Brief Note from Kip Hansen
On December 18, 2017, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a paper titled “Revised Glyphosate Issue Paper: Evaluation of Carcinogenic Potential” as part of a larger release of its latest findings on glyphosate, the main active ingredient in the world’s most used weed killer, Monsanto’s Roundup.
The revised issue paper was part of a larger timed release of a number of EPA statements on the 18th December.
The finding?
“For cancer descriptors, the available data and weight-of-evidence clearly do not support the descriptors “carcinogenic to humans”, “likely to be carcinogenic to humans”, or “inadequate information to assess carcinogenic potential”. For the “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential” descriptor, considerations could be looked at in isolation; however, following a thorough integrative weight-of-evidence evaluation of the available data, the database would not support this cancer descriptor. The strongest support is for “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans”.
The reaction of the American press was astonishing — almost complete silence. The major “Newspaper of Record” for the United States, The NY Times, did not mention the report at all — not a single line, anywhere in the paper. Of major US papers, based on a search for mention of the report in each of the following, these papers and news outlets did not mention the new finding: NY Times, Washington Post, Portland Tribune, Seattle Times, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, UPI and CNN.
My online search only turned up three (3) Main Stream Media outlets that carried the news: the LA Times [and here on Twitter](my lifetime, hometown paper), the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and Reuters.
[Personal Disclosure: In my youth, I delivered the LA Times seven days a week for several years, including the Sunday edition, weighing several pounds.]
As a measure of interest in the general topic, a Google search for “news Monsanto’s Roundup” returns 3,820,000 results — there has been a lot of news about Monsanto’s Roundup product — yet when the US EPA finally issues the results of if oft-delayed findings (delays which were reported by all major US news outlets) — the majority of US news sources remained silent. The EPA made public announcements of the release of the reports, including advanced copies to the press with an embargo date of 18 December.
There is no more powerful way to bias news coverage than this: simply to not report the news at all.
I have my opinion on why this non-event happened. What’s yours?
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Author’s Comment Policy:
Always glad to engage in civil conversation about the topic at hand — in this case the non-coverage of this major and long-awaited EPA report by MSM in the United States.
I will reveal my personal opinion later on in my usual Epilogue in the comment section, after I feel that most of you have had your say.
If you expect a reply from me, please address you comment to “Kip …” so I can see it.
I don’t intend to argue the case for or against Roundup and I will not entertain general discussion of Monsanto-hating conspiracy theories.
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Just more evidence of the massive Obama war on science with his dishonest, distorted and deceptive efforts to make all “science” nothing but his politicalized propaganda supported by a liberal and science ignorant main stream media.
Science is in bad shape. Most published research findings are wrong and can’t even be reproduced let alone replicated.
Here’s a link in which the author points out that the evidence on what foods we shouldn’t eat is very weak. He puts the blame on cherry picking. It’s a lot like climate science.
Scholars have to publish. To get published they have to produce interesting results. There’s no penalty for being wrong. Only the most blatant fraud is punished. What ensues (ie. the replication crisis) is entirely predictable.
I’m no fan of Obama but he can’t take the blame for a crap fest that has been going on for decades.
You’re quite right. This has been going on for many decades. Too many Government organizations benefitted from it.
Commie ==> Anything written by Dr. Aaron Carroll is worth reading. I don’t always agree with him though — but at least one gets straight science well written.
The problem you point out isn’t the result of lack of scientific integrity, it’s a problem with how things are reported by the media. Whether it’s about food, chemicals or climate, the media are the alarmists, not the scientists. The media are directly dependent on high readership for advertising revenues. Research is funded because it answers a question, not to spread a message.
‘Science is in bad shape. Most published research findings are wrong and can’t even be reproduced let alone replicated.” This is an assertion without evidence, and it’s absurd. In the context of the discussion alone, about a paper in which much science is being evaluated, it suggests that the conclusion are unreliable – if this is true, then why should the MSM report it anyway?
While it is true in science that “negative” findings (those that don’t reject the null hypothesis – what you would call “uninteresting”) have in some fields often gone unpublished, the scientific community is aware of this problem, and it is changing. It’s particularly bad in pharmacology.
“There’s no penalty for being wrong.” No, there is no penalty for being wrong, nor should there be. Some studies are wrong simply by statistical chance. That’s why science never “proves” anything – it is always open to revision, and because of the way science works, most often the wrong studies are identified by ensuing research. The general message of a whole body of research that replicates findings and “fits together” well (a theoretical treatment agreeing with empirical results, for instance) is rarely wrong. This is one reason that the antrhropogenic climate change research is so compelling.
