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Comment by SquareWheel | Hacker News Reader

So the "animals" mentioned in the title refers to roundworms, a parasite that lives in soil. Not something you exactly want, but also not something you would expect to be targeted by a herbicide.

Glyphosate discussions always brings out people with strong opinions, but the product is studied extensively by researchers and the majority of studies have not shown harm. That doesn't prove it's safe of course, but it's where we're currently at.

Because Roundup is such an important part of our agricultural industry, it should continue to be studied in depth. This study and others like it are important to ensuring that farming at scale remains safe for human consumption, as well as minimizes environmental impact.

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This whole subject does reveal the duplicity and manipulation of Bayer-Monsanto on this topic, because they use studies on purified glyphosate to make their claims of harmlessness.

However, RoundUp is glyphosate + surfactants (oily lipid-type molecules) which are needed to dissolve the waxy leaf surface so that the glyphosate can be absorbed by the plant, without which the herbicide would be ineffective.

Studies with RoundUp formulation show the disruption of cell cycle effects, which can lead to cancer in applicators who get exposed. This is a common issue with a wide variety of strong surfactants, for example see this from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, where they dumped tons of a surfactant mix called Corexit:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corexit

There will always be people who believe the Bayer-Monsanto propaganda. Just like there are people who believe that burning 100m-year-old plant matter is fine. Just like people believe that there are aliens living among us.

There have been countless studies on the matter. Even without the surfactants it's still a nasty substance.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.7639...

https://www.cornucopia.org/2014/03/gut-wrenching-new-studies...

https://www.figo.org/removal-glyphosate-global-usage

https://jech.bmj.com/content/71/6/613

https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...

Surfactants are essentially soaps, right? So surely their safety profile is well understood already and glyphosate is the more important component to be researching anyway?

"Surely" is the opposite of science. There are as many kinds of surfactants as of acids and bases.

You would not say of an acid, "surely it is essentially vinegar", or of a base "surely it is essentially baking soda".

Are they using an especially unusual choice of surfactant in roundup? Wouldn't it be trivial to just go to one with a better safety profile if it's not the active ingredient? It just doesn't seem like a plausible conspiracy to me that Monsanto would be going to such efforts to hide the side effects of the surfactant they are using. I'm not saying it shouldn't be studied, I'm just saying this doesn't seem like such a huge "gotcha" to me.

Plants have waxy leaves; surfactants which dissolve waxes allow the glyphosate to enter the plant; such surfactants tend to be highly potent (i.e, they'd effectively strip oils from skins cells and get into those cells). Soap probably wouldn't dissolve waxes.

Fundamentally, the exact identity of the 'inert ingredients' in Roundup and similar products should be exposed on the label. Currently that's proprietary information, but there's a wide range of toxicity of such substances.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30951798/

> "(2019) As glyphosate-based-herbicide composition is legally classified as confidential commercial information, confusion concerning the identity and concentrations of co-formulants is common and descriptions of test substances in published studies are often erroneous or incomplete. In order to resolve this confusion, laws requiring disclosure of the chemical composition of pesticide products could be enacted. Research to understand health implications from ingesting these substances is required."

That the surfactants used are a "trade secret" seems to suggest they are not just soap.

That they carefully exclude them from every toxicity test they commission suggests so more strongly. Why are the concealing "soap", and carefully not testing the product with it?

No. It's a common Monsanto/Bayer talking point to minimize these chemicals by calling them "soaps." These chemicals are what allows the active ingredient to permeate tissues. Monsanto/Bayer funds studies with only the active ingredient to mislead people into thinking RoundUp is safe to be sprayed on food.

> the product is studied extensively by researchers

Which researchers and funded by whom? This is the line Monsanto brings out every time. It turns out their corrupt research couldn't convince a court, who decided glyphosate was to blame for cancer, to the tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.

And it's not just roundworms https://sites.psu.edu/soilmicrobiology/projects/glyphosate-i...

This chemical is bad news and the only reason it's legal is regulatory capture by Monsanto/Bayer.

you know that this judgment was very controversial or you believe everything is just 1 and zeroes in life?

