No More Roundup In My Yard, Period

[Phoebe]

[Phoebe]

People responded by saying that we eat food grown with Roundup all the time and should just wash our vegetables. But how does that relate to the actual spraying of it in my yard, where it blows around and we inevitably have to breathe it? I have actually sprayed it on weeds myself in one area far from the garden, after some unpleasant negotiations surrounding different aspects of yard work. I don't really want to do that.

[Mike]

I would need more information about the risks of exposure. The one example that article provided was a woman who has been spraying Roundup on her coffee farm regularly for five years. That seems a couple orders of magnitude difference from me spraying a few cracks in my sidewalk once a year. If I'm aware of the risks, wear a breathing mask when spraying poisons and wash properly afterwards, how much of a risk is there?

[Phoebe]

Maybe there's only a very tiny risk to you, the once-per-year user. Maybe the risk to me or my kids is very small too. However, the report behind this article isn't based on one woman who used it on her farm for five years; several different studies were considered in the report. I'm in no position to judge the risk of cancers accurately, based on that info. However, the info is enough for me to say, why should I use this on my garden, or tolerate this being used on my garden? I don't want to spray this stuff - which smells awful, by the way, and exposure was shown to cause damage to human cells, so that's reassuring - on my veggies and then hope I do a good enough job washing them off later. I don't want to use it myself and get it in my skin and lungs. This is not like vaccines or something, where failure to spray my yard is hurting anyone. What is the purpose of having this supposedly "easier" way of killing weeds, when we are not running some large agricultural operation?

Put another way, if only I'm spraying a sidewalk crack once a year, there is little reason even to purchase and use Roundup. Why not get down there with gloves and pull the damn weeds out, so they're more likely to die and less likely to return than if I used Roundup, and other plants I want to preserve are less likely to die accidentally, and overall I'll spend less time on this effort than I did assembling and cleaning out my sprayer? I don't mean to direct this at you personally, but at Ron. Why does he have to use Roundup at all? Why do I have to put up with it? He killed some of my favorite plants with Roundup. Now we add "carcinogenic potential" to that list of reasons and it's a no-brainer.

There are other considerations about the reliability of information about herbicides. I don't trust our EPA anymore because you have things like this going on: . Environmental factors are suspected as primary causes of some neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's - in particular, herbicides and pesticides are being examined, given the concentration of cases in areas of widespread use. The recent studies of this are disturbing, and we are only going to hear about them if we dig into this in our copious spare time, because I guarantee that Scott Pruitt doesn't care. No, he does care: about making sure nobody is protected from any of this! Fire the scientists. Herbicide runoff into our waterways is a major problem too - granted, my contribution is minimal compared to agriculture, but when there is no reason to contribute to the problem at all... why?

[Mike]

It feels like your argument is that no amount of risk (no matter how small) is acceptable, regardless of the trade-off.

[Phoebe]

It's not that; it's that a scientific organization I trust to be fairly accurate has said that the ingredients in the stuff are probably carcinogenic, but as a layperson I don't know what that means in terms of acceptable levels of risk. To know what an appropriate risk-level is, you'd have to trust the EPA or some other regulatory body. The EPA isn't giving us any info and I do not trust the EPA on this matter even one bit, for reasons that are totally rational. They weren't exactly reliable on this stuff before, and now they're actively purging the agency of scientists who don't toe the [GOP] party line.

I imagine the risk is a lot worse for people who work with the stuff daily in huge amounts than it is for people dealing with small amounts. But you still have to mix up batches of it, you still end up breathing it, it gets on your skin and clothes, and so forth. The fact that you're using small amounts then raises the obvious question: why do you even need an industrial herbicide for your random handfuls of weeds?

Ron has already heard the foundational argument here about not destroying good plants; that's where this began and I would confess to you a certain irrational rage on this point has accumulated and cannot be dislodged, ever since a favorite pair of bushes and favorite irises were destroyed, and then people delved into alternative facts about what happened.

[Tahlvin]

I travel to California a lot for work, where there are warnings posted on almost EVERYTHING indicating there's a risks of cancer, death, etc. It can lead to warning overload, where you see it so much you start to tune it out. Incidentally, that's something we had to consider carefully when designing user interfaces for healthcare software, where you didn't want to inundate the user with so many warnings that they just click through them without really reading them, and end up missing a warning that could mean life or death.

All of this is to say, I'm with Mike: there's not enough in the article for me to make a decision one way or the other. It may or may not be carcinogenic, and may or may not have been responsible for a lady getting cancer after extended, industrial exposure to it over an extended period of time. It's not that I'm averse to getting down on my hands and knees and pulling some unwanted vegetation by hand. But I'm also not averse to using chemical means and taking appropriate precautions, just because there have been some "maybe it is and maybe it isn't" studies.

