When the Ramazzini 2005 study was released the government and aspartame manufacturers were responsible for a coverup. They found an old AARP survey sent to a million American seniors: 16 pages with 56 questions. It asked: How high did you go in school? Had a hysterectomy? Do you eat brownies? Oatmeal? Margarine? Question #25 asked "Over the last 12 months when you drank coffee or tea, what kind of sweetener did you regularly add?" There were 6 multi-choice selections, one of which was: Equal or aspartame...
The 10 year old 3-word item instantaneously converted the questionnaire into the biggest aspartame study in history! It showed no problems at all! (None were asked for!) Thru saturation news releases this propaganda spread planetwide in major magazines and other media.
Dr. Soffritti's work was presented to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The EFSA risk assessment has been criticized from the beginning because of conflicts of interest among the panel members, particularly the chair Susan Barlow, who is an industry consultant. They rejected Dr. Soffritti's study with the lame excuse that cancers were caused by lung infections. Eminent Researchers and scientists know that respiratory infection is a factor in the dying process and never took their excuse as noteworthy.
Ramazzini's control rats had a much lower incidence of cancers than the aspartame-fed rats. Critics of EFSA's risk assessment said that if the cancers were caused by inflammatory lung disease than the control group would have had as many cancers as the rats fed aspartame.
EFSA didn't apologize so they were reported to the Universal Court of Justice. Then EFSA's Dr. Koeter admitted that industry pressured them to hijack science.
Dr. H. J. Roberts, M.D., FACP, FCCP, author of several texts on aspartame disease commented:
"The elegant studies by Dr. Morando Soffritti and his colleagues, coupled with other recent related publications, reinforce my longstanding opinion that aspartame products represent carcinogens -- or co-carcinogens -- for several major tumors in humans, especially involving the brain.
"The details appear in my text, Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic, and in my article, Does Aspartame Cause Human Brain Cancer? The latter indicated that aspartame or its metabolites 'might activate one or more oncogenes that potentate or initiate cell mitosis, either by direct or indirect effects.'
"The failure of the FDA to acknowledge and act on the ongoing revelations over the last two decades about the hazards of aspartame products in a number of realms, especially when taken by children and pregnant women, remains a source of professional embarrassment. This chemical constitutes an imminent public health hazard. I congratulate Dr. Soffritti for independently underscoring this warning."
Neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock remarked on Dr. Soffritti's first study:
"The study released in the European Journal of oncology by Morando Soffritti and co-workers should terrify mothers and all those consuming aspartame sweetened products. This was a carefully done study, which clearly demonstrated a statistically significant increase in several types of lymphomas and leukemias in rats. Both of these malignancies have increased significantly in this country since the widespread use of aspartame.