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Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

nytimes.com

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Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#161

Post by arethuza »

cies wrote: post #98
sametmax wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France we had this wonderful scandal about donated blood that was provided by aids infected patients... but declared safe. It's been used to make transfusion to other people that were already plagued with hemophilia, so that they could really enjoy the benefit of having both diseases at the same time. I'm wondering what will be the next stuff like that. Will we learn in 30 years that milk is actually unhealthy and…

> Will we learn in 30 years that milk is actually unhealthy I do not know if you are joking, but we know for some time now that regular consumption of dairy as an adult human increases risk for many health complications. (similarly evidence builds up against meat and eggs for some time now) http://nutritionstudies.org/12-frightening-facts-milk/ http://www.peta.org/living/food/reasons-stop-drinking-milk/ http://www.pc…

On the other hand, the BBC were running this story yesterday about the risks of a low dairy diet for young people:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39557687

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#163

Post by nthcolumn »

Roundup usage has been so ubiquitous for decades now so this is very worrying. I am much more concerned with Monsanto's GM food patents/diminishing biodiversity/pollution threat than this. I have no issue with GM science btw. NONE. (re:'GMO safety /mutant food nonsense') I wonder if this is a sly segway from Monsanto. Given a choice between Monsanto Roundup everywhere and Monsanto GM everywhere I'll take the former.

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#164

Post by epistasis »

malandrew wrote: post #119
sametmax wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a recent trend in many niche (but maybe somehow influential ?) social networks like HN or some subreddits. Controversial big players are having more and more supportive comments, despite previously being famous for dubious proven activities. It wasn't like that at the beginning. I tend to put my tinfoil hat on when I think about what could have caused it.

I chalk it up to the fact that Silicon Valley companies have now reached the scale where they have reached the same level of public scrutiny and manufactured disdain by the media. I worked at a tech company in the valley that has gotten a lot of negative attention. Some criticism was deserved but a lot of stuff was blown completely out of proportion to the point where people believed outright falsehoods and these peo…

This is exactly it, for me. Having grown up in farm country, I know that Monsanto is just one of many similar players in the game, yet only Monsanto gets the criticism. Apple bore the brunt of media narratives on Chinese working conditions, but a small amount of poking shows a whole host of tech companies with identical or worse practices.

It's a symbol of an entire industry, and the disconnect between the media narrative and the reality is large.

People are uncomfortable with how little they know about their food sources, just as they are uncomfortable about how technology is changing their lives. This sells a good story. There's some truth to parts of the narrative, but at the end of the day if there's a bunch of articles on that narrative, the most accurate one is not likely to be the most read, the most read will be the one with the largest reach by its headline hook and the one that prompts people to share it the most.

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#165

Post by DanBC »

sametmax wrote: post #84
alevskaya wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many conflicts of interest in the world - organic farming is an industry too. e.g. at least one of those 14 experts is an active member of the organic industry and has long had a beef with the GMO industry: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/glp-facts/charles-ben... As to the science: the original highly-questionable IARC determination has since been contested by both the European Chemical Agency and th…

Ockham's razor reasoning is that a gigantic profit driven structure with a huge lobbying activity, and high financial stakes should probably not be trusted with making the right choice between their business and our health. History tells it didn't work very well for us when the big guys said tobacco, asbestos, the Chernobyl cloud and PCBs were all safe and good. Given Monsanto's pretty poor moral track record (improp…

> terminator seeds

Monsanto has a legitimate tricky choice here.

One lobby group was very concerned about cross contamination, about GM seed escaping from GM farms and getting to other places.

Terminator genes help fix that.

And sterile crop isn't new thing from GM, it's common for hybrid crops to do this too.

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#166

Post by lambdadmitry »

shriphani wrote: post #82
alevskaya wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many conflicts of interest in the world - organic farming is an industry too. e.g. at least one of those 14 experts is an active member of the organic industry and has long had a beef with the GMO industry: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/glp-facts/charles-ben... As to the science: the original highly-questionable IARC determination has since been contested by both the European Chemical Agency and th…

As Nicholas Taleb put it - stuff that is natural is time-tested. Food we've grown + consumed has a multi-millennium history of being safe to consume. The burden of proof is on the synthetic. And health issues can materialize with a time gap of a decade or so - essentially you can ruin a couple of generations with a mistake you didn't catch in time. It doesn't help when those who have to prove their validity have to r…

>stuff that is natural is time-tested

Unfortunately "time" doesn't test for cancerogenicity, as laypeople are terrible at inferring causality that may span months or years. Case in point [1]: several "herbal remedies" used in China for hundreds of years are linked to kidney failure and kidney cancer.

