Does the World’s Top Weed Killer Cause Cancer? | Hacker News Reader

Does the World’s Top Weed Killer Cause Cancer?

bloomberg.com

31 pointsurahara15 comments

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TLDR; it's a $66 billion dollar question, World Health Organisation Report says probably, yes - it is cancer causing.

At what exposure level?

Always the critical question isn't it.

Do you have to drink it?

Have repeated exposure?

Get it on your skin once(hoping this is not the case!)?

Eat it off unwashed food for years?

etc...

And what is the increased risk?

One of my pet peeves about science reporting (including this video) is that it treats "cancer causing" as a purely binary attribute and they never report on the measured effect. When making policy we really ought to make a distinction between something that will we believe will cause 1 new case of cancer in 1000 vs. something that will cause 10 or 50 times that many.

No the World Health Organisation didn't say that. The IARC did, basing their decision on a hazard criteria, not a risk based one. The WHO and FAO's statement is that it is not carcinogenic [0]. Most regulatory agencies follow a risk based approach that takes into account real world exposure.

Also, the IARC apparently ignored data on farmer exposure to glyphosate [1]

[0] http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf?ua=1 [1] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/glyphosat...

You have an interesting comment history.

Good catch. Almost entirely composed of defending agribusiness...

Just because i'm mainly interested in a certain issue doesn't mean i work for the agribusiness industry (see my other comment, I don't have any links).

While it looks like i'm defending the agribusiness industry to you, to me its more to do with countering bad science and propaganda about GM food.

I think you've miss-read my comment. That was the summary of the video not a statement of opinion, and I think it's an accurate TLDR of the video.

As the other commenter highlighted, seems you mainly comment on this issue.

For my part I have no commercial connection to this industry/issue.

Any industry connection you want to disclose?

Sorry, i missed the TLDR part, the rest just jumped at me, because i've seen it so many times before.

I don't have any industry connections at all whatsoever (I'm a plain old software dev). I'm mainly interested in the whole anti GMO movement and related issues. As I see it there is a lot of misinformation out there, partly as a result anti GMO organisations pushing an anti science agenda and employing similar tactics to ones used by climate change denying groups.

So when I see those inaccurate claims repeated, I'm inclined to comment, always trying to cite reliable sources. So I do understand if my comment history looks like i'm some kind of industry shill (i've been called that on social media lots of times before).

Sure, no worries. I think we all don't want industry shills hyjacking discussions. Thanks for clearing that up.

While I am dismayed by blanket anti-GMO pseudo- and non-science, the possible toxicity of glyphosate is absolutely a scientifically valid concern with regard to this particular genetic modification.

What do you mean by "valid concern" though? And what do you mean by "this particular genetic modification"?

It was already known to the State of California...

"It is known"

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