“Only the most blatant fraud is punished.” ANY fraud is punished! Fraud is not acceptable under any circumstances. Simple errors and mistakes in judgment are not (though depending on the magnitude, reputations can be destroyed). Scientists are not gods.
Folks share your opinion. Here’s an example …
Science is fine.
Academic scientists and the way they organise themselves are in trouble.
@Kristi Silber:
Did you overstate your position there or do you actually believe that scientists make no alarmist pronouncements?
Do I need to repeat here the well known evidence to the contrary? I hope not.
Well if the scientists were indeed interested in pushing the science, they would publish only in journals that are read by specialists in that field, and they would never give any abstract or press release to the media to the masses. For what purpose would they tell the media to the masses stuff they are not competent to comprehend ?
Well of course to get the paying public (taxpayers) to grant funding for further study.
The mass media are going to edit it / translate it / rewrite it /whatever to make it sound important.
I was once asked by a popularly read electronics monthly journal, well actually of that very name to write a specific paper on a specific subject, so I did that; it was a tutorial paper, and I sent the manuscript to the editor.
He edited it as editors do, and a technical term that appeared frequently throughout the manuscript, appeared only once in the edited draft which he sent back to me to check for “technical correctness”.
Well the problem was that everywhere else that word was to be, he replaced it with a synonym from some thesaurus; that is a …. different …. synonym for each instance.
None of those synonyms from colloquial spoken English meant the same thing as the original word, as a word in a scientific tutorial about the very subject of that word.
so the entire manuscript was reduced to total bullsh*t.
Check it for scientific accuracy he said.
So I scribbled across it: “It WAS technically correct and accurate when I sent it to you; now it isn’t. ”
So he published my original manuscript verbatim, and never changed a word.
Later he apologized, and we got along famously from that time forward.
G
The MSM’s response was about like their reporting when butter and eggs were declared healthy foods after the “consensus” of scientists insisted for 40 years they were sure killers.
As it happened, I worked at Monsanto Chemical’s Central Research Laboratories in St Louis County MO for three years, mid 1964 to mid 1967. Not on any chemical things, but digital electronics, and also LED devices and materials . OK so GaAs is a chemical. I’m not sure that it is toxic, but both Gallium and Arsenic are. I worked only on the optics of LEDs, the material was just a necessary part of getting light out of something.
Back then, Monsanto also made Aspirin, which has a specific chemical formula so Aspirin is just Aspirin, and Monsanto is a principal supplier to the world. They also make the active detergent ingredient in most house hold laundry products, so no matter what colored bottle all of your dashed washing machine powders or liquids some in from P&G or elsewhere, the part that works is made by Monsanto, and the label on the box tells you to use about five times as much as it takes to wash your clothes. I bought a bag of the part that works before they add the colored dust to it, from the company store, and it lasted us for the three years we lived in MO.
And let’s not forget Skydrol, the non flammable hydraulic fluid used in just about every aero-plane thy flies with Hydraulic controls on it.
I don’t think I have ever worked for a big company that acted more ethically than Monsanto. I have no idea how they are today; just how they were back then. And I am planning on dousing my back yard with round up as soon as the freezing weather abates.
G
No so far as I know, I have no investments in Monsanto, although I can’t guarantee that some of my funds don’t.
G
George E. ==> Thanks for the personal report on your experience with Monsanto.
I too have a serious Round-Up roundup to accomplish in the spring — an invasive little bugger of a plant that has taken over my wife’s shade garden in the 13 years of our absence (we were in the Caribbean) and the old brick roofing tile kiln (a relic of the past) that is covered in poison ivy vine.
Monsanto of course invented “Astroturf “, and while I was working there Monsanto wanted to make a movie of a cricket match being played on a pitch of Astroturf just to get a 30 second clip to show to share holders at the Annual General meeting of shareholders.
So being a colonial, but having very little playing time on the cricket field, I was drafted into a Monsanto Cricket team, to practice up for the movie. So they outfitted a bunch of us, some Aussies and a couple of Indian chaps, with all the correct white cricket togs, and they gave us paid time off work to go out to a park (might have been St Louis Forest Park) and polish up our cricket skills.
Then on a weekend, we went out and on a cricket pitch of Astroturf we played a four hour cricket match against a Team from the Washington University (?) in St Louis (izzat a medical school?), and Monsanto video-taped the whole four hours, to find that 30 second clip for the AGM. I’m pretty sure we played cricket for about two full months before the movie was shot.
