Monsanto Weedkiller Is ‘Probably Carcinogenic,’ WHO Says | Hacker News Reader

Monsanto Weedkiller Is ‘Probably Carcinogenic,’ WHO Says

bloomberg.com

157 pointswalterbell116 comments

I know that its hard for someone to understand who doesn't work with farm chemicals on a regular basis but Roundup is on the low side in terms of toxicity.

Here's a copy of a Material Safety Data Sheet that all those who handle herbicides need to maintain for employee access:

http://greenhouse.ucdavis.edu/pest/pmsds/Roundup.PDF

Almost anything is toxic, even salt, if the dose is high enough. The question that must be answered is if there is a realistic chance that people in contact with the herbicide can receive a high enough dose to raise the chance of cancer. Or that the average person either living in the country or consuming the food has an increased risk.

It's becoming increasingly common for states to take blood tests at the beginning and ending of the season of commercial pesticide applicators to monitor them.

If anyone was to have an increased level of ill health this group, because of the sheer volume of material that they handle, would be the first to show it.

We are not talking about toxicity, but about carcinogen products. Very different.

Carbon monoxide is toxic. If I breath it while walking a previously fired forest, I feel bad today. If I breath too much I die. But if I get out alive tomorrow my body will be fine.

Carcinogen work in totally different ways. If I contact or breath it I will feel fine today but I will have created damage to some of my cells DNA. This damage will create other damages when 5 years from no my cells transcribe some genes in a chain reaction, or will accumulate errors over time.

Five years from now one of the damaged cells will start replicating itself without control, and I will get cancer.

We get cancer by indirect ways, and delayed in time, on people that are not isolated so it is hard to get the cause effect relationship.

I worked in a Hospital for some time. On oncology got people that smoke 3-4 cigarettes packages a day that got pulmonary cancer, but they were seriously convinced that smoking had nothing to do with it.

It took decades to establish a relationship between smoking and cancer, and that was with half of the population smoking. With smaller populations it becomes harder and harder.

Most people cook with oil at too high a temperature, causing it to smoke and develop carcinogenic compounds, regularly, over decades. There are many examples of this in our lives (ultravilot sunlight, cosmic radiation on intercontinental flights, radon rich basement bedrooms, etc), the point being that carcinogens and cancer are more complex than you suggest. Yes smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day for decades increases one's risk for cancer, but so does just living to an old age as a non-smoker.

I remember reading a study of cadavers that found everyone has microscopic cancers throughout their bodies, throughout their lives. It seems there's a dance between evironments that drive the proliferation of micro-cancers and our body's ability to repair this damage.

To make things even more complex, with ultra-violet for sure but possibly involving other forms of radiation as well, it is possible that small amounts of exposure actually produce a preventative effect in regards to cancer. With UV, that mechanism is the production of vitamin D in the body, a lack of which causes a wide variety of health issues and may have a link to the development of cancer.

This panel by the Mars Society actually had a very interesting discussion of this area of human health that deserves much more study. https://youtu.be/sFHQlobJbwY

There is evidence for and debate surrouding hormesis, a positive biological response to a little bit of something deadly at higher doses e.g. low-dose radiation. [1] [2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

>With UV, that mechanism is the production of vitamin D in the body, a lack of which causes a wide variety of health issues and may have a link to the development of cancer.

I imagine that vitamin D production and DNA damage are separate events. Presumably, both can occur at the same time.

So would someone who took vitamin D supplements but didn't get sun exposure be slightly less likely to develop cancer than someone who got just enough sunlight for their body to produce enough vitamin D?

If that's the case, it's not really a general rule that small exposures to carcinogens prevent cancer.

I've just recently seen work that's exploring vitamin D suplimation vs. sunlight derived vitamin D and they're finding the sunlight provides more benefit than no sunlight exposure and Vitamin D suplimation.

FWIW, I have a friend with a form of skin cancer who got orders from his doctor to go to a tanning salon.

We know that sunshine is carcinogenic.

Is a farm worker more likely to contract cancer from the 8 hours/day exposure to sunshine, or to glyphosate?

I personally have no idea, but I think it would be an interesting measure.

I can't edit my post above, but here is the International Agency for Research on Cancer list of "known" carcinogens (group 1, including "solar radiation") and "probable" carcinogens (group 2A, including glyphosate).

http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Classification/Classifications...