Seriously, WTF is wrong with people... we repeatedly polluted whole world with harmful substances like lead that killed god knows how many people and damaged in some way everybody else with this kind of logic, yet people have the balls to come up with "innocent until proven guilty by 100 peer reviews" mantra for... MONSANTO

I don't believe, unlike many, that they are comically evil guys. Just playing a god for profit with stuff they probably understand only in lower 90 percentile range, especially second, third etc. order effects. And probably too over-invested in direction company took decades ago, so nobody looking at bonuses as drive will change its direction dramatically.

Choosing to blindly believe one side over blindly believing the other side is a dubious approach to these things. I care about environmental issues, and have no love for many aspects of Monsanto’s business and history, but your emotional appeal is extremely unconvincing.

> for Monsanto

GP isn’t making their comment “for Monsanto”, but for the sake of seeking the truth on this specific issue. You will continue to be shocked until you change your perspective on how we ought to evaluate nuanced issues. Especially when those issues have to do with global food production.

> sake of seeking the truth on this specific issue

I don't disagree with you, I also don't think we should be using the product when the truth is as clouded as it is. So ban it until the truth comes out.

>So ban it until the truth comes out.

Okay but given that we have endless studies already, it seems like "until the truth comes out" really means "until my preferred conclusion comes out".

My preferred conclusion would be that it's actually safe, since we're using a massive amount of it already and we're all exposed.

It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer in humans. Similarly to tobacco companies Monsanto is subsidizing research that just happens to find no harms with RoundUp. I'm sure it's fine though, no big deal that trace amounts can be found in urine samples from 80% of Americans. https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/09/weedkiller-g...

>It took decades to prove conclusively that cigarettes cause cancer in humans.

Glyphosate has been around for almost 5 decades. Wikipedia says "The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity"[1]. If you think this is not "conclusively" enough, how much longer/more evidence do you need? Is this a standard that we should apply to everything[2], or just chemicals made my evil multinational corporations? Maybe we should delay rolling out cell phones for a few decades just to be sure that they don't cause brain cancer?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...

But only when the advent of RounUp ready crops have we started spraying RoundUp directly onto food. Previously we only consumed RoundUp in trace amounts. It's extremely misleading to exclude the facts.

I appreciate the correction. That said, it doesn't affect the argument that much. At best it changes "almost 5 decades" to "almost 3 decades". I think it's reasonable to say that if people aren't willing to wait 5 decades to "prove conclusively that [thing] causes cancer", that they're not willing to wait 3 decades either. Let me re-ask the question from my prior comment: should delay rolling out cell phones for a few decades just to be sure that they don't cause brain cancer?

Again very misleading argument - anybody can choose to not use phone, or have loud calls and never, ever put any phone closer to 0.5/1m from their head if they are concerned.

Not something you can do with mass produced food which at this point is almost all food most people can buy. On top of that, have you seen, ever, a label on food stating that it contains ingredients on which Round up was used, how much etc?

Let's stop comparing apples to mortar bricks and have some factual discussions on such serious issues, not just random whataboutisms to divert topic.

>Again very misleading argument - anybody can choose to not use phone, or have loud calls and never, ever put any phone closer to 0.5/1m from their head if they are concerned.

The people with EMI sensitivity and/or oppose 5G deployments beg to differ.

>Not something you can do with mass produced food which at this point is almost all food most people can buy.

Easy choice here would be to buy organic

> Not something you can do with mass produced food

none of us would be alive without such mass produced food in the first place

The overall picture from those studies sounds pretty murky, though.

there is no rampant epidemy of cancers striking farmers who use round up. let the market decide based on the available data.

Nobody is "blindly believing" that RoundUp causes cancer. There have been numerous cancer cases. There have been studies directly linking RoundUp to cancer. The world's foremost experts on cancer classified RoundUp as a carcinogen. Monsanto has been caught numerous times falsifying studies and paying for studies to be done on only the active ingredient (leaving out the ingredients that make it permeate the cells).

I have to take it at face value to a degree otherwise Monsanto can fire cannons of money at scientists and yell “the science isn’t settled!” until the end of humanity even if roundup really did cause cancer.

At the same time I think there is a limit to how bad roundup can be to have fought off criticism in EVERY country and remain on the market.

Have you ever sat on a jury? Seen how that particular sausage is made?

