What's the story on Roundup

[Jimmy]

I don't use it very often, but occasionally a bad patch gets a dose. Not on my veg beds usually paths etc.

So this chap that apparently got cancer. Was he using it every day and spraying whole areas commercially?

Does a once a year dose with a can or squirt from a sprayer pose a problem ?

Anyone know?
Thanks
Jimmy

[Aberdeenplotter]

Jimmy. Glyphosate has long been a source of debate with conflicting views. I used it regularly at work (jobbing gardener) and I have used it on my allotment to deal with nettles docks and thistles(the type that spread by the root). It's extremely effective and I rely on the advice given by those that are supposed to know. It's never been proven to cause cancer which I think is important and as far as I understand, the court case in America was decided by a jury influenced by argument and not by fact.

I also understand that Monsanta are to appeal. It will be interesting to see the final outcome but whatever that is, I'm sure the debate will go on.

[Jimmy]

But don't forget some scientists use the principal

1. Formulate your conclusion
2. Assemble the facts that fit
3. Reject all others
4. Take the money

Jimmy

[bikermike]

One case doesn't prove it is dangerous for all or at any set level. If it gets overturned it doesn't prove it's safe either.

Weedkiller kills stuff. it is going to be toxic on some level. You can't just politely ask weeds to fall over and die (or if you can get that to work, I'll pay your train fare to pop over).

It seems likely that if you are exposed to it, you have a risk.

My view, for what it's worth is that I don't use the stuff on my plot, and I buy food that is grown to organic standards to minimise my contact with it there. There's nothing that pernicious for the cost/benefit to make it worth it. I'm not sure it should be banned on principle (that's not to say it shouldn't be banned if proven harmful), but it's use should be limited to where it's needed.

[bikermike]

But don't forget some scientists use the principal

1. Formulate your conclusion
2. Assemble the facts that fit
3. Reject all others
4. Take the money

Jimmy

They tend to be the ones that fail under peer review (which is why it's so important)

[Martin H]

I hardly ever use herbicides, but I am not particularly concerned about using Roundup in a domestic setting. The active ingredient, glyphosate, works by disrupting the shikimic acid enzyme pathway - plants rely on it but the pathway does not exist in any animal above a bacterium. So it isn't going to hurt me or my cat, not directly. The other stuff in Roundup (surfectants etc) has been pretty comprehensively tested as well, so the guy who just won his court case was very unlucky to suffer such severe reactions from being regularly doused in it.

My only slight concern is whether glyphosate could damage our symbiotic gut bacteria, as some studies have suggested. But I'm sure if I'm careful, don't take a shower with the stuff and don't put it on my chips, I'll be fine.

Some uses of roundup by the agriculture industry are much more worrying, for example its use in conjunction with GM crops to obliterate all competing plants to the detriment of our already decimated insect community. The stuff ends up in our bread (in tiny doses). But that's another story.

[Greenleaves]

#6, think someone has been sniffing the chemicals he refers to

EDIT #6 was deleted by the user - its not Martin's post which has been renumbered!

[Jungle Jane]

It’s good this products been banned in some countries when you look into it. Glyphosate alone doesn’t do much damage to plants but when it’s mixed with other ingredients it makes the formulation much more toxic (Round up is 125 times more toxic than glyphosate alone) it makes neonicinoids more toxic because it disrupts the livers ability to detox it. Proper testing needs to be done on final formulations not just on each active ingredient singularly,I’ve added these two links from medical publications -

“In the short term, the strong herbicidal and toxic properties of its formulations were exerted by the POEA (a petroleum based oxidised molecule) formulant family alone. The toxic effects and endocrine disrupting properties of the formulations were mostly due to the formulants and not to G (glyphosate). In this work, we also identified by mass spectrometry the heavy metals arsenic, chromium, cobalt, lead and nickel, which are known to be toxic and endocrine disruptors, as contaminants in 22 pesticides, including 11 G-based ones. This could also explain some of the adverse effects of the pesticides. In in vivo chronic regulatory experiments that are used to establish the acceptable daily intakes of pesticides, G or other declared active ingredients in pesticides are assessed alone, without the formulants. Considering these new data, this assessment method appears insufficient to ensure safety.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29321978