They’ve had their bad moments. There was a terrible fire and explosion at a dock in Texas City Texas, where Monsanto fertilizer was stored and was being loaded onto a freighter when the fire happened, and the explosion wiped out a huge area. That and some other unfortunate accidents were a part of their employee safety folklore.
It could get you fired if you drank your coffee out of a beaker in your office or laboratory.
A top high paid woman Chemical Research engineer came into her lab and picked up her beaker of hot coffee that was warming over a Bunsen Burner, and took a gulp
OOoops That’s not my coffee. Well those were not her words; she said nothing, but dropped to the floor, and died. The beaker was not her coffee but Potassium Ferricycanide that somebody was heating up for some test. All of this folklore was recited to me the day I reported for work in my safety indoctrination by the corporate safety engineer. It was a very good three years of my industrial career, which I gave up only to come back to the West coast to work at Fairchild Semiconductor, when all of the Intel founders were still at Fairchild.
G
George ==> Great stories…..
george, you wrote: ” And I am planning on dousing my back yard with round up as soon as the freezing weather abates.”
Why do you want to kill your back yard? Maybe you live in a desert climate where weeds have invaded the sand and rocks? Just curious.
“””””….. Rod Everson
December 28, 2017 at 7:30 am …..”””””
Rod, the back yard had accumulated over time the seeds of weeds that have not yet been identified by botanists, all of which blow over from surrounding areas, including bamboo, and ivy which (the ivy) was strangling every tree in the yard. some of these weeds grow up to four feet tall, and there are grasses in there that get three feet tall, including the kind of grain stalks that get in your clothing and then burrow through it and you can’t pull them out backwards. My wife told me she was going to plant vegetables out there so I stopped weed whacking the yard and waited to see her garden grow.
Well the weeds kept growing until I couldn’t see the yard, nor the sliding glass patio door that the ivy had engulfed long before we moved in.
So I once mowed it down to an inch of stubble and then covered the whole yard in a black plastic sheet, and that stopped the weeds, but only for about two years by which time the solar photons had performed radiochemistry on the plastic sheet, so it was slowly evaporating.
So then I waited for it to get about nine inches deep, and I rounded it up, with the correct dilution from concentrate, and that did it magically till there was nothing short of 700 microns wavelength out there in the yard. But the ivy started to eat the house.
So my wife paid a contractor who came out with a team and in eight hours they had every last ivy leaf and shoot out of there along with all of the trees that had been slaughtered by the vine. I was impressed; never seen a bunch work so efficiently and they carted four 3/4 ton piled up truck loads of junk out of that yard. It’s like a miracle to see plain old dirt ground again, so I want to keep it that pristine brown color that goes all mushy when it rains. Nothing like a good mud back yard.
Well I wouldn’t mind a nice slab of green concrete instead.
G
what can the MSM bitch about now?
About how the Trump Administration’s EPA is obviously lying to the American Public /sarc
I don’t know why you used the “sarc” tag. It was true. That IS what they will say.
+1 to Leghorn.
Clearly a study by the gutted, Trump-filled EPA puppet agency. How now can anyone trust a thing the EPA has to say?
/sarc
A quick search of the website of Canada’s state broadcaster, the CBC (which receives over $1 billion from the taxpayer each year) shows no articles about Monsanto’s Roundup or Glyphosate more recent than November 9 of this year, and nothing about this EPA report.
The ABC, the Aussie equivalent, neglected to cover the topic as well. A general search [not google] gave one result in the “Insurance Journal”.
Paul it’s know $1.5 Billion thanks to PM Trudeau he just loves going into debt to pay his cronies in the CBC.
I see no sign of this story from Britain’s esteemed Bolshevik Brainwashing Company. But they do report Prince Charles’s views that we’re all doomed.
As mentioned above the CBC gets a lot more than $1B from the Feds. It is an unseemly amount for a biased organization. I am not surprised that the CBC has said nothing, as that does not fit into its bias, which is to regurgitate everything David Suzuki says without question and promote the point of view that can only arise from the Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal elites who continue to control this once great country.
Reuters, which is hardly a paid mouthpiece for Monsanto, reported extensively on the U.N./WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer report on glyphosate. Reuters obtained a draft of the report and compared it with the final version. They found that all exculpating evidence was suppressed or removed. A detailed report may be found at
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/who-iarc-glyphosate/
This panel appears to operate with a level of scientific integrity that is comparable to the IPCC and the UNFCC.
RayG ==> Yes, Reuters has been running a series of exposés on the UN IARC finding. You provide one link, here is another.