I keep getting called for jury selection and it keeps getting called off.

People have been talking shit about jurors for 2 millennia, one of the oldest plays in history was dedicated to talking about how awful jurors were, and yet they stick around. I still value them merely on the basis of their relative resistance to corrupt influences compared to scientific institutions.

The courts ignored the science. The law has little to do with truth or justice.

c.f. also the talcum powder lawsuits against J&J.

Majority of research claimed that J&J talkum powder is safe?

Basically, the best studies show no link e.g. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27584...

The American Cancer Association doesn't list talc at all when talking about risk factors for ovarian cancer: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/ovarian-cancer/about/new-resea...

J&J is winning most of the cases in court, or having large verdicts overturned on appeal, but there are supposedly something like 38,000 cases out there and each one has an outside chance to end up being like the one they lost in Wisconsin state court which initially awarded over $4.69bn to 22 plaintiffs (reduced to $2.11bn on appeal).

Do you think it really is a risk factor for ovarian cancer?

You have no evidence of that. More likely the plaintiff had their own scientific experts who were more persuasive, that's how all technical matters are adjudicated in courts.

Nonetheless, surely the point is well-made that just because 12 jurors or 1 judge decide that a presentation is more persuasive does not say anything about the truth value of the underlying science.

Just look at the junk science of the FBI crime labs - and that stuff is being measured at the higher "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard.

Another factor that makes Monsanto/Bayer look really bad here is that they lost despite having basically an unlimited legal budget with a huge team of lawyers versus this school groundskeeper and their case was so bad they still lost.

>having basically an unlimited legal budget with a huge team of lawyers

no, their budget is capped at the amount that they're suing for. If you're getting sued for $1M there's no point in spending more than $1M on lawyers.

>versus this school groundskeeper and their case was so bad they still lost.

According to the court filings for the appeal, Johnson was represented by

>The Miller Firm, LLC Michael J. Miller, Curtis G. Hoke, Jeffrey A. Travers;

>Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, P.C.; R. Brent Wisner, Pedram Esfandiary;

>Audet Partners LLP, Mark E. Burton

Something tells me that he wasn't paying for all of this out of pocket.

> no, their budget is capped at the amount that they're suing for. If you're getting sued for $1M there's no point in spending more than $1M on lawyers.

If it affects future worldwide business, they can spend more to protect overall business.

>It turns out their corrupt research couldn't convince a court, who decided glyphosate was to blame for cancer, to the tune of $300M c.f. Johnson v. Monsanto Co.

What makes you think a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better qualified to make conclusions on the available evidence than scientists?

Because the jury are listening to experts from both sides of the case, and those experts are qualified to draw conclusions. Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to suggest.

>Because the jury are listening to experts from both sides of the case, and those experts are qualified to draw conclusions.

That doesn't answer the question. What makes you think that a jury of 6-12 laypeople are better able to determine the truth from 2 conflicting teams of experts, than a team of experts versed in the relevant field?

>Also "scientists" are not uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, as your comment seems to suggest.

They seem to be uniformly on the side of Monsanto/Bayer/glyphosate, according to wikipedia.

>The consensus among national pesticide regulatory agencies and scientific organizations is that labeled uses of glyphosate have demonstrated no evidence of human carcinogenicity. [...]

there's more but I'm not going to quote the whole paragraph

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

It wasn’t “just” a jury in the first place, Monsanto appealed and also lost.

Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?

> The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment toxicology review in 2013 found that with regard to positive correlations between exposure to glyphosate formulations and risk of various cancers, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, "the available data is contradictory and far from being convincing".[11] A meta-analysis published in 2014 identified an increased risk of NHL in workers exposed to glyphosate formulations.[12] In March 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic in humans" (category 2A) based on epidemiological studies, animal studies, and in vitro studies.[8][13][14][15] In contrast, the European Food Safety Authority concluded in November 2015 that "the substance is unlikely to be genotoxic (i.e. damaging to DNA) or to pose a carcinogenic threat to humans", later clarifying that while carcinogenic glyphosate-containing formulations may exist, studies "that look solely at the active substance glyphosate do not show this effect."[16][17] In 2017, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as causing serious eye damage and as toxic to aquatic life, but did not find evidence implicating it as a carcinogen, a mutagen, toxic to reproduction, nor toxic to specific organs.[18]

Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the *European Chemicals Agency* over a company with a vested interest in keeping their product on the market.