“It may seem implausible that glyphosate could be toxic to humans, given the fact that government regulators appear nonchalant about steadily increasing residue limits, and that the levels in food and water are rarely monitored by government agencies, presumably due to lack of concern. However, a paper by Antoniou et al.[12] provided a scathing indictment of the European regulatory process regarding glyphosate's toxicity, focusing on potential teratogenic effects. They identified several key factors leading to a tendency to overlook potential toxic effects. These include using animal studies that are too short or have too few animals to achieve statistical significance, disregarding in vitro studies or studies with exposures that are higher than what is expected to be realistically present in food, and discarding studies that examine the effects of glyphosate formulations rather than pure glyphosate, even though formulations are a more realistic model of the natural setting and are often orders of magnitude more toxic than the active ingredient in pesticides.[189] Regulators also seemed unaware that chemicals that act as endocrine disruptors (such as glyphosate[108]) often have an inverted dose–response relationship, wherein very low doses can have more acute effects than higher doses. Teratogenic effects have been demonstrated in human cell lines.[212] An in vitro study showed that glyphosate in parts per trillion can induce human breast cancer cell proliferation.[289]

Adjuvants in pesticides are synergistically toxic with the active ingredient. Mesnage et al.[189] showed that Roundup® was 125 times more toxic than glyphosate by itself. These authors wrote: “Despite its relatively benign reputation, Roundup® was among the most toxic herbicides and insecticides tested.”[189]

The industry dictates that 3 months is a sufficiently long time to test for toxicity in rodent studies, and as a consequence none of the industry studies have run for longer than 3 months. The only study we are aware of that was a realistic assessment of the long-term effects of GM Roundup®-Ready corn and soy feed on mammals was the study by Séralini et al. that examined the effects on rats fed these foods for their entire life span.[261] This study showed increased risk to mammary tumors in females, as well as kidney and liver damage in the males, and a shortened lifespan in both females and males. These effects occurred both in response to Roundup and to the GM food alone. These effects only began to be apparent after 4 months.

There are multiple pathways by which glyphosate could lead to pathology.[248] A major consideration is that our gut bacteria do have the shikimate pathway, and that we depend upon this pathway in our gut bacteria as well as in plants to supply us with the essential aromatic amino acids, tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine. Methionine, an essential sulfur-containing amino acid, and glycine, are also negatively impacted by glyphosate. Furthermore, many other biologically active molecules, including serotonin, melatonin, melanin, epinephrine, dopamine, thyroid hormone, folate, coenzyme Q10, vitamin K, and vitamin E, depend on the shikimate pathway metabolites as precursors. Gut bacteria and plants use exclusively the shikimate pathway to produce these amino acids. In part because of shikimate pathway disruption, our gut bacteria are harmed by glyphosate, as evidenced by the fact that it has been patented as an antimicrobial agent.[298]

Metal chelation and inactivation of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes (which contain heme) play important roles in the adverse effects of glyphosate on humans. A recent study on rats showed that both males and females exposed to Roundup® had 50% reduction in hepatic CYP enzyme levels compared with controls.[156] CYP enzyme dysfunction impairs the liver's ability to detoxify xenobiotics.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4392553/

[Jimmy]

Yes I read they genetically modify crops to be immune to roundup.
Then the can spray the fields and the crops won't die but the weeds will.

None of this sounds good
1) Genetically modified food crops.
2) Spraying food crops.

If anyone ever tells you ..
I am a scientist, trust me it's safe.
On the fourth word you should be 20 paces away and accelerating fast!

Jimmy

[bikermike]

yeah, what have those pesky scientists ever done for us...?

It's not scientists you need to be worried about - there's plenty of scientists showing the danger. It's the words "trust me" that you need to be scared of.