Difficult to test. What if some workers are chronicly sleep deprived and that contribution was the tipping point for some of them, but not all sleep deprived workers? What if some workers are chronicly anxious, causing sustained elevated stress hormones that combined with other factors put them over the tipping point? So many possible confounding variables

Er, why? The choice isn't between sunlight and no glyphosphate and glyphosphate and no sunshine, so there is no real reason to compare them except to make irrelevant propaganda points.

> Almost anything is toxic, even salt, if the dose is high enough.

That is tremendously misleading. You body needs salt to function. Your body does not need, and has no use for glyphosate. There is no beneficial dose. If it's harmful, an incredibly minute amount can be materially harmful.

Moreover there are at least two ways to get a significant number of people developing diagnosed cancers from chemical exposure: A small population (ag workers) and a large dose, or a small dose and a large population - the rest of us.

Whats your point? That the WHO are scare-mongering? That Monsanto shouldn't be held accountable for knowingly marketing a poisonous, carcinogenic substance and profiting from it in the billions?

The acetaminophen in Tylenol ( a common over the counter pain and fever medication used by millions of children and adults every day ) is carcinogenic and hepatotoxic.

" There are, however, published data giving clear evidence that paracetamol causes chromosomal damage in vitro in mammalian cells at high concentrations and indicating that similar effects occur in vivo at high dosages. Available data point to three possible mechanisms of paracetamol-induced genotoxicity: (1) inhibition of ribonucleotide reductase; (2) increase in cytosolic and intranuclear Ca2+ levels; (3) DNA damage caused by NAPQI after glutathione depletion. "

"Paracetamol induced sister chromatid exchange in human cells in vivo, and it was aneugenic and induced chromosomal aberrations but not micronuclei in mammalian cells in vivo. It induced DNA single-strand breaks in mice treated in vivo. Paracetamol induced sister chromatid exchange and chromosomal aberrations in human cells in vitro. It weakly induced cell transformation in a mouse cell line. It induced chromosomal aberrations, micronuclei and sister chromatid exchange in mammalian cells in vitro. It did not induce gene mutation, and the results of tests in mammalian cells in vitro for unscheduled DNA synthesis and DNA damage were inconclusive. Overall, paracetamol was genotoxic in mammalian cells in vivo and in vitro. It was not mutagenic to insects but was clastogenic in plant cells."

And here is an entry from the NIH TOXNET database about liver and bladder cancers induced by tylenol.

http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cpdb/chempages/ACETAMINOPHEN.html

Everything including water is toxic under the right conditions.

This is such a stupid, misleading and criminal way to put things up. The world is toxic. You can die by crossing the path of a car. You can die by drowning. You can die by ingesting meat until you choke.

But why would you do that? There is a name to it. It's called suicide.

Accepting to use and eat toxic products when other possibilities exist is a form of suicide - even if it's collective.

Water, drank too much, too fast, can kill you.

The dose makes the poison.

Not a very good example. There's a pretty good argument Tylenol is too dangerous to be an OTC drug. There are no Tylenol cancer cases because they all died of liver failure.

The leading cause of overdose and acute liver failure in America is from Tylenol (APAP).

There is good reason that many prescription pain-medication formulations are switching from acetaminophen to different NSAIDs.

There is no justification for doling out acetaminophen when safer options exist.

Oh, well then, no need to worry about this at all .. everything is toxic in the right numbers, so there's no wrong-doing here in the slightest and we shouldn't stop big companies from polluting the planet, because .. after all .. its already all polluted.

What a ludicrous position.

This was obviously not the stated position, and you are being deliberately disingenuous by portraying it as such.

"It's the dose that makes the poison" - that's a fairly accurate statement. Every industry uses chemicals that are potentially harmful, and we accept that as a trade-off for the benefits they offer.

The same applies to RoundUp. Is the benefit it offers to agriculture worth the risk? Can exposure be controlled in such a way that the risk is ameliorated? There's a cost-benefit analysis to be performed there.