But as with other issues, there seem to be other factors at play in your reasoning, including Ron murdering some of your beloved vegetation with the substance in question, so you do what works for you.

[Phoebe]

[Tahlvin]

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[Kyle]

Wow. This is bullshit of the highest order. They didn't publish the large, extensive study that demonstrates Roundup doesn't cause cancer because it was "too much" to fit into one article? This enrages me. It's stuff like this that give conservative nut-job global warming denials ammunition to say there's a conspiracy. Disgusting.

[Phoebe]

Uh, something in the milk here ain't clean, and I don't say that just because I dislike Roundup. I have many reasons not to use it that have nothing to do with cancer. If I understand what they're talking about correctly, "the study" is the entire Agricultural Health Study. Lots of people in lots of different areas use this data to perform studies on different things - for instance, this is one reason we know that certain pesticides are linked to a higher incidence of Parkinson's disease (which I might add is also far more common in the upper Midwest where certain kinds of pesticides were more commonly used), or to different sorts of cognitive decline, and so on. It is totally normal for portions of this to come out in different articles. If I were the board that reviews stuff like the risks of Roundup use, I'd hold off on making big judgments before reviewing more of that data. But what exactly are they saying he withheld, and what's the evidence he should or could have published that? Just dumping all the data from the AHS isn't exactly going to demonstrate anything - someone has to comb through and figure out what's going on, right?

[Phoebe]

The above btw was what happened - they were talking about the whole ball of wax, and that's ridiculous. It also turns out that, lo and behold, the company was editing scientific articles intended to disprove the claims about a cancer link, and the real kicker is that they apparently did not tell the truth about whether they were doing that.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ty-reviews

None of this has any bearing, btw, on whether I want people to kill my tomatoes by spraying Roundup on weeds, or whether I want it touching my flesh. I don't but even if it was proven safe I wouldn't want that. The point is, they said they had not edited the articles, but then they were apparently involved in inappropriate procedures that could have tainted the studies they had a major financial stake in. Bad form all around.

[bralbovsky]

Using the cigarette studies, oh, and the Exxon climate memos, oh, and Thalidomide impacts (which took 12 years, despite direct, clear and provable linkage between a chemical people took on purpose and in high dosages) as our benchmark, I am damn worried about roundup. I am especially damn worried because apart from the environmental saturation, which can't be exactly quantified until we build a computer we should all be afraid of, there's increasing use beyond the 'recommended uses. Much of the residual impact testing levels were done after the grain had been in the field for weeks after application. Rain, wind, harvesting, handling, all allegedly mitigate the amount of chemical that can remain to be consumed. However, huge swaths of the grain industry discovered that if you spray it again, just before you harvest, it stresses the sprouts and they bud more vigorously, producing higher yields. No testing has been published on the chemical levels in these forced yields.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if there's a financial incentive to alter or hide incriminating data, an industry WILL alter or hide it. Every profitable quarter is a profitable quarter. No questions asked. A sixty year old farmer will say to himself, well, I got maybe ten years left in me anyway, it'll be this or something else that kills me, so I'll take the cash. The migrants who work for him will be gone. Mike Rowe insists that safety is never first, maybe third, maybe tenth. That includes the downstream safety of the folks who end up buying it.

Until we go to a system of punitive damages based on a multiplier of their ill-gotten gain, we won't stop it. For example, if Martha Stewart made 1 million, she either pays 3 million or seven million or 12 million in damages depending on her malice aforethought. Until the damages really cut into profits and viability, graft will be just another business expense.

As far as crackpot conspiracy folks...more and more I'm finding it sensible to hear them out. Did they get the plate number they said was dumping ballot boxes into the river, not every letter, but hear them out. Sometimes they're shills or shell companies for bad guys. That will come out. But if there's nothing in it for them, if they're at risk getting the info, they deserve a hearing - they often have the goods even if the sourcing is shady.

[Phoebe]

FYI: latest research from upper Midwest region, several common pesticide ingredients, including glyphosate, "exhibited significant association with Parkinson's disease incidence", and here's a really important part of that:
Occupational exposure may be less related to the risk than non-occupational exposure. I.e. don't assume the intuitive conclusion that the farmer spraying it would suffer the greatest long term effects; might be opposite.

[mimekiller]

[Bonefish]

A perfectly valid reason to avoid using round-up is that it supports Monsanto, and Monsanto is evil.

[Phoebe]

I can't say one way or the other, but they're the ones responsible for all the fake news that was discussed just above in this thread. And fake news obviously has no place when it comes to science. Also good to see you back.

[Ronster]

[Iantha]

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles. ... se-Cancer/

So maybe less alarm about glyphosphate? A large study found that it isn't a carcinogen.

[Phoebe]

That is great news. My concern at the moment is what it does to your brain, but just drinking the water and eating food is probably taking care of that all by itself! I'm not going to panic about people spraying the weeds around the fence, however, which is the important thing.