[veggiechicken]

Yes I read they genetically modify crops to be immune to roundup.
Then the can spray the fields and the crops won't die but the weeds will.

None of this sounds good
1) Genetically modified food crops.
2) Spraying food crops.

If anyone ever tells you ..
I am a scientist, trust me it's safe.
On the fourth word you should be 20 paces away and accelerating fast!

Jimmy

Have you thought about which companies produce Roundup and which ones develop GM seeds and then asked yourself whether the same company is trying to control the world's crops in the process?
https://www.theguardian.com/business...-sale-to-bayer

[Cadalot]

Spartacus - Trust Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Hlc0KtX68&t=296s


Listen to the lyrics

[Workslave]

When Glyphostate is mixed with a surfactant it has been shown to be systemic
this means it passes along the food chain.

Glyphosate as an active chemical has only been shown to be safe in questionable studies.

The governments of the world have a duty to provide enough food and weigh the risks against the pros. Feeding people is deemed important enough to break the rules as they dont want revolutions to occur.

Please remember that DDT was determined to be "safe" for a number of years as were many other "safe" products. Bayer was amajor producer of it.

Bayer commercialised "Heroin" and have never acknowledged the social cost.

Bayer created and sold "agent orange" sold as a "safe defoliant",

Monsanto has lobbied some countries to make seed saving by farmers illegal (Iraq and others),
They are now contributing to genetic diversity loss, GMO dispersal and Trapping farmers in contracts to buy next years seeds. all knowingly evil acts in pursuit of profit.

They decided to lose the Monsanto name as it was getting too much bad publicity.

See a pattern??

Sincerely
Steve

[Martin H]

I haven't been worried about using Glyphosate. That's because it works by affecting an enzyme pathway that isn't used by animals, only by plants and bacteria. So it seemed to me that the worst it could do would be to upset the bacteria that make our digestive systems work, and plenty of more or less impartial studies have shown no significant connection.

But I saw a scientific study a couple of weeks ago which explores quite a different aspect. It is a study on generational effects of glyphosate on mice. The data shows that the chemical had no significant impact on the mice they treated, but two generations later, i.e the grandkids of the treated mice, they found "dramatic increases" in prostate disease, obesity, kidney disease, ovarian disease, and birth abnormalities. The implication is that the glyphosate had caused genetic damage that only impacted later generations.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42860-0

I really, really hope that if the effect is genuine, there's no equivalent transgenerational impact on humans. But it will be quite a while before we know.

[toomanytommytoes]

Here's a criticism of that study from Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/science/com...te_epigenetic/):

The set limits for daily exposure to glyphosate are mentioned in the introduction:

The current “safe” standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for daily chronic reference dose of glyphosate is 1.75 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. The no observable adverse effect level (NOAEL) is 50 mg/kg per day dose. The allowed industry exposure levels are 2.5–4.5 mg/kg per day.

The researchers base their observations on mice treated with 50% of the NOAEL (25 mg/kg/day) when the EPA's daily chronic reference dose is 1.75 mg/kg/day. Meanwhile, the chronic population adjusted dose (cPAD) is the dose at which a person could be exposed over the course of a lifetime with no adverse health effects. The cPAD for humans set by the EPA is 1.0 mg/kg/day. The dose administered to gestating mice is therefore 25-fold higher than the cPAD set by the EPA, and it is administered consistently over 7 days during gestation. They do state that due to the rapid metabolic turnover of the mice, this is roughly equivalent to 5 - 10 mg/kg/day; however, no citation or confirmation of their calculation is provided.

Regardless, based on residue daily intake estimates performed by the EPA, chronic dietary exposure estimates for females aged 13-49 years old is approximately 0.069 mg/kg/day. For the general US population, it's 0.090 mg/kg/day. Considering that, at a minimum (according to the authors' calculations), that would equate to a 7-day consistent dose 72.5-fold greater than what you would normally find in females aged 13-49 years consuming average amounts of food and water in the US. For the general population, it still equates to a minimum of 55.6-fold greater daily exposure.