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Comment by mhkool | Hacker News Reader

you are neglecting the negative effects of spraying billions of tons of Roundup on the planet before the public knows for sure that it is a dangerous poison. Same with neonics, we sprayed too much and the insect populations shrunk too much and will not revive quickly since the poison is still in plants and soil.

The obvious thing is that industries work for profit and have no sympathy with insects or the health of individuals and that we are unable to regulate industries in a proper way.

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For me the example of what you cite is the wonder product 'Scotchgard'.

You could put it on your shoes from new and they would stay looking new, you could spray it on furniture and it would survive spills from coffee/tea/wine. You could coat your whole house with Scotchgard and be blissfully unaware that it was a bio-hazard.

Plus who thought negatively of the 3M corporation?

3M was a brand that you trusted, it was a sign of quality and familiar through 'Scotchtape™' and 'Post-It™' notes. Their reflective products were literally brilliant and life saving. Smart people used Scotchgard. Stupid people that didn't care about their belongings didn't.

But now we know that perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS - the magic ingredient) is not what you want in your blood. Pretty much stands to reason when you think about it, but nobody in the 1980's thought that carpets laced with the stuff would lead to people being poisoned with it.

The same chemical was used in bulk by the military for fire-fighting kit and other uses, plus the factories making things like shoes, carpets and everything else led to a pollution problem. So now, along with Strontium-90 we all have a little bit of perfluorooctane sulfonate in our bodies. Lovely.

Since the chemicals are not 'food' or 'medicines' there is no regulation on what is a safe level to have in the water supply.

But we now know that from the early 1970's the people at 3M knew there was a problem. But they kept quiet and just marketed more and more variations of the product. I only learned recently that PFOS was evil. I had also stopped using it without thinking about it. Partly due to other products such as Gore-Tex™ coming along there is way as a consumer that you realise the old product has been phased out. You just pay the premium for the new and improved water repellent to not even know the old one was 'evil'.

But the execs at 3M knew all along. Like the execs at Philip Morris. Or at Exxon. Or at Monsanto.

Critical to Gore-tex is the DWR coating, which is still made of PFCs (basically Scotchgard). Sometimes they use shorter chain molecules like C6 (vs. C8), which have a shorter biological half-life, but the harmful effects are the same.

I think this "Roundup is a dangerous poison" was a propaganda meme that came out of the need to demonize US agribusiness in Europe. It's a kind of social activism protectionism. I would not be at all surprised to learn it was sustained by funding from ag interests in Europe.

OF course Roundup is not a dangerous poison. This is simply a lie that is repeated over and over by the dishonest and the gullible.

I base my opinion on three court cases in the USA where evidence was borught to court that Monsanto knew many years ago about the cancer causing risks. on what do you base "this is simply a lie" ?

Court cases are not good ways to determine science. In a particularly egregious case in the 1980s, for example, a jury returned a verdict for a defendant in which it was claimed that a head injury in a car accident led to lung cancer.

Scientifically, there is no good evidence that Roundup causes cancer.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/08/17/cancer-juries-scienti...

Please don’t cite snopes, it’s the worst possible citation you can give.

Here’s a better citation: IARC (the World Health Organization’s cancer research division) conducted a review with 20 international experts of all the publicly available research on glyphosate and found that it does indeed likely cause cancer: https://www.iarc.fr/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-gly...

court cases like that don't mean anything, they're super biased by what lawyers make up as a narrative.

Whether roundup is safe or not is not clear to me, but the decision of 12 unwilling laymen with no access to independent research tools is certainly not credible.

I did not say anything about the capability of the jury but was talking about the evidence that was brought to court.

Poe's Law is strong with this one. I can't tell if you're serious or if this is advanced snarkasm.

Totally serious. The anti-Roundup fervor is of a kind with anti-GMO fervor. The goal of it is to provide a pretext to exclude cheaper US agricultural products from Europe.

I don’t trust the research that was done on roundup. Supposedly it degrades within six months.

The reality is that it doesn’t. We know this because the city of Davis, CA does public composting. Yard trimmings are scooped up, taken to the city compost yard, and over a year or som it becomes compost. Residents can pick up a quantity of free compost every year.

Around ‘97-‘98 the city compost started killing many kinds of plants.

The cause turned out to be glyphosphate. Despite Monsanto’s research, the reality was that glyphosate persists far longer than six months.

Hmmm.... wouldn’t farmers have figured this one out pretty quickly? Spray their fields then plant a month after? Sure, some of them use around-Up resistant seeds, but not all.

The recommendation when using glyphosate to kill existing plants before reseeding is to wait a week after application before reseeding. I’ve done this seeding grasses, grains, and root vegetables. It works just fine.

Wasn’t there a city worker suing Monsanto over this?

American farmers suing a German company (Bayer) over their cancers is about protecting the European economy?

I haven't researched this in any great depth but I did just run across the following:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/monsantos-sway-o...

https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-round...

Doesn't sound completely cut-and-dried to me.

Tell this to my husband's brother, who has probably-terminal cancer of a type that's got a strong statistical link to the chemicals he worked with as a lawncare professional.

"Chemicals", not Roundup.

Guilt by association?

Pretty sure that's one of the ones he worked with.

There's also that class-action suit for Roundup users who are also cancer-havers that I keep seeing ads for lately...

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