Exposure to weed killing products increases risk of cancer by 41% – study

theguardian.com

4 points·pseudolus··5 comments

So, assuming the study is at all accurate (and that's probably very debatable), if your lifetime baseline chance of getting X cancer was 1 in 1500, it's now 1.41 in 1500.. And that if you expose yourself to a sufficient degree to these substances. Pretty mild stuff for using things that can dramatically improve how much crop food we save from damage. These headlines are designed to scare people who are just bad at calculating percentages in different contexts.

Yes, it would be helpful for journalists to take a look at the concept of absolute vs relative risk: https://www.healthnewsreview.org/toolkit/tips-for-understand...

Almost right... these headlines are designed to get people to click on them and look at ads. I didn't fall for the bait, but even if I did, based on the headline, I doubt it would treat statistics in any honorable way.

> that can dramatically improve how much crop food we save from damage

We already have tons and tons of food rotting in storage all the time. Lack of food is not a problem in the western world. It is not a useful argument.

Very true on the first point. distribution, allocation and use problems with existing food production for all sorts of reasons (political, economic etc) are the much more immediate issue but as to your second point, the above doesn't disqualify the usefulness of even better crop yields or a need to give the technologies behind them a nuanced defense.These things are a long term investment in human development, and they always have been.

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