Point is, stating that RoundUp is possibly carcinogenic is useful information – but it doesn't mean its better to immediately stop use of it. It also doesn't mean that Monsanto "knowingly market[ed] a poisonous, carcinogenic substance", as you stated. It does mean that use of the substance may potentially need to be re-evaluated, but preposterous jumping to conclusion of the sort you exhibited is what's killing political debate worldwide.

I'm not sure that was the point. The word "carcinogenic" has lost some of its impact when we learned over time that nearly everything is carcinogenic. We need to know a degree and likelihood and manner of action to really know what that means. You can be cynical about big companies, but this sort of health research is full of inaccuracies as well.

Exactly. Especially since it's apples and oranges.

Water is not optional. Without it you die. Roundup is optional. Without it the world can still grow crops (we SOMEHOW have for thousands of generations). Dumping many many tons off chemicals designed to kill (however small the organism) all over our food and planet, let alone planting homogeneous, patented, and GM'd "basic" plants, is a recipe that likely isn't good for the planet over time.

>Without it the world can still grow crops (we SOMEHOW have for thousands of generations).

Historical yields were tiny compared to what we get from contemporary farms. I don't know if we need Roundup in particular, but if we went back to traditional farming methods half the world would starve.

There's no going back.

Actually there is no evidence of this, a good proportion of of the food produced is actually used to feed animals which is the most inefficient way to produce food.

Just by eating less meat (which makes sense because we are not supposed to eat so much meat), suddenly we don't need to product so much. The actual price of the food is so low currently that what you pay in a supermarket is mostly the externalities. Switching to cleaner methods would not lead to starvation providing that we would eat differently.

Most americans would happily choose cancer over vegetarianism. That part isn't Monsanto's fault. Source: I am a vegetarian who talks to omnivores and near-carnivores.

Yeah, that's the main problem I guess, the system is providing people what they want but not what they need. It works like any other market, the consumers want cheap meat so the industry is providing cheap meat. The whole industry is then shaped to solve the wrong problem. They don't even need to fully switch to vegetarianism for it to work but they need to understand that eating meat once in a while is healthier and more reasonable than having a diet based on eating meat every day.

What about when the population doubles, and then doubles again?

http://geneticliteracyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01...

That's very unlikely. The global population is probably going to peak mid-century and then go down.

Is it? Where do you see that trend?

http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/worldpopulat.gif

It's more about what we are willing to eat than what we grow, diets high in meat require lots of arable land and energy to create.

Everything is optional at some level.

You need to do a cost/benefit analysis, not reject methods that could cause any number of deaths ever.

Because all methods cause some number of deaths in some circumstances.

Numbers need context if you're going to make the right decision.

More like "just because it's done by someone you don't like, doesn't mean it's wrong". Blame Monsanto for the evil things they do (there's plenty), but not everything else.

Your argument is almost literally "Stalin believed 2+2=4, therefore 2+2 is 5".

I'm trying to provide a background because I have twenty plus years in the fertilizer business. I'm old enough that I remember when it was introduced.

I don't know WHO's agenda but I've seen enough cycles on both pesticides and GMO's when someone makes a provocative statement based on early research and are usually proven wrong.

That "usually proven wrong" argument works both sides. The point is this: there is evidence that glyphosates' are carcinogenic, and the WHO - whose job it is to report these things - is reporting it, based on a scientific and impartial process.

What's your point in attempting to refute this position, from the perspective of PR of Monsanto - who has a history of covering up its failed science in order to reap profits - with anecdotes and "good ol' boy farmer"-style arguments?

The ad-hominem attacks aren't necessary. I think this boils down to:

- has Monsanto been knowingly misleading about the toxicity of their products? If not, then this is a non-story.

- is this any worse than anything already sprayed on our food (or is it actually less toxic than the cocktail of herbicides used before Roundup?)

If you knew half the things sprayed on your crops you'd be appalled - but there are 7 billion people to feed and at least 300m of them expect their food to be exceedingly inexpensive (and look to the FDA to help define just how much toxic crap they can stomach before the trade-off is no longer worth it).

Side question. If I wanted to explain with studies to someone that GMO hate is unfounded, do you have a recommendation on a place to gather facts or recent studies on it?

