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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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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