@ur momisugly Kip Hansen December 27, 2017 at 12:28 pm
Now if only Reuters would devote some serious investigative resources at the egregious manipulation of the various so-called temperature data bases but I think that is far beyond anything that Santa will leave under my CO2 absorbing Christmas tree.
What do you expect? WHO is not John Galt…
There is a law firm advertising for clients in Roundup suits on cable TV, claiming that the “World Health Organization” has called glyphosate a human carcinogen. A bit more founded than the baby powder causes ovarian cancer claims, but not much.
The talcum powder stuff should not survive appeal. The biggest jury award has already been reversed. This is just silicone breast implants junk science on steroiods. Cervival/uterine cancer is usually HPV. Hence the new vaccines. Externsl Talcum powder does not even get into the anatomical proximity.
But, …. but, …. but, ….. external cigarette smoke gets into the anatomical proximity and causes cervical cancers.
think little scientifically Samuel C Cogar. Anything that gets into the lungs has an excellent environment for getting absorbed into the cell or the bloodstream. The lungs are evolved for absorption. Anything sprinkled on the skin is very unlikely to get absorbed. The skin is evolved to not absorb things. It takes a number of tricks with chemistry to get “absorption patches” to work safely, and then only for some drugs.
Talc often has a very small amount of asbestos mixed in because the two materials are closely associated geologically. Any pharmaceutical manufacturer of talc body powder takes extreme measures to ensure that no asbestos gets incorporated. A single lawsuit could wipe out all the years of modest profit from baby powder.
Get your daily “jollies” by making such comments, philohippous?
“DUH”, getta clue, …… philohippous, …… Homo sapiens sapiens and/or their hominoid ancestors have been inhaling the smoke being emitted from the burning of dead biomass for the past 200,000 to 2 million years, or to be more specifically, ….. ever since they learned to use fire for cooking and keeping warm.
And given the fact that our species in the Family of Great Apes did not go extinct due to the claimed cancerous effects of inhaling smoke particulate from burning biomass is proof that the breathing of biomass “smoke” has never been harmful to humans ….. or proof that our early human ancestors evolved an immunity to any ill effects of biomass smoke ….. which now would be classified as an Inherited Survival Trait.
And philohippous, don’t you be fergettin the FACT that the majority of the world’s human population was still breathing “tons” of biomass smoke …. up until the early 20th Century when central heating became fashionable and affordable.
Tom…..that would be the firm of Brown and Crouppen. They are local (St. Louis) ambulance chasers and the WHO says glyphosate might be a POTENTIAL carcinogen……which seems to be close enough for them.
Quite simple really,
The lack of reporting is most likely due to the fact that the information was released from the Trump Administration’s EPA rather than the Obama EPA … and the media can’t/won’t do anything to cast a better light on President Trump especially when the news from His EPA is diametrically opposed to that of the prior administration Sphere of Influence
…if it were the democrats…they would be talking about yields going up…feeding the poor….to a background of singing angels
Actually, Lat, it was liberals that didn’t like the “modified” crops being developed that were a bit resistant to Roundup. So yields were going up.
It was the same sort of fear that the anti-nuke folks successfuly waged.
Bryan A ==> The Obama EPA came to the same conclusion but refused to issue it….EPA pulled down a report on its website of the ruling in May 2016 in one of the many delays on the ruling.
Sept. 12, 2016 – EPA issued the first version of this paper, with the same conclusions. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/glyphosate_issue_paper_evaluation_of_carcincogenic_potential.pdf I have no idea whether the MSM covered it, but at any rate you can’t blame the Obama administration for not issuing its conclusions, nor would anyone with any sense blame the Trump administration for altering this scientific assessment, one that has been in the works since far longer than Trump has been in office. Maybe this revised version wasn’t reported because it’s not really new at all, but only included data from a few more studies.
Kristi ==> This is the version that was removed shortly after, according to the press, from the EPA website, with an announcement that it would be re-done in the future — which is now here and the revision issued.
I provided several links about the 2016 pull-down.
Dems LOVE Bernie’s tax cuts …
https://youtu.be/FYAClOv3px4
No, just a revised version of an Obama-era report reaching the same conclusions.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/glyphosate_issue_paper_evaluation_of_carcincogenic_potential.pdf
My guess is that Trump’s EPA wanted credit for issuing such a report, since as far as I can tell it’s virtually the same as the earlier version, only including a few more studies that don’t alter the conclusions.