I wrote a blog post defending GMOs awhile back, with examples of non-Monsanto GMOs that have saved papayas in Hawaii, promise to deliver food to Africa, and improve nutrition. The thing many people don't realize is that all food is GMO. There are no such things as tomatoes, peaches, apples, or corn in nature. These are all products of just a few thousand years of selective breeding. With GMOs, we are also constantly performing a massive ongoing experiment involving over 100 billion livestock animals, and livestock farmers have seen no deleterious effects in the health of their products:

http://ideonexus.com/2011/12/05/gmo-foods-and-the-promise-a-...

That's misleading definition of GMO. Genetically Modified Organisms is not the same as Gene Modified organisms. Gene modified organisms are made through selective breeding. Genetically Modified Organisms are made by splicing genes from other creatures.

The former means application of genetics, while second implies selective breeding.

I've honestly got nothing against GMO, and I know that GMO carries a stigma, but honestly, so do vaccines. I've got loads of problem with Monsanto, their business practices and Round-up but not too many problems with GMO as GMO.

Not necessarily other creatures, GMO technology is often used by selecting genes from same species.

The so-called "traditional" method of crop development, on the other hand, takes genes not just from other creatures but from totally random mutations, often induced by carcinogens and radiation, and then selected.

With GMOs we know much more about what has happened to the genome of the species.

By creatures I mean anything living. Bacteria, plant, animal, etc.

I think even regular GMO technology probably still is affected by radiation (cosmic radiation and sun) and breeding - I doubt every single grain of corn is genetically manufactured once you can just let it naturally breed.

Not to mention radiation is a great and cheap way to rid of some pests really fast, but tell that to any organic food lover and they'll get defensive.

There was a Forbes article[1] last year that linked to a number of studies. If you're looking for a less "journalistic" take and want to poke around with the data/studies yourself check out GENERA[2] (a database of peer reviewed GMO studies).

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2014/09/17/the-debate-...

[2] http://genera.biofortified.org/

Well begin by the website of Monsanto, lol.

Well, why not? There are first to know the good arguments for their solutions. You can start there and then go look for independent analysis and verification of the claims.

While we're at it, let's have BP teach us all why their oil spills and dumping of even more toxic chemicals into the ocean to cover those spills up are really no big deal.

Don't feed the trolls.

You must get really worked up about the companies that make X-ray machines.

From the actual study, rather than speculation and red-herrings: "One study in community residents reported increases in blood markers of chromosomal damage (micronuclei) after glyphosate formulations were sprayed nearby." [1]

[1, PDF] http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVol...

the fact that this is the top comment on HN for this link is absolutely disgusting.

And who has written this data sheet? This data sheet is based on whose data?

Look back a few decades on the data sheets of Asbestos or Thalidomide. Or at the research about how smoking is safe. I believe a WHO panel of independent researchers more than your sponsored data sheet.

This article (not the study) is total trash. Every other thing on this planet - from water to oxygen to sunlight to common cold[0] to turning a light on when you go pee at night[1] apparently causes cancer. People read bullshit like that, start being afraid of everything they interact with, and then newspapers are surprised we have anti-vaccine movements, or that the general population doesn't trust science at all.

If anything is a serious danger to humans here, it's not Roundup, it's reporting like this.

EDIT: because it seems not clear to some - "causing cancer" is not a binary thing. There are degrees, and types, and required exposure levels, etc., and not all types of cancer are actually dangerous. And all of this is more important than "oh welp, it's carcinogenic", yet none of it is even mentioned in the article.

[0] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-371451/Common-cold...

[1] - http://gawker.com/5515697/turning-on-the-light-to-pee-at-nig...

The reason this is important to discuss is that Roundup is out there, in massive quantities, and if it is determined that it can cause cancer in much higher rates than previously expected - then something must be done about it, because of the sheer magnitude of the market penetration of this product. If it is discovered that Roundup-poisoned regions have extraordinarily high rates of cancer - and this is yet to be determined - then there is indeed an industry- and culture- changing event on the horizon.

We don't get to that horizon unless we discuss the issues - so why are you attempting to thwart discussion of this issue by people who are intelligent enough to understand the science behind the conundrum?

I totally agree with you here. And the study done by WHO is a step in the right direction. I'm not objecting studying things - on the contrary, I'd be happy to see more studies about Roundup because, as you said, it's used with our food on a mass scale.