> Not going to quote the whole paragraph? The paragraph that goes on to say that there's an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other issues?

I'm glad that you quoted the whole paragraph, but this seems to put a damper on your conclusion

>"the available data is contradictory and far from being convincing"

>Personally I trust a jury of 6-12 laypeople or the European Chemicals Agency over a company with a vested interest in keeping their product on the market.

Their conclusion is:

>the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) classified glyphosate as causing serious eye damage and as toxic to aquatic life, but did not find evidence implicating it as a carcinogen

If someone is not qualified as an expert on a given topic themselves, they have no rational basis for evaluating competing and mutually incompatible claims generated by two parties who are each qualified experts. The process devolves into mere sophistry.

I mean what do you want, 50 scientists saying one thing, 50 scientists saying another and have 50 more scientists making the final decision on what the "truth" is?

How is that any better, considering you just have more scientists that may randomly lean one way or another.

That roundworm aerates the soil and is critical for the health of plants you’re eating as well. It’s also a proxy for nervous system reactions.

Glyphosate doesn't last in soil though, it's broken down in a few days by soil bacteria.

I have heard this too, but then how is it showing up in people later on?

It gets into plants and animals during those days https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-herbicide-glyph...

Doesn’t mean that it doesn't last elsewhere, studies in BC have shown that is persists in plants that are sprayed but don’t die for at least a year https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-herbicide-glyph...

Which makes the practice above of spraying replanted forests so “the good trees grow faster” even more abhorrent

> the good trees grow faster

They replant with round-up ready pine, so they spray to kill aspen which is a firebreak species, and grow massive pine stands which are the opposite. It's the major reason for the massive forest fires we've had lately (and thus the massive flooding).

the more i learn about it the worse it gets :(

Do you have a source for that? I thought the half-life in soil was 90 days. Certainly would be perplexing as to how various Roundup products work for months to a year.

The long-lasting Roundup products contain other active ingredients in addition to glyphosate.

It seems regular Roundup has multiple active ingredients these days.

Let's not forget adjuvants.

If it show up in your urine, it mean it lasted too long.

It is also a powerful chelating agent (make you lose minerals) is another concern for humans.

"Although the chelating properties are well known, this potential additional environmental risk was never adequately considered in the regulatory risk assessment (EFSA 2015a, 2015b)."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5823954/#:~:tex....

"a few days" is the lower end. From wikipedia:

>The half-life of glyphosate in soil ranges between 2 and 197 days; a typical field half-life of 47 days has been suggested. Soil and climate conditions affect glyphosate's persistence in soil. The median half-life of glyphosate in water varies from a few to 91 days.[57] At a site in Texas, half-life was as little as three days. A site in Iowa had a half-life of 141.9 days

On the other hand, in the Americas it's an invasive species and many crops were doing fine before it's introduction so I'm not sure I'd call it critical for plants health. In the end we can compare yield in fields with roundup applied and those without and compare yields to find out the overall effect on plants.

But the dangers of it affecting other animals' nervous systems the same way it affects roundworms is a serious worry.

The roundworm in this study, C. Elegans is not invasive. It's one of the critical components of an ecosystem. You are thinking of other roundworms.

Hmm, I was assuming the OP was extending the c elegans result to earthworms since I've never heard of c elegans aerating soil. And now that I go google it I'm seeing lots of stuff on c elegans requiring aerated soil but none on it doing it itself so I think I'm correct in my assumption?

c. elegans help maintain the decomposition pipeline, not soil aeration.

There are a few things that if they were lost globally would greatly affect the necessary process of decomposition.

A lot of what's written about c. elegans environment has been overturned. It was thought to be a soil nematode, but it's really most common in rotting fruit.

Footnote: Roundworms and Earthworms are different animals.

The animals cited in this study are roundworms and belong to the Filum Nematoda, one of the most frequent animals in this planet and also one of the most overlooked.

Most of them are not parasite animals, but we know more about the parasites because they cause gross diseases in humans.