Kristi ==> You’ve got your timeline wrong… EPA pulled the 2016 report in May 2016…..no one ever thought Trump would win the election (certainly not in May!…the NY Times still had Clinton an 85% favorite the day before the elections).
There is really no two-party politics story here.
There was a great deal of criticism over the pulling of the report, but now the revised report is out —
Plaster the link all over the Greenpi$$ Facebook pages.
It’s very simple. The EPA finding is wrong, which is why it will not get reported.
Glyphosate is a chemical. Everyone knows that ‘chemicals’ are toxic, and those that Monsanto make are especially so. So the finding MUST be wrong – by definition.If it were right it would be hugely embarrassing to all the MSM which have been frightening people for years with warnings about ‘chemicals’.
The US need to follow the much esteemed technique which the European Commission has been pioneering with political issues. When a country gets a political answer wrong – a referendum, for instance – they are invited to redo the vote again and again until they get it right. This is what the EPA should do with their study….
Dodgy ==> Even the EU was forced by the weight of scientific evidence to rule glyphosate could be continued to be used for another five years…a little short of admitting that it doesn’t cause cancer, but far short of the expected ban.
…Even the EU was forced by the weight of scientific evidence to rule glyphosate could be continued to be used for another five years…
Scientific evidence? I am not sure that you understand what ‘scientific evidence’ is! let me explain the Scientific Method to you…
You start with a hypothesis – your guess at a possible explanation of a natural phenomenon which will generate the best newspaper headlines.
Then comes the hard work of investigating possible support for your hypothesis. It is a good idea to find supporting substance from a widely diverse a set of fields as possible – this will render the hypothesis much more secure. So you should look for activist endorsements, inclusion in well-established forums and think-tanks, and, of course, the best field for support – government approvals.
Having thus proven your hypothesis, you then offer it out for peer review. This comprises phoning around your circle of colleagues so that a united front can be put up to a tame journal editor. It helps if you can add one (or more) of the big names in your research area to your paper’s author list – everyone will then know that the paper MUST be completely trustworthy, without even reading it. Most of your work here will actually not be on the paper, but on the press release, anyway…
Having thus proven your postulate, it only remains to cite the paper in a round of applications for grants. If you achieve these, take them to the nearest University Dean, and start up a research chair with the proceeds. All you then need to do for the next 10 years is recycle the original paper in a succession of conference presentations while travelling widely across the globe with your new chums…
Excellent, Dodgy, excellent!
Dodgy, don’t forget stage two.
Hire a bunch of psychologists to (mis)use statistics to demonstrate that any one who doesn’t agree with you is akin to a Holocaust denier, a racist, and also believes the earth is 6,000 years old and the moon landing was faked, and that the contrary opinion was paid for by the Koch brothers.
I wish my comment was satire; but of course the evidence is out there for all to see.
Dodgy Geezer comments (with a sarc tag) that the US should follow the EU technique of repeating democracy until you get the result you want. To avoid any ‘holier than thou’ thoughts I suggest everyone looks at the multiple referendums the US imposed on Palau on the Compact of Free Association proposal (eventually agreed on 1986). Funnily enough there have been no referenda on the topic since.
Ricco ==> There were multiple referendums about independence and Free Association status, see the Wiki here. History reads a bit different there. If there is a point to your comment, please feel free to clarify.
Reporting that it is not carcinogenic does not support the narrative that industry is evil, that “chemicals” are evil, and that the people need to be saved from these evils. By the brave journalists who run the MSM, and their supporters. Mencken was right. Politics is all about frightening people and offering them shelter from the scary stuff that you have made up.
rxc ==> “does not support the narrative that industry is evil, that “chemicals” are evil,” yes, I think you are getting there …. doesn’t support the narrative…..
Reporting that it is not carcinogenic does not support the narrative that old out of patent chemicals are unsafe and must be replaced by the new in patent and much more expensive chemicals sanctioned by whoever has been paid to sanction them
The left loves science, except when it doesn’t. They slander “deniers” and withhold evidence that disrupts a chemo-phobic narrative. This final outcome just doesn’t comport with the expectations of major news organizations.
We live in a time of unparalleled wealth and ease, made possible by technology and the spread of freedom and opportunity. It is obviously absolutely necessary to identify true sheisters, reali hazards and to correct well-meaning mistakes; but there is more risk in the near all-out war on technology, freedom and reasonably-regulated capitalism as engines for good.
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” – Carl Sagan
Paul P ==> I would be happy if the general public understood the basics of math, physics, biology, physiology and chemistry their teachers tried to pound into their heads in high school — just that much would make he very happy.