What I'm objecting is not quantifying the findings. Asbestos doesn't "cause cancer" the same way Roundup may or may not do, nor is it the same type of cancer. Bundling it all together is what I find harmful. Articles should give threat level.

>if it is determined that it can cause cancer in much higher rates than previously expected - then something must be done about it

Even that is going too far! "much higher rates than previously expected" could still be miniscule.

I want to discuss the issue. But a prerequisite is a risk ballpark. Anything before that is useless guesswork.

I suppose we could split off five different threads to discuss what to do in each risk bracket. But that seems terribly inefficient. There's no way to have a good unified discussion about "might exist somewhere in these eight orders of magnitude"

> something must be done!

There's a mentality that's never backfired.

Tangential, but that gawker article sure is being terrible about science. Turning on a light for an entire hour screws up circadian rhythms. That does not imply that 1-2 minutes of pee light does the same.

>If anything is a serious danger to humans here, it's not Roundup, it's reporting like this.

What exactly is so horrible about Bloomberg's reporting in this instance?

Did you even read the article? Half of it is essentially defending Roundup.

I did. It doesn't really defend or accuse Roundup, it just gives a bunch of quotes from both sides. And that's ok.

My issue is that there's no attempt at specifying the significance of the problem. Saying "it (maybe) causes cancer" doesn't say absolutely anything about how dangerous it actually is - both in absolute terms and relative to alternatives.

I think that "X causes cancer" articles should be considered harmful.

I get what you're saying. However, the article having a high degree of brevity isn't really cause to shoot the messenger in this case.

What was reported was factually correct. Bloomberg isn't obligated to provide in-depth context and analysis of the issue.

If people want to take interest in the underlying science, they can. If people want to be stupid and jump to conclusions to support whatever biased position they hold, they can do that too.

Either way, it's not the article's problem.

I disagree. The job of the press is - or should be - to inform people. It's not about "in-depth context and analysis"; what bundling everything under "causes cancer" does is provide negative information.

> If people want to be stupid and jump to conclusions to support whatever biased position they hold, they can do that too.

I understand that you can't be responsible for people being randomly stupid, but if the stupidity is systematic and predictable, then indeed it becomes your responsibilty if you know about it and play into it for profit.

>I understand that you can't be responsible for people being randomly stupid, but if the stupidity is systematic and predictable, then indeed it becomes your responsibilty if you know about it and play into it for profit.

Though I tend to agree, it's a bit of a stretch to conclude that an article, due to its brevity, was intentionally written that way for the sake of profit.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was written this way only because it's just how everyone writes such things these days (i.e. "it's cancer!!!1111") - but not having malicious intent doesn't change the fact it's harmful.

The value in awareness alone outweighs any supposed harm.

If the article didn't exist, the discussion about it on HN wouldn't either. Thus, some people would arguably be less informed as a result.

The first step to becoming informed on a topic is knowing it exists in the first place.

It is the article's problem. A ballpark range of the risk is necessary to even get close to understanding the issue. Reporting without that is worse than nothing. It leaves people further from informed than they previously were.

Imagine if we were talking about a tweet, and that tweet simply mentioned the existence of the WHO report in question. I highly doubt it would be subject to the same level of condemnation.

The article may as well be the journalistic equivalent of that. Its purpose isn't to provide an in-depth understanding of the issue, it's simply saying an event occurred that is notable.

People give different weight to tweets and articles, in a similar way they do to a HN comment and a blog post. In both cases, the former is less "official" than the latter. I agree that the line between these two types of responses can be blurred at times.

This interview about the topic (Glyphosate by Monsanto) is also quite telling:

http://m.canalplus.fr/?vid=1122650 (English with French subtitles)

Interviewee: It is completely safe and you could even drink it

Interviewer: We got a glass of it here, you want to drink some

Interviewee: No, of course not, I'm not an idiot and the interview is over now.

People can play that game:

Interviewee: It is completely safe to drink urine

Interviewer: I have some urine here, would you like to drink some?

It is clear the interviewer is there to make a spectacle, not to meaningfully inform the public of the facts.

Edit: Or...

Interviewee: It is completely safe to smoke cigarettes

Interviewer: I have a pack here, would you like to smoke one?

Interviewee: Sure

PROOF THAT CIGARETTES ARE SAFE!!!!

