Comment by healthisevil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by healthisevil | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The acetaminophen in Tylenol ( a common over the counter pain and fever medication used by millions of children and adults every day ) is carcinogenic and hepatotoxic.

" 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.

This is such a stupid, misleading and criminal way to put things up. The world is toxic. You can die by crossing the path of a car. You can die by drowning. You can die by ingesting meat until you choke.

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.

Water, drank too much, too fast, can kill you.

The dose makes the poison.

Not a very good example. There's a pretty good argument Tylenol is too dangerous to be an OTC drug. There are no Tylenol cancer cases because they all died of liver failure.

The leading cause of overdose and acute liver failure in America is from Tylenol (APAP).

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.

Oh, well then, no need to worry about this at all .. everything is toxic in the right numbers, so there's no wrong-doing here in the slightest and we shouldn't stop big companies from polluting the planet, because .. after all .. its already all polluted.

What a ludicrous position.

More like "just because it's done by someone you don't like, doesn't mean it's wrong". Blame Monsanto for the evil things they do (there's plenty), but not everything else.

Your argument is almost literally "Stalin believed 2+2=4, therefore 2+2 is 5".

I'm not sure that was the point. The word "carcinogenic" has lost some of its impact when we learned over time that nearly everything is carcinogenic. We need to know a degree and likelihood and manner of action to really know what that means. You can be cynical about big companies, but this sort of health research is full of inaccuracies as well.

Exactly. Especially since it's apples and oranges.

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.

>Without it the world can still grow crops (we SOMEHOW have for thousands of generations).

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.

It's more about what we are willing to eat than what we grow, diets high in meat require lots of arable land and energy to create.

Actually there is no evidence of this, a good proportion of of the food produced is actually used to feed animals which is the most inefficient way to produce food.

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.

What about when the population doubles, and then doubles again?

http://geneticliteracyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01...

That's very unlikely. The global population is probably going to peak mid-century and then go down.

Is it? Where do you see that trend?

http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/worldpopulat.gif

Most americans would happily choose cancer over vegetarianism. That part isn't Monsanto's fault. Source: I am a vegetarian who talks to omnivores and near-carnivores.

Yeah, that's the main problem I guess, the system is providing people what they want but not what they need. It works like any other market, the consumers want cheap meat so the industry is providing cheap meat. The whole industry is then shaped to solve the wrong problem. They don't even need to fully switch to vegetarianism for it to work but they need to understand that eating meat once in a while is healthier and more reasonable than having a diet based on eating meat every day.

Everything is optional at some level.

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.

This was obviously not the stated position, and you are being deliberately disingenuous by portraying it as such.

"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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com