I would be over the Moon if 4-year college grads understood even half of the science they were intended to understand from their liberal arts curriculum.
Round-up is a huge greenie issue here in Portland, OR – you should hear the sanctimony.
save the bees
i don’t care, save the bees
Roundup is an herbicide, not an insecticide.
see above
Unfortunately bad news sells copy. That a chemical is really just harmless, sells zero copy. Almost everybody knows and admits it, except when their living depends on it.
Most of us do occasionally like to look at the crash on the other carriageway, even though it means we are taking our eyes off the road and our hands are less secure at the wheel. I don’t have a ready solution for this aspect of the human condition.
Michael Hart – Kip’s point is that, given prior msm coverage that gave support to anti-Monsanto rhetoric, maybe one brave msm participant would at least be interested in setting the record straight.
The view that Monsanto is a big evil corporation out to victimize the little guy will persist partly because the NYT and their world-view cohorts didn’t have the gonads all these years to say clearly that Roundup is not only a miracle for farmers but also appears harmless to humans. The latter was the truth of the matter and is more so now that the EPA has cleared the product after crawling through the issue for years.
scraft1 ==> Only Reuters has been straight with the Monsanto/Roundup issue…..
KIp,
Do any studies demonstrate a cancer risk due to the frequency of herbicide and other chemical exposure over time? Compare someone like me who hobby farms dry cattle vs full time agriculture employees?
Craig ==> See the links in the pdf of the EPA “Revised Glyphosate Issue Paper: Evaluation of Carcinogenic Potential” report here. They discuss much, if not all, of the evidence on all sides of the issue.
In my opinion, if you follow the instructions diligently, neither you nor your livestock have anything to worry about — only your poison ivy need worry.
Lomborg covered pesticides in his book, the Skeptical Environmentalist. All pesticide use in the US amounts to about 2 cases of cancer per year. Stopping all pesticide use would actually see a large INCREASE in cancer, as people, especially the poor, would no longer be able to afford most fruit or vegetables.
Craig, I don’t hobby farm. Real farm. Organophosphate Insecticides are more dangerous than herbicides. Both classes are perfectly safe after years of testing (else not approved) when used as directed. Also, precautions like eye protection and impervious gloves are recommended when handling/diluting the concentrates.
The epidemiological support is that me, my farm hands, and many many thousands of others like us show no cancer upticks of any sort compared to city folk who never saw a farm or ever got close to farm concentration pre-dilution pesticides. Those concentrates are not even available to city slicker gardeners. Yiu can probably access the concentrates as a hobby farmer through chains like Farm and Fleet or Tractor Supply. Not HomeDepot or Lowes.
Ristvan – I’m not a farmer but I spend a lot of time maintaining my property and trying to keep out certain plants, particularly invasive weeds. I buy Roundup from Lowes and find it very effective, particularly if you dilute it a bit less that the instructions recommend. My experience is that herbicides you can buy at garden center are overly conservative in their dilution rates but are otherwise as advertised.
Thanks guys
“Dry cattle?” That sounds terrible. Poor Bessie.
roundup found in fetal cord blood samples enough? in city dwellers.
advice for farmers in aus is workclothes to be washed in seperate machines from home laundry because of cancer clusters in farm families, pretty stupid cos the clothes are still going to be toxic to the wearer..throwing them away would be safest option.
fairly high cancer and nervous system diseases in older male farmers in victoria Aus have been documented. organophosphates probably the main cuplrits
but you couldnt pay me enough to even use roundup on my land. id rather do 3 rounds with slasher n tiller or more than open a bottle of any weedkiller.
So you don’t want to use actual data.
Well if you live near any full time agriculture farms you will quickly learn that virtually all farming chemicals, including herbicides or pesticides are way too expensive to spray on either the farm employees or on the farm products, so they are only sprayed on the pests whether weed pests of animalia.
Most farm crops grow in rows, where they haven’t planted any weeds, and the weeds grow in between the rows, where they haven’t planted any crops. Also both weeds, and crops contain Chlorophyll which reflects IR better than green, whereas dirt and soil are both brown and hardly reflect green at all, so it is a very simple algorithm that even silicon valley immigrants could encode.
1 … if it is in a row, don’t spray ….If it is in between rows, keep looking …. if it looks green , it’s a weed …. spray the damn weed … jump to … 1
G
I live in Florida and use a lot of Roundup.
I hope they have a sale on it to “reintroduce” it to the public.
I’ll buy & use even more.
A little bit of Dawn or Palmolive makes it work better……
Message received; I’ll definitely give that a shot (so to speak).
