself satisfy the criteria (for a patent)

The Myriad patent has long been deeply controversial.

“For women as they are trying to make these major life decisions, it is very helpful for them to have a second opinion. By having only a single lab offering that testing, it is impossible really to be able get that second opinion, either in the way the test is performed or in the interpretation of such a result,” says Dr. Wendy Chung, a clinician and a geneticist at Columbia University. “You’re essentially stuck in a situation of a mediocre test.”

The Myriad screening test is also mostly based on results gathered from white women. The patent has limited further research to see if the results are accurate for women of other races, says Kim Irish of Breast Cancer Action who cites the example of Runi Limary, an Asian woman who received ambiguous results when she had genetic testing done. “Runi was told that this “variant of uncertain significance” has been seen in Asian women, and that these ambiguous results seem to come up more for women of color,” says Irish.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit against Myriad, the University of Utah Research Foundation and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in May 2009. A federal judge ruled against Myriad in 2010 but the company won on appeal at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. 

James Watson, one of the two scientists who discovered DNA, filed a friend of the court brief that stated: “(W)e would not want one individual or company to monopolize the legal right to the beneficial information of a human gene—information that should be used for the betterment of the human race as a whole.”

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has long accepted claims that include DNA sequences – an estimated 35,000 such patents have been approved.

However the Obama administration recently began to limit this approach. “The chemical structure of native human genes is a product of nature, and it is no less a product of nature when that structure is ‘isolated’ from its natural environment than are cotton fibers that have been separated from cotton seeds or coal that has been extracted from the earth,” wrote lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice in a legal brief in 2010. "Common sense would suggest that a product of nature is not transformed into a human-made invention merely by isolating it.”

The ACLU welcomed the decision. "Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation," said Sandra Park, an ALCU lawyer. "Myriad did not invent the BRCA genes and should not control them. Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued."

Source

The Benefits of a Ketogenic Diet and its Role in Cancer Treatment

By Dr Mercola

A ketogenic diet calls for eliminating all but non-starchy vegetable carbohydrates, and replacing them with healthy fats and high quality protein.

The premise is that since cancer cells need glucose to thrive, and carbohydrates turn into glucose in your body, then lowering the glucose level in your blood though carb and protein restriction, literally starves the cancer cells into oblivion.  Additionally, low protein intake tends to minimize the mTOR pathway that accelerates cell proliferation.

This type of diet, in which you restrict all but non-starchy vegetable carbs and replace them with low to moderate amounts of high quality protein and high amounts of beneficial fat, is what I recommend for everyone, whether you have cancer or not. It’s a diet that will help optimize your weight and  all chronic degenerative disease. Eating this way will help you convert from carb burning mode to fat burning.

Dr. Thomas Seyfried is one of the leading pioneer academic researchers in promoting how to treat cancer nutritionally. He’s been teaching neurogenetics and neurochemistry as it relates to cancer treatment at Yale University and Boston College for the past 25 years.

He’s written over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters, and has also published a book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer.

Source