Whats your point? That the WHO are scare-mongering? That Monsanto shouldn't be held accountable for knowingly marketing a poisonous, carcinogenic substance and profiting from it in the billions?
" There are, however, published data giving clear evidence that paracetamol causes chromosomal damage in vitro in mammalian cells at high concentrations and indicating that similar effects occur in vivo at high dosages. Available data point to three possible mechanisms of paracetamol-induced genotoxicity: (1) inhibition of ribonucleotide reductase; (2) increase in cytosolic and intranuclear Ca2+ levels; (3) DNA damage caused by NAPQI after glutathione depletion. "
"Paracetamol induced sister chromatid exchange in human cells in vivo, and it was aneugenic and induced chromosomal aberrations but not micronuclei in mammalian cells in vivo. It induced DNA single-strand breaks in mice treated in vivo. Paracetamol induced sister chromatid exchange and chromosomal aberrations in human cells in vitro. It weakly induced cell transformation in a mouse cell line. It induced chromosomal aberrations, micronuclei and sister chromatid exchange in mammalian cells in vitro. It did not induce gene mutation, and the results of tests in mammalian cells in vitro for unscheduled DNA synthesis and DNA damage were inconclusive. Overall, paracetamol was genotoxic in mammalian cells in vivo and in vitro. It was not mutagenic to insects but was clastogenic in plant cells."
And here is an entry from the NIH TOXNET database about liver and bladder cancers induced by tylenol.
http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cpdb/chempages/ACETAMINOPHEN.html
Everything including water is toxic under the right conditions.
What a ludicrous position.
Your argument is almost literally "Stalin believed 2+2=4, therefore 2+2 is 5".
Water is not optional. Without it you die. Roundup is optional. Without it the world can still grow crops (we SOMEHOW have for thousands of generations). Dumping many many tons off chemicals designed to kill (however small the organism) all over our food and planet, let alone planting homogeneous, patented, and GM'd "basic" plants, is a recipe that likely isn't good for the planet over time.
Historical yields were tiny compared to what we get from contemporary farms. I don't know if we need Roundup in particular, but if we went back to traditional farming methods half the world would starve.
There's no going back.
Just by eating less meat (which makes sense because we are not supposed to eat so much meat), suddenly we don't need to product so much. The actual price of the food is so low currently that what you pay in a supermarket is mostly the externalities. Switching to cleaner methods would not lead to starvation providing that we would eat differently.
http://geneticliteracyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01...
You need to do a cost/benefit analysis, not reject methods that could cause any number of deaths ever.
Because all methods cause some number of deaths in some circumstances.
Numbers need context if you're going to make the right decision.
"It's the dose that makes the poison" - that's a fairly accurate statement. Every industry uses chemicals that are potentially harmful, and we accept that as a trade-off for the benefits they offer.
The same applies to RoundUp. Is the benefit it offers to agriculture worth the risk? Can exposure be controlled in such a way that the risk is ameliorated? There's a cost-benefit analysis to be performed there.
Point is, stating that RoundUp is possibly carcinogenic is useful information – but it doesn't mean its better to immediately stop use of it. It also doesn't mean that Monsanto "knowingly market[ed] a poisonous, carcinogenic substance", as you stated. It does mean that use of the substance may potentially need to be re-evaluated, but preposterous jumping to conclusion of the sort you exhibited is what's killing political debate worldwide.
But why would you do that? There is a name to it. It's called suicide.
Accepting to use and eat toxic products when other possibilities exist is a form of suicide - even if it's collective.
The dose makes the poison.
There is good reason that many prescription pain-medication formulations are switching from acetaminophen to different NSAIDs.
There is no justification for doling out acetaminophen when safer options exist.
I don't know WHO's agenda but I've seen enough cycles on both pesticides and GMO's when someone makes a provocative statement based on early research and are usually proven wrong.
http://ideonexus.com/2011/12/05/gmo-foods-and-the-promise-a-...
The former means application of genetics, while second implies selective breeding.
I've honestly got nothing against GMO, and I know that GMO carries a stigma, but honestly, so do vaccines. I've got loads of problem with Monsanto, their business practices and Round-up but not too many problems with GMO as GMO.
The so-called "traditional" method of crop development, on the other hand, takes genes not just from other creatures but from totally random mutations, often induced by carcinogens and radiation, and then selected.
With GMOs we know much more about what has happened to the genome of the species.
I think even regular GMO technology probably still is affected by radiation (cosmic radiation and sun) and breeding - I doubt every single grain of corn is genetically manufactured once you can just let it naturally breed.
Not to mention radiation is a great and cheap way to rid of some pests really fast, but tell that to any organic food lover and they'll get defensive.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2014/09/17/the-debate-...
What's your point in attempting to refute this position, from the perspective of PR of Monsanto - who has a history of covering up its failed science in order to reap profits - with anecdotes and "good ol' boy farmer"-style arguments?
- has Monsanto been knowingly misleading about the toxicity of their products? If not, then this is a non-story.
- is this any worse than anything already sprayed on our food (or is it actually less toxic than the cocktail of herbicides used before Roundup?)
If you knew half the things sprayed on your crops you'd be appalled - but there are 7 billion people to feed and at least 300m of them expect their food to be exceedingly inexpensive (and look to the FDA to help define just how much toxic crap they can stomach before the trade-off is no longer worth it).