Bioaccumulation and Biomagnification:
Bioaccumulation and Biomagnification are exceptionally important in understanding toxicity, and coincidently are two of the things that proponents of using toxins in the environment seldom test for — or even mention!
Bioaccumulation is a phenomenon where harmful substances or impacts of harmful substances build up over time within a single organism. Effects generally do not show up quickly, meaning that short term lab studies seldom find any problem. In fact, by limiting a study period, or forgetting to report longer term issues, there is some evidence that company scientists slant data to show safety.
One example was feeding studies of herbicides in a particular species of rat. Reported studies were 90 days. There were no serious effects on the animals. Then Gilles-Éric Séralini, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen, carried out the same feeding studies — using the same species of rat — but for a longer period. A large number of his rats developed cancers. The so called "Séralini affair" continues to be debated, and many called him a fraud, but in the U.S. the herbicide purveyor has lost, as of February, 2024, $11 billion over class action lawsuits with 100,000 settlements.
The Swanson (et al) study published in the Journal of Organic Systems, Vol. 9 No 2 (2014) titled "Genetically engineered crops, glyphosate and the deterioration of health in the United States of America", found significant correlation (< 10-5) between glyphosate applications and end stage renal disease (R = 0.975), acute kidney failure (R = 0.978), cancers of the thyroid (R = 0.988), liver (R = 0.960), bladder (R = 0.981), pancreas (R = 0.918), kidney (R = 0.973) and myeloid leukaemia (R = 0.878).
The relationship to kidney disease is particularly interesting given studies carried out in Sri Lanka where an epidemic of CKD emerged in the context of the civil war. Researchers in California postulated that the disease was caused by bioaccumulation of toxic metals such as arsenic and cadmium in the kidney, proposing a mechanism of chelating of the metals by the herbidide thus bypassing the liver, which in the absence of the herbicide scrubs these toxins from the blood stream. A similar mechanism might explain the high correlation with Autism found in the Swanson study combined with low levels of toxic metals used as adjuvents in some vaccines, with large numbers of parents blaming vaccines for the sudden onset of Autism after early childhood vaccination. To the best of our knowledge, this possible interaction has not been studied to date.
Biomagnification is a well understood phenomena — but different from bioaccumulation, since more than one organism is involved. Rather, it is a result of the predator/prey food chain. If a prey organism bioaccumulates a toxin, and many of these prey organisms are in turn consumed by a predator, the predator will rapidly ingest high levels of toxin. This is biomagnification, and could have massive consequences for the prey organism, especially during breeding season for insectivorous birds, for example
If bioaccumulation and biomagnification effects are ingnored in safety research, safety is far from guaranteed. This is a factor in a large body of reseach carried out by or accepted by regulatory agencies
This is a very serious problem when we depend on lab toxicity studies.