Earthworms are the common pink worms found on soil, they belong to Filum Annelida (and is true that some european earthworms invaded America a few thousands years ago).

Earthworms and humans are basically not directly linked in the trophic chain. We don't feed on them, and they don't feed on us directly or cause us diseases.

Do you know if there /are/ any studies done with smaller mammals, out of curiosity? My worry is always that we're poisoning our dogs/cats, where a toxic amount I imagine is much smaller

You’re worried about dogs and not children or adults?

you're worried about children and adults and not our global society, war abroad, disease, destitution, and human suffering?

see what I did there? I presumed you didn't care about anything not explicitly mentioned -- was I accurate? I bet not.

humans tend to (generally) wait until the produce is washed and on a dinner plate before they try licking it -- animals (and certainly some humans, too) may not.

The specific worry may be towards the danger of the high volumes of raw chemical on the plant itself rather than the underlying danger of treating a plant with that chemical before preparation and wash.

> wait until the produce is washed

It is my understanding that the produce assimilates the chemical internally

You want to wait for it to dry before letting animals and people in the area you have applied Roundup.

Of course, but it's still there after drying. dogs/cats sniff the ground, lay on it, eat bugs that have interacted with it, etc. (hopefully not for all of these, but I am sure they do)

Some things completely change character after drying. Permethrin will kill cats while wet (like just after applying topically to a dog), but they wont absorb enough of it dry. And it doesn't really re-wet by just adding water (permethrin for hiking stays on clothes through 30 washes or something).

I'm not sure if it chemically changes or if it starts out in some kind of emulsion or something that can't be recreated by just rewetting with water.

That's really interesting, I didn't know that. Makes me wonder how many herbicides / insecticides are like this for sure

To me it appears that roundup kind of blocks an honest discussion on other causes of declining insect populations.

what would these be? edit: this was a genuine inquisitive question, not snarkiness.

One factor could be land use and reduction of the overall richness of our ecosystem. That could be highways, cities, suburbs, timberland, and the coverage of monoculture crops

Global warming. There is a German entomologist who thinks this is the most likely explanation (or the largest contributor). Iirc the insect population declines everywhere. Also in woodland where roundup is not applied.

>Glyphosate discussions always brings out people with strong opinions

That's funny, I've experienced this first hand. There's a guy who comes into the vet clinic I frequent who's dog died of cancer and he drives around with giant decals pasted all over his white van saying that Roundup killed his dog and to stay away from it. He claims that the gardener sprayed his dog deliberately and that his dog died as a result. He is very passionate about it and spends a lot of time evangelizing this cause.

Pesticides & herbecides in general are just not safe at the moment and it's been clear they having been causing lots of health problems.

A lot of people, especially the farmers themselves & people living close to the farms get way too high amounts of pesticides in their system. And I also don't trust the safe amounts allowed are actually properly tested over a lifetime.

Causing all kinds of issues, among parkinsons and such, take France for instance: https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2021/06/vineyard-...

This site seems to promote organic agricultural practices as pesticide-safe but organic farming uses some of the most dangerous pesticides (e.g copper sulfate) precisely because of the anti-scientific requirement that anything used must be of "natural" origin, which is just the naturalistic fallacy. The bias here is clear.

Soil roundworms are not necessarily parasites. Free living ones have huge populations in the soils and sea bottoms. In ecology handbooks there is often shown a study that found more kilograms of roundworms than kilograms of deer living in the same places.

They are highly influential in fertile soils.

I wonder how much the effect on microorganisms has been studied. I have a small hunch that a lot of the weird reactions people have to various plants can be traced back to glyphosate and its effect on our gut biome.

c elegans are roundworms, but they are not parasites. They eat bacteria and yeast that grow on rotting fruit and other decaying matter.

If roundup or glyphosate had these effects on c. elegans I'd expect a large-scale visibly noticeable impact on crop yields.

These neurotoxins do not deserve the benefit of the doubt until shown otherwise

It's a neurotoxin... according to whom? A search for "neuro" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate turns up 0 matches. However, the same wikipedia article does mention the mechanism of action

>It inhibits a plant enzyme involved in the synthesis of three aromatic amino acids: tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine

which seems decidedly not a neurotoxin.

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