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Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

theguardian.com

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Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#321

Post by emodendroket »

adrr wrote: post #237
abe_duarte wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who have been exposed to the chemical got cancer. Internal Monsanto documents show the link and their concern. A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr...

There’s more than glyphosate in roundup. Also if glyphosate increased the risk of cancer, we would see cancer increase when it started to get widely used. Cancer rates except for skin cancer keep falling.

As far as I can tell the lawsuits they've lost have concerned non-Hodgkin's lymphoma where the picture looks a bit more mixed. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/nhl.html

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#322

Post by CharlesW »

pfdietz wrote: post #20
CharlesW wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come? Is it not true that ~0.75% of Americans have celiac disease? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease

How can that be relevant? I mean, this is just the grossest of correlations "Americans have X, and are also exposed to Y, therefore Y causes X"? If anything, it means actually establishing a causal relationship (assuming one existed) would be difficult because the background rate of this disease is so high.

I was responding to the parent commenter’s claim that “gluten intolerance” (quotes theirs) was a “strong warning sign of woo”.

We know that environmental factors contribute to the development of celiac disease, so we should understand the degree to which glyphosate may be one of those.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#323

Post by zelphirkalt »

pumnikol wrote: post #309

I've been in the field for many years and I see the EU on the forefront of public chemical safety, both in terms of legislation and enforcement. ECHA is transparent about glyphosate [1]. It is not even labelled as CMR on REACH Annex III [2], and that's saying a lot. If you follow the developments, you will find that there is no way to prove a chemical as "safe". All it takes is one bloke on record to develop any heal…

However, there are people in the EU, who prolonged glyphosat usage for another few years, against the principles of the EU to only allow proven safe products.

And they are still pushing CETA, which supposedly weakens standards for food and gives companies more rights to sue countries, when new protective laws are made.

EU does many good things, but is far from always being on the lookout for the wellbeing of its people.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#324

Post by jiggywiggy »

voakbasda wrote: post #132
jiggywiggy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways that don't require that much more effort. For instance plastic covering the field will clean up a field. But that's a tiny bit more work then just spraying and poisoning everything. Of course the GMO crops that are bred to be glysophate resistant are even more convenient

That’s not a tiny amount of work. We are talking about hundreds and thousands of acres. That is not feasible for covering with plastic.

There is no healthy way to long-term grow thousands and thousands of acres with a monocrop. You have to chemically spray everything to death and chemically try to uplift the soil, but it's just not sustainable over a few decades. And completely unhealthy both for the farmers and consumers. The bottom line is only better off if you ignore all the societal and long-term costs.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#325

Post by noirbot »

emodendroket wrote: post #317
gruez wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr ... You seem to be presenting this fact as some sort of that bayer is guilty, but it's not really convincing. For one, it's a 8 person jury in san francisco. I'd expect them to rule against bayer on ideological grounds (ie. little guy vs multi bililon dollar…

If the jurors all just ruled against Bayer "on ideological grounds" then their counsel was asleep at the wheel.

Perhaps, but there's also a reason most lawyers do their best to make sure their case is heard in a favorable jurisdiction. You can only strike so many jurors for something as banal as "doesn't like large multinational corporations", which it's not obvious that would entirely bias them.

It's not to say that every juror walked in already decided on it, but I'd somewhat expect a panel of urban CA citizens to be at least 60/40 in favor of a person against a big corp, and so if the evidence is already somewhat in that direction, then that's how it goes.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#326

Post by Supermancho »

Retric wrote: post #295
Supermancho wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's implied that @21000BC, they were pulling weeds by hand. Weed killing is part of cultivation. No offense, but you seem completely out of touch with reality, on this topic. I'm not sure you can make a compelling argument without experiencing the simple world of gardening. https://imgur.com/a/Bly85h8 - these are 2 weeds that have taken over and killed a simple flowering plant from our yard. You can see there are 2…

That’s a logical assumption without direct archaeological support. Remember we started with wild plants so a significant energy investments beyond throwing seeds may simply have been wasted effort because it’s less needed and has lower rewards. Further removing competitors is a non obvious behavor. The benefits of a possible harvest increased after destination so the time lag between just tossing seeds and active far…

> That’s a logical assumption without direct archaeological support.

It's what people do without any training. It's not necessary to have archaeological support for instinctive behavior. There's no archaeological support people swatted at flies during that time period. Again, this is rather pointless when you're arguing that early man was less capable than a child. GL with whatever.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#327

Post by slowking2 »

IncRnd wrote: post #117
slowking2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safer depends how much cow manure is eaten vs how much glyphosate. Although cow manure also has various microorganisms in it so if you got really unlucky with the wrong type of even one of those in the manure a little bit of shit could make you very sick (edit: as you point out, but my point is eating more shit exposes you to more of these on average). Don’t eat shit or drink 1000x or 1000000x doses of something that…

That's the point, though. From the article, the urine of 80% of the people was laced with glyphosate. It's not about a single ingestion but about it building up in the body.

Dose dependence is still a thing for long term exposure. There’s a lot of crap in urine. Knowing someone is pissing something doesn’t mean it’s toxic. We already know they’re exposed because they eat it. There is very little new information gained just by knowing people urinate it. You’d need to know how much of it they urinate compared to the amount they are exposed to and for how long to start figuring out if there is a long term build up. And even if there was no long term build up it may or may not be long term toxic. Like drinking alcohol. There is no long term build up of ethanol in the body but long term consumption of enough alcohol is still dangerous.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#328

Post by zzzeek »

omginternets wrote: post #315
dredmorbius wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a civil lawsuit, the actual legal standard is "preponderance of evidence". Factor that by cost of defending the case and potential risk of payout in that and future cases as well. A multimillion dollar settlement suggests some doubt on the part of the defendant to establish their case.

I was speaking scientifically.

i was speaking legally

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#329

Post by unclenoriega »

brokenodometer wrote: post #244
harles wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think organic is great. I just wish we didn’t put non-GMO in the same bucket. Give me GMO foods without pesticides.

That would be counterproductive. GMO crops have a lower yield than non-GMOs without the application of pesticides. https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/can-genetic-engin...

The linked article says that GMO crops produce higher yields and use less pesticides than non-GMO crops.

Re: Weedkiller ingredient tied to cancer found in 80% of US urine samples

#330

Post by dodgerdan »

IncRnd wrote: post #219
dodgerdan wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me an example of that where the payment was over $1bn.

It took me less than 10 seconds to find. "Companies Finalize $26 Billion Deal With States and Cities to End Opioid Lawsuits" [1] "Judge approves $1 billion settlement for victims of deadly Florida condo collapse" [2] "39 State Attorneys General Announce $1.85 Billion Settlement with Student Loan Servicer Navient" [3] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/health/opioids-settlement... [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/…

In each case you’ve listed the companies are clearly guilty. You’re proving my point for me.
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