Yes, it's a good clip, I suggest watching it from the start to the very end and then making up your mind.

The interview was apparently supposed to be about the golden rice, which is a topic that is completely unrelated to Monsanto in any way at all.

Also, if I was in the shoes of the interviewee, I wouldn't drink it as well, even if I trusted it was completely safe for me - it probably doesn't taste well, and I don't feel like doing a show for a disrespectful jokester in front of me who thinks he's funny, and refuses to talk about the thing he was supposed to.

Moore tells the interviewer that one "could drink a whole quart of [Roundup]" without any harm. When Moore is offered a glass of the weedkiller, however, he refuses and says "I'm not stupid." - Why did he bring it up when he was not going to follow it through.

He might have expected a modicum of respect from the interviewer, and not a gimmick to "win" an argument.

Saying you are prepared to drink it is a gimmick. The same basic idea has been used a million times before for everything from asbestos to tobacco to coal dust to lead paint. Common enough for it to be parodied in a 25 year old episode of the Simpsons ("Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish").

Also Patrick Moore is a professional science denier. He doesn't deserve respect from anybody.

"can drink" and "prepared to drink" are different things.

Also I don't assume that random glasses of chemicals handed to me have been processed and handled in a food-grade manner.

Claiming you could drink a quarter of it implies you believe it is food grade. It's extreme my disingenuous to hypothesize that a Roundup bottle imparts more health hazard than the contents.

>Claiming you could drink a quarter of it implies you believe it is food grade.

This makes no sense. Chemicals aren't inherently food grade or not. I won't drink a non-food-grade quart of water either.

>It's extreme my disingenuous to hypothesize that a Roundup bottle imparts more health hazard than the contents.

You've heard of agent orange, right? It wasn't the herbicides that injured people, it was small quantities of potent contaminants.

It's not just the bottle, it's every container it's ever touched, every source for dirt or bad-to-ingest chemicals to get in that wouldn't bother plants at all.

Edit: And to be clear, this applies just fine to things that are human-safe in small doses or for farm use. Contamination by literal dirt is a great example of something fine to spray on plants and dumb to consume directly.

Really? Company representatives are obligated to drink glassfuls of foul chemicals to prove that reasonable doses are nontoxic?

Would you drink a glass of food coloring?

He is not even a company representative! He's some random environmentalist who wanted to talk about golden rice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore_%28environmentali...

It's sickening what passes on as journalism today.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Patrick_Moore

Patrick Moore is an ecologist who denies that humans cause climate change, and a corporate consultant through his firm Greenspirit Strategies. Moore has consulted for the Nuclear Energy Institute, and the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition. He has worked for the mining industry, the logging industry, PVC manufacturers, the nuclear industry and has worked in defense of biotechnology.

Although Moore was once (1981, 1986) a leading figure with Greenpeace Canada and subsequently with Greenpeace International, in 2008 Greenpeace issued a statement distancing itself from Moore, saying he "exploits long gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson, usually taking positions that Greenpeace opposes." [1]

Environmentalist is hardly the word I'd use to describe Patrick Moore. Professional contrarian, science denier and industry shill would be more accurate. He is certainly not some 'random environmentalist'.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patrick_Moore

It is somewhat telling how certain people on HN all of the sudden start defending Moore...

Did anyone defend his opinions? Insulting the journalist is not defending Moore. Using the title from his wikipedia page when calling him "some random" is not defending him either.

I think you're seeing what you want to see...

In his defence, it's probably not at all nice to drink

Is there a link between the WHO classification and California food labels, as claimed by http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/03/2... ?

Indeed, the IARC’s classification of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen is more significant than you may realize. IARC is one of the five research agencies from which the OEHHA—which is the California agency of environmental hazards—gets its reports to declare carcinogens under Prop 65. What this means is that in a few years’ time, foods containing glyphosate will have to have a Prop 65 Warning label to be sold in California. While it will take time, that process is now in motion with the IARC classifying glyphosate as a Class 2 carcinogen.

I found this NPR article to be a bit more informative: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/03/24/394912399/a-top-...

The report's a bit light on details. All sorts of things can cause cancer in lab animals if you give them enough. It's more a question of what concentration.

And if the human exposure studies are that bad I wonder why there's not been much fuss since they were published in 2001.