Roundup is already naturally easily absorbed by plant tissue, but even more so when the targeted plants are in dry soil and getting dehydrated.
Good point. The anionic surfactant causes it to better cover leaf surface for absorption. We use surfacant enhanced glyphosate on the Wisconsin dairy farm. Only takes a little bit.
Sunsettommy ==> The surfactant included in the Roundup formula is to help it spread evenly on the surface of the plant instead of bead up (like dew does).
Kip, this is why I said it, since it is designed to be readily absorbed, but doesn’t really need to cover entire leaf to make it effective, as the chemical translocate well inside plant tissue.
I used to apply the stuff by a home made wiper onto parts of Cocklebur leaves (a VERY nasty weed when it is big) which wipes them out easily. Rarely did 50% of any leaves get chemical on it.
Best applied when plant is wilting a little, which makes plant tissue absorb it faster.
ST, what you say and observe from personal experience is absolutely true. But a farmer spraying hundreds of acres wants to minimize cost, so maximize leaf area per spray droplet. Fully Wetting leaves is very expensive.
I sincerely hope that the initial efforts for a class action suit based on Round-up will have cost those lawyers a few million.
A nice fantasy outcome would be that the people that responded to the TV solicitation would all get together under a class action and sue the lawyers for wasting their time.
Anybody have an info on class actions over Roundup and whether any of them have been successful?
scraft1 ==> See Googling Round-Up class action suits.
None have been, or will be, successful in the US — the big study that everyone was waiting for, and which was excluded from the IARC finding, pretty much puts the kabosh on the suits.
This most inconvenient finding cannot be allowed to pollute the public’s mind. It could lead to all sorts of problems for the Gang. Someone might ask questions about DDT or the Ozone Hole, two cherished Eco-Doomsday poster children, and we wouldn’t want that!
makes me wonder if the Trump EPA might revisit DDT and do some true studies. But then I guess there is no one pushing for this as no one has a vested interest in it being made legal again for household use. Maybe if the Bed Bug epidemic reaches plague levels?
Peter, if malaria makes a return to the USA, you can count on it.
EPA has already done a study that basically exonerated DDT. It was handed to the then director of the EPA who ignored the study’s findings and recommendations. Instead he recommended the ban.
The problem with DDT is not that it is unsafe, it is a problem with resistance in target insects, e.g., malaria mosquitoes. yellow fever mosquitoes, etc. During the 1940s,1950s, and early 1960s DDT was grossly overused. It was used as a larvicide, pupacide, adulticide, and as a surface spray. Most target insects developed resistance to DDT and then other related pesticides. It was from DDT that we ultimately learned resistant mechanism in insects. Resistance doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t use the pesticide at all but that the amount required to get 95% mortality is so high it is not worth the effort. DDT does still make a very good surface spray for around entry doors and windows. However, so much DDT was used for so many different things and is so long lived it is still ubiquitous in the environment. However, bed bug return, the resurgence of malaria, yellow fever, and other arthropod vectored diseases is a directed result of the overreaction to pesticides lead by the organized environmental community and technocrats in government. Today professional in entomological health worry about resistance especially in light of re-emerging diseases. Because of the government and environmental zealots mosquito control have very few pesticides left in their arsenal. To get a older chemical re-labeled cost tens of millions and that cost is used by EPA and zealots to eliminate pesticides from the market place. Ironically China now manufactures most of the pesticides we have banned or made uneconomical to re-label.
I read somewhere that DDT has been used effectively and safely in some African countries, but that politics and persistence of fear of the chemical has prevented use elsewhere. Comments?
scraft1 ==> DDT is in current use in most of Africa, recommended by the UN WHO, mostly for indoor spraying (applied to walls) and for bed nets soaking.
Some countries still cling to the pseudo-ban and disallow its use.
They should do a study on the impacts of aging on cancer risk, and then ban aging. That would definitely reduce cancer rates.
Sounds dandy. But then, of course, the sick liberals would have to find and punish those found guilty of aging.
Then some college professor from a state college could go on a talk show and talk about how age is a symbol for toxic masculinity and everyone over a certain age is, by nature, a perpetrator of unspeakable acts against the healthy intersectional youth culture.
Then some activist will start a campaign, paid for by Soros, that all old people are agists and that college age students should be the only ones allowed to participate in societal functions like voting or even, say, breathing because old age is a function of Nazi symbolism.
What is really sad……I’m want to be saying this tongue in cheek, but I’m not.