We don't know if something is dangerous until we deliberately and scientifically test it. Given that "non-natural" stuff (e.g. GMO) is thoroughly tested, I would expect that it's way safer than "natural" one that was never really tested.

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/1343598/Chinese-herb-...

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#167

Post by Elrac »

slazaro wrote: post #120
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also be interested in Science-Based Medicine [1], another blog where Steven Novella posts. [1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ (in case you're wondering about the name: in a nutshell, "science-based medicine" is the position that "evidence-based medicine" is an insufficient rejection of quackery because it leads to a lot of effort being misspent on finding "evidence" to support scientifically implausible…

> (in case you're wondering about the name: in a nutshell, "science-based medicine" is the position that "evidence-based medicine" is an insufficient rejection of quackery because it leads to a lot of effort being misspent on finding "evidence" to support scientifically implausible and already-debunked treatments and theories) Sorry if this is a common objection, but my first reaction to this is, there's lots of peop…

Related topic: In the eternal and tiresome dispute between religious Creationists and modern science, a favorite talking point is that "it's only a theory!" As a result, some science-minded people are proposing that scientists adopt a different word to substitute for the "tainted" word "theory," whose colloquial meaning differs from that in a professional scientific context.

Me, I think this is a terrible idea. I fiercely resist having my (or anyone's) use of vocabulary directed to accommodate ignorant people. I can see only losing battles in that direction.

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#168

Post by sametmax »

jpttsn wrote: post #154
adsfqwop wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fail to account for the possibility of unknown unknowns, and again you're displaying biased cognitive dissonance. You can't determine generational toxicity from LD50 profiles. You are simplifying everything way too much. Glyphosate is an analog to glycine. You know, the building blocks for proteins. DuPont did a study in 2007 that shows glyphosate is integrating in protein structures. Does that not worry you? Gly…

If only people remembered to check for unknown unknowns.

That would be ideal, but it's hard to see what you can't see, right ?

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#169

Post by sametmax »

alevskaya wrote: post #134
sametmax wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing against the science, I'm arguing against the people. E.G: I think GMO have a fantastic potential. It's a powerful technology. And like any powerful technology, it has a huge potential of destruction as well. And I don't trust the people making money with it to take the necessary precautions to avoid a catastrophy. There are so many past and present events where money won over the benefit of the human…

You don't need to convince me of the potential malfeasance of US corporate interests - I grew up in West Virginia, a state that's more or less been run by the coal industry for a century. :) We should always remain vigilant of unappreciated risks, both health and ecological, from existing practices and chemicals. However, scientific studies are not cheap. In a world with an endless supply of serious problems, we have…

Monsanto is not running out of money any time soon. We can always tax it specifically to finance more research. They want to play with dangerous techs ? Ok, well it's going to be long and expensive. And again and again and again. Any other way would be foolish.

Re: Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents

#170

Post by baldfat »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #135
arthurfm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is actually another option -- especially with respect to herbicides: manual labour. Wouldn't organic herbicides containing Nonanoic (Pelargonic) acid [1], vinegar [2] or salt [3] also be options? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonanoic_acid [2] http://weedicide.co.uk/does-vinegar-kill-weeds/ [3] http://weedicide.co.uk/salt-kill-weeds-herbicide/

I've personally looked into some of these things, and have read quite a few warnings about both salt and vinegar. Improperly used, they can ruin the soil and render it barren. I'm not sure of the truth of this, but it was enough to make me just use manual labor at home (in other words, my garden was half weeds since I rarely did it). The larger the scale of application, however, the worse they seem to perform. [1] Sa…

> Just because things are natural or traditional doesn't make them necessarily better than the chemicals we are dealing with now

a) cyanide is 100% natural so is snake venom so is that better then you?

b) Everything is a chemical. Salt is Sodium chloride (NaCl) has it certainly does destroy the soil. If you don't like someone try dumping some salt into their garden. https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/plant-problems/environmenta...

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