The monograph this re-classification is based on is not yet published.

It's a fanciful smear to suggest that the billions of dollars at stake play a role here, isn't it? What a ridiculous idea!

http://www.gmwatch.org/gm-firms/10595-monsanto-a-history

It's not a matter of if something is carcinogenic, but how carcinogenic, at what dose and under which circumstances. The article doesn't go into details about whether it'd be carcinogenic at the levels you can get in food.

I encourage anyone who wants to know more about glyphosate to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqWwhggnbyw

Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab (BS in Biophysics, MS & EE in Electrical Engineering, PHD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and she has done research suggesting glyphosate is responsible for a whole host of human health issues due to broad spectrum effects on our gut microbes.

Glyphosate doesn't affect any human systems as many may point out, but according to Seneff it does kill a lot of our gut bacteria, and I've seen a lot of articles suggesting how important our gut bacteria are to our health. Seneff suggests that gut bacteria effects are only seen at around the 4 month or later mark in humans, but says every official study has been 3 months or less because they only examined it for toxicity.

There are a lot of take down articles claiming she is a quack, but none I've seen that really call into question the science of what she claims. Most take down articles accuse her of working too far outside her field, as if her BS in biophysics followed by her several advanced degrees shows her unable to gather research in biology. Some people think her claims about autism and glyphosate prove she is not worth listening to, but I disagree that a scientist who does original research should be broadly ignored because a subset of their claims are hard to swallow. Even if the autism connection is false, there are many other issues.

She points out that glyphosate use has grown exponentially in the last 15 years since it went out of patent, and runoff from glyphosate (which kills plants) is causing real harm to our ecosystems. She also says they have new harvest techniques where they just spray the poison on wheat crops before harvest. It kills the wheat but I guess makes harvest easier. So if her claims are correct, your food could have been directly sprayed with this stuff right before it was taken from the farm to the factory. She then points out that until recently no studies of glyphosate occurrence in food have been done, nor had any studies of glyphosate in humans been done. A recent study found something like a third of european food and a fifth of europeans to have measurable levels of glyphosate in their urine.

So there's this chemical that everyone swears up and down is SO SAFE that we don't even need to study it. Meanwhile we have a clearly brilliant woman who makes a compelling case that spraying this stuff left, right and center on our food may be a bad idea.

I do not think the people who say "we shouldn't look into it" have a leg to stand on. Seneff may not be right, but the ONLY way to know is to examine her claims and prove or disprove them. We should examine the data she presents in the youtube talk linked above and try to see if her claims hold water.

If you disagree with me or know more than me, that's fine. I'm just sharing what I know. I'm not saying we shut down your farm, I'm just saying we should have the facts. Her talk has at least convinced me some facts are missing, including long term studies of glyphosate's effect on our gut microbes. If you can point me to a study of this, please do.

Quickly looking at her CSAIL page, I note 2 things about her glyphosate research:

(1) Her talks generally are not at scientific conferences.

(2) Her published articles are in "predatory open access journals". Since she is not stupid, I assume she is publishing this work there because she cannot publish in more respected journals.

The WHO is respected, it is relying on well-performed studies. If they say glyphosate is probably carcinogenic, I'll pay attention. Seneff is publishing in Omics and MDPI journals, which are viewed as publication mills by the community. It appears the community has examined her claims and rejected her from being publishing them anywhere respectable.

Good points, thanks for the rational assessment.

I still can't tell if her claims don't hold water (specifically, that glyphosate materially harms gut microbes), but your observations do show she has been shunned by the scientific establishment. I'm no conspiracy theorist there, so that does lend credibility to the idea that she's making an error somewhere.

I would love to see a specific debunking of her claims that didn't cop out and say "glyphosate has already been proven safe, DUH" or attack her personally.

But your observations are good food for thought, thanks.

Here is a better source for the hypothesis and evidence: Glyphosate probably causes cancer, says WHO + Lancet paper. [1]

Yes, Glyphosate happens to be an ingredient in Roundup, which happens to be manufactured by Monsanto. Neither are the primary subject of the scientific hypothesis.

[1, PDF] http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVol...

