- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486281/
- https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/risk/...
The common message is Glyphosate has a very short (ish) half life in soil. What happens when it enters the water table first?
And it's still for sale next to fertilizer in the home box store so you can spray your yard and poison your family.
I use Roundup very carefully to manage bindweed and Bermuda grass. It's the only method practical for home scale and timeline.
It should not be used indiscriminately at industrial scale, where cultural practices are more appropriate and important.
Seeing roundup on shelves at home depot casts a spell. Because it is, it must.
There is no reason for pesticides for residential use. The virginal lawn is an aesthetic and just that. Fads and aspirations can change. Some aspirations are vile, some are virtuous. So let's ban it there. Then, some years after, when that hypnotic waft from the orgiastic excess of Roundup bottles at the garden center has evaporated, let's see how many people will still be carrying water for its industrial use.
>* From literature studies, glyphosate’s half-life in surface waters and soil ranges from 2 to 91 days and from 2 to 215 days, respectively (Battaglin et al. 2014; Castro Berman et al. 2018).
(source water from a ~100ft deep water table next to a large ag plot at a property, have both pre and post filter water tested to validate filtration effectiveness)
https://www.nifa.usda.gov/about-nifa/how-we-work/extension
https://www.isws.illinois.edu/health-environmental-applicati...
Go on.
According to new research from Duke University, while it was always thought that glyphosate would break down very quickly in the environment, it seems to stick around a lot longer than we expected when it complexes in hard water.
This new research found that when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard—like magnesium and calcium—glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to 7 years in water and 22 years in soil.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2023-10-roundup-herbicide-ingredient-e...
So you’re looking at 1 microgram in a liter of water.
Ok. But does it have any impact at levels like that? Is the impact more or less than the arsenic, mercury and other naturally occurring toxins in drinking water?
No, not toxic; you are correct.
we know that it can cause issues. there are also issues that have not been measured.
a lot of folks forget that unless the outcome of X is death or cancer etc ... it is often not studied. your quality of life can be greatly reduced by something but if it doesn't kill you then no one is looking at it.
A tiny amount of fluoride is helpful for bones and especially teeth. Fluoridated toothpaste covers this need perfectly, but many people don’t use it. Fluoride in drinking water covers this need also but (arguably) brings along small risks of symptoms of slight excess fluoride consumption.
The amounts that are actually put in drinking water do not seem to have any significant negative effects, and it seems reasonably clear that the population positive effects dominate, but being non-consensually subjected to a marginal risk of negative effect in order to achieve a positive outcome for the population is exactly the kind of thing that reliably provokes this kind of reaction from the paranoid libertarian set.
https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/basics/cost.htm
You'll notice one key thing is missing: Side by side comparison with communities that don't have fluoride in their water. That could be other countries. Or better, rural US communities that for the most part use well water. Those controls exist.
Note: Better diet also has an impact on oral health, and diet over the last 75 years has also improved.
I'm not saying not including that comparison is wrong, but as "the science" goes, it does feel odd that something so obvious is not included.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34597567/#:~:text=Excess%20a....
Yes, fluoride is toxic. The EPA limit for fluoride is 4ppm, and that is probably too high (something like 2ppm would work better). There are parts of the country where the natural incidence of fluoride in groundwater is in excess of 4ppm, and therefore defluoridation needs to be done.
Fluoridation of drinking water is done to a standard of 0.5-0.75 ppm (US Public Health Service specifically recommends 0.7). Most of the country lives in places where the natural ground water concentration of fluoride is below this level, and thus fluoridation is necessary to reach the recommended level.
What is your recommended alternative?
If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves. It is not inconceivable that commercial entities finance "peer-reviewed research" in order to support public health policies.
That said, this issue has received a lot of attention in recent years. Some articles try to put a positive spin on it but the stark truth of where we are today is that there are no standards enforced requiring data publishing (“available on request” doesn’t cut it) and reproducibility. This, combined with the amount of money in this industry and the impact that it has on public policy is an acceptable situation.
Some good coverage:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
(Lots of links to follow on this above post)
https://www.science.org/content/article/what-massive-databas...
(This one puts a positive spin on the editorial process but the fact remains that there is a massive flood of fraudulent papers being published. Going back to standards of open data plus verified reproducibility would go a long way to mitigate this problem.
(This applies to empirical sciences only. In contrast, for a mathematical paper, rigorous reviews of the formal logic are the gold-standard.)
I choose the phrase 'review' intentionally; it doesn't need to follow one of the typical [1] 'peer review' processes from a journal. There are likely alternative methods that are (at least as) or (more) effective. Some fields have seen amazing contributions from 'lay people' all across the world.
> If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves.
For a person equipped with the time, skill, rationality, and motivation, I agree. But it is an empirical question to assess how many people have these skills. I also want to push back against what might be an individualistic bias [2] in the statement above. Even if one is an individualist, it isn't optimally efficient nor practical for an individual to 'take on' all this responsibility. It is rational and efficient to place some degree of trust in others.
[1] These processes vary and should be treated with a fair bit of skepticism. I want to to dig in more; e.g. to what degree have these processes been designed to account for human realities so as to maximize quality?
[2]: See also https://so2020.isosonline.org/conference/the-individualist-b... "Individualism claims that social entities (e.g. groups, institutions) are essentially nothing but suitably arranged aggregates of individuals. This is usually tried to be demonstrated through developing accounts of reduction or supervenience. Holism, on the other hand, claims that social entities are sui generis as something over and above individuals."