EH ==> If you are genetically male, then your two biggest risk factors will be gender and age — risks increasing with age. The same is true for heart disease, heart attacks, obesity, diabetes, and about a dozen other things that will kill you…..but not for glyphosate-induced cancer — a non-existent risk.
If you are genetically male; then how does which of the 57 gender varieties you choose for yourself be a risk factor, unless you are hermaphrodite, which is not included in the sacred 57, so you are screwed anyhow .
g
Why do I picture carousel from the film logans run. They didn’t get cancer.
“[Personal Disclosure: In my youth, I delivered the LA Times seven days a week for several years, including the Sunday edition, weighing several pounds.]”
Geez, you were once a paperboy? A blatant conflict of interest!! How can anything you write be trusted since you are obviously shill for the Leftist MSM!!! /sarc (and then some)
SMC ==> Yeah…but if I didn’t reveal it myself, some muck-racker like Sadsack Sou in Australia would dig it out and beat me to death with it.
My understanding is that for people who chose to be informed about glyphosate at all, the concern was with a surfactant used with it, not the primary active ingredient. I remember speculation from a long time ago that the surfactant was more effective than the glyphosate. The EU has available glyphosate with different additives than what we get in N.A. I don’t know whether or not the concerns with the surfactant were valid, but I don’t think any realistic research showed concerns with the active ingredient (can’t speak for junk science though)- any concern we had was with the wetting agent.
BCBill…………….that was my underswtanding also.
BCBill & Kokoda ==> Surfactants can themselves be used as both pesticides and herbicides — Safer soap concentrate is still sold as an insecticide — and other strong soaps (which are basically surfacants) will kill many plants as well, mostly by dissolving the waxy substances on the plant surface causing the plant to dehydrate.
Personally, I hadn’t heard Roundup’s surfactant criticized — though it would probably aqffect insect populations if sprayed on them.
A quick search shows many articles of varying reliability about the surfactants used in glyphosate. For example http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GTARW.php
BCBill ==> The link to to a known “nutty fruit-cakery” site — no science there.
MSM is also silent on this really big news:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-27/new-trump-executive-order-targets-lobbyists-clinton-linked-individuals-and-perhaps-u
The media might be changing direction , if very slowly, extrapolating from 2 comments from the BBC a few days ago . No-one hates Trump more than the BBC but a few days ago , on an item about the tax bill there was a slight reference to the possibility that Trump might actually be achieving things- spoken through gritted teeth of course , but still.
Then there was another comment that was so unBBC that I could not believe it : a story that US pollsters now consider a Trump second term not impossible.
Reality eventually sinks in. The impending results of that story I linked to will be IMPOSSIBLE for the MSM and the willfully blinded portion of the public to ignore. Big things ahead.
I bet the BBC does not report this. I will keep an eye on “Farming Today” to see if they mention it.
Are you kidding me? The very word “Roundup” implies subjugation and enslavement. This is a racist, white-supremacist dog-whistle product. Does Trump have no shame??!!
I subscribe to the theory that a large enough amount of anything over a long enough period of time can cause cancer….simply because it’s a substance that’s constantly irritating something
It only takes five times normal Oxygen to give you ersatz lung cancer, which usually morphs into pneumonia, so you eventually drown; in any case it is fatal.
As far as I know Calcium is the only chemical that is absolutely safe, specially if consumed along with vitamin C.
g
Try dropping a block of it on your head. ;*)
Hi, Kip
The EPA study is important in its own right, especially for us here in Europe, where Roundup is a big issue right now, but the main thrust of your piece seems to be the NON-REPORTING by the MSM
You say –
” The revised issue paper was part of a larger timed release of a number of EPA statements on the 18th December…”
Did any of the Dec. 18th releases get more notice? Seems I don’t have permission to access the relevant EPA server, so I can’t even see easily what they were. Maybe MSM doesn’t normally pay too much attention to this stuff, unless something relevant somewhere else catches their eye.
mothcatcher ==> Try this link for the other documents. If no good, they may be restricted to Us IPs or something (wouldn’t have thought so). All the documents were on the same topic — glyphosate (Roundup).
In 2016, when the EPA delayed the release of this data, nearly every MSM in the US carried articles expressing outrage…. Google reports 3,820,000 results on ghe search phrase “EPA glyphosate news” — the US MSM simply did not report the news.
Thanks, Kip. I had assumed that the other releases would be on a range of subjects, and therefore MSM’s differential response could be examined.
Trial lawyers are known to lean left just like the msm. Don’t want to piss off the ambulance chasers. They might pull some of their tv adds.