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization, has assessed the carcinogenicity of five organophosphate pesticides. Here is the key finding for glyphosate:

For the herbicide glyphosate, there was limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The evidence in humans is from studies of exposures, mostly agricultural, in the USA, Canada, and Sweden published since 2001. In addition, there is convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals. On the basis of tumours in mice, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) originally classified glyphosate as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group C) in 1985. After a re-evaluation of that mouse study, the US EPA changed its classification to evidence of non-carcinogenicity in humans (Group E) in 1991. The US EPA Scientific Advisory Panel noted that the re-evaluated glyphosate results were still significant using two statistical tests recommended in the IARC Preamble. The IARC Working Group that conducted the evaluation considered the significant findings from the US EPA report and several more recent positive results in concluding that there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals. Glyphosate also caused DNA and chromosomal damage in human cells, although it gave negative results in tests using bacteria. One study in community residents reported increases in blood markers of chromosomal damage (micronuclei) after glyphosate formulations were sprayed nearby.

Bet you $1000 that some of the commenters here work for Monsanto. :)

Bet $2000 that you're right :)

Waiting for the pro-GMO crowd to come forward calling all this "anti-science"...

The report isn't claiming GMO is carcinogenic, it's claiming glyphosate is, that's a big difference.

If the roundup crops had been created by breeding or grafting, would you say "I can't wait until the pro-grafting crowd comes forward calling all this "anti-science"

GMO is a technique for modifying plant genomes, Roundup Ready is an application of the technique to make crops resistant to an herbicide. It's overuse of the herbicide that's the problem here.

Traditional plant breeding techniques have successfully been used to breed herbicide resistant crops without GMO now, meaning that you could have the same allegedly carcinogenic cocktail of chemicals sprayed on your non-GMO crops.

What do you want to hear?

Does Roundup "cause cancer"? Well, probably. You know what else causes cancer? Water. Oxygen. Sunrays. Coffee (on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; according to the news, it cures cancer on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday). It all depends on exposure.

And yes, I'm willing to bet that all that "organic-certified" nasty crap people dump on their crops is even worse than Roundup.

Study itself may be fine (I haven't read it), but the article is total junk. If you were to believe this kind of reporting, then every goddamn thing around you will give you cancer for sure. And yes, a lot of people believe that, and then they go all kinds of crazy (from unsolicited food advice - "Hey, why would you drink that?! Don't you know it causes cancer?!" to anti-vaccine movements).

Yeah, and I can't get rid of water, but I can get rid of Roundup :D

GMOs have very little to do with weed killers.

Well not when it comes to Round-up Ready. It's Roundup Resistant GMO + Roundup = we kill everything in the field except the crops.

Well, BASF sells an herbicide resistant rice + herbicide combo developed using completely natural breeding techniques:

http://agproducts.basf.us/news-room/press-releases/current-p...

Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" crops are not the only place roundup (glyphosate) is used.

If engineering herbicide resistance into plants is such a bad thing, what's your alternative? Do you want to return to the methods we used before we discovered modern genetics?

Monsanto has done some nasty things in the modern era, but their genetics (including their "Roundup Ready" products) are not one of them. If you want to complain about Monsanto, I suggest starting with the changes that Romney (Bain & Company) made to the companies business practices.

Your first comment seems to suggest that people who are pro-GMOs will be going against these findings. GMOs and weed killers are two parts of Monsanto's business model, but as far as the science behind the two goes there is virtually nothing in common.

.. except the marketing of Roundup as safe to use only in combination with other GMO products from Monsanto, that is.

The entire point of roundup is that you use a GMO that has been modified to make it resistant to the weedkiller. In theory this allows you to use less weedkiller earlier in the growing cycle.

You got that around backwards. The entire point of certain GMOs is to enable roundup to be used to kill weeds in the crop without affecting the crop itself. Ie Roundup-ready Cotton (and other Roundup-ready crops that are grown in the US - My family grows Roundup-ready cotton and it has been awesome in terms of improving productivity)

You can't use weedkiller at all in the growing cycle unless you modify the organism against it.

Depends on how you define "cycle" though. It's quite possible to use Roundup on the ground to first kill the weeds, then wait some time for the glyphosate to disintegrate, then plant the crop. Or just use weedkiller on areas outside the planted crop, in order to stop weeds from spreading from outside.

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