8 ms·

Controversial pesticide research all but vanished from a major conference

199 points by stareatgoats 2y ago

tmaly 2y ago
My local garden place use to tell me roundup was safe to drink. A few years later the that big cancer lawsuit hit the news.
- hammock 2y ago
  Not to take away from your comment, but for those who clicked comments before reading, this article is about neonics not roundup
- google234123 2y ago
  A lawsuit != scientific evidence... which points the otherway
  - memkit 2y ago
    Sure... but Roundup definitely causes cancer in humans. It's well established at this point. "One international scientific organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), classified glyphosate in Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans" in 2015. In 2017, California environmental regulators listed glyphosate as “known to the state to cause cancer.”" That's not to mention the strong-arming, harassment, and threats towards researchers publishing papers that paint Monsanto and Bayer in a negative light. [1] 1. https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists/ https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists...
    - bpodgursky 2y ago
      It's really not.
      - memkit 2y ago
        I mean what do you make of the threats towards researchers? Surely that has limited the amount of scientific evidence published against the safety of Bayer's products, no? It's also a damning piece of evidence in and of itself, at least stochastically speaking.
        gruez 2y ago
        >I mean what do you make of the threats towards researchers? source?
        memkit 2y ago
        This is a decent summary of one tiny fraction of their unethical doings: https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists/ https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists...
        gruez 2y ago
        Skimming the first few parts, since the linked article is long and I'd like to avoid engaging in a gish gallop: >when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, her scientific analysis of the harms of DDT, Monsanto engaged in targeted personal attacks to try to undermine her research They said mean things, but calling it a "threat" seems like a stretch. Moreover after clicking through some of the links I still have no idea what they actually said aside from some well chosen quotes. >In the lead up to IARC’s report, Monsanto rolled out an “an unprecedented and harsh strategy” to discredit experts, wrote Colorado School of Public Health Dean Jonathan Samet. Monsanto’s attacks, he said, amounted to an “attack on expert review” itself. I skimmed the linked article and it doesn't offer specifics about what the "attacks" actually were. >Journalists at France’s largest newspaper Le Monde, in their award-winning series about the Monsanto Papers, described the Monsanto-led attack on IARC as “an effort to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible.” Skimming the linked source, it looks like the "attacks" in question are FOIA requests. >Following that email exchange, GLP went on to publish dozens of articles critical of the cancer agency — many of them personal attacks on the scientists involved in the glyphosate review, and some of them written by former chemical industry lobbyists and climate science skeptics. See first reply in this comment. >Engaging climate science denialists bad/questionable, not exactly "threatening" >Another document reveals that Monsanto consultants drafted at least one letter calling for an investigation of the “flawed” IARC process — and designed to look like it was written by a member of Congress. 1. The process is arguably flawed, as other commenters have mentioned. I think it's fair game to criticize them for that 2. I looked at the linked document and I can't imagine how anyone thinks it "look like it was written by a member of Congress". Nowhere does it claim that it's written by a congressman, and the signature block just says "NAME"? Is this even a real letter that was sent to Dr. Collins, or a draft letter that they wanted an actual congressman to send?
    - infecto 2y ago
      Is there anything in CA that is not known to cause cancer?
      - erik_seaberg 2y ago
        There's actually a list, but it's really big and includes possible exposure to toast (acrylamide) and beer (ethanol). There's also no compensation or incentive for doing any work to prove that a warning isn't justified, so everyone errs on the side of spamming them everywhere.
        roywiggins 2y ago
        The evidence for alcohol consumption causing cancer is actually pretty strong: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > evidence for alcohol consumption causing cancer is actually pretty strong As it is for red meat and hot drinks. These are low-magnitude high-significance effects.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), classified glyphosate in Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans" Group 2A includes red meat and hot coffee [1]. To the extent glyphosphate is problematic, it's in being toxic [2], not carcinogenic. (Though again, we can speak similarly of barbecue [3].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2A [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4993204/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4993204/
      - memkit 2y ago
        > To the extent glyphosphate is problematic, it's in being toxi [2], not carcinogenic. This is a fair assessment based on the published scientific literature. But you have to take into account the fact that the owners of glyphosate have 1) surveilled, harassed, defamed, and threatened individual scientists and 2) paid millions of dollars to ethically dubious scientists to publish articles in favor of the safety of glyphosate 3) paid billions of dollars to victims of glyphosate exposure because they were found liable (or thought they would be) of causing them harm Given those facts, I think it's reasonable to assume that glyphosate is pretty f*cking bad for you and it's truly mind boggling that people feel the need to defend it. It feels like everyone you talk to on the topic is a bureaucrat in the Soviet Union engaging in doublespeak. Clearly, the people harassing, threatening, surveilling, defaming, and bribing are the baddies. Clearly, they have something to hide.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > you have to take into account the fact that the owners of glyphosate have... Monsanto was absolutely shady. That doesn't change the biochemistry of glyphosphate. > it's reasonable to assume that glyphosate is pretty f-cking bad for you Almost every industry has someone being shady. Concluding adversely from that is not reasonable. (It's literally ad hominem, concluding an argument by way of the speaker's character and motives.) You said "Roundup definitely causes cancer in humans" and then provided sources. Your sources don't support that assertion beyond a very weak definition of causation, at which point we're back to it being similarly carcinogenic to widely-consumed foodstuffs.
- Modified3019 2y ago
  I work in agriculture as an agronomist, and did some time putting out small plots sprays. I absolutely fucking hate the drinking roundup meme. Yeah sure, pure Glyphosate has an acute toxicity similar to that of table salt (in rodents). So if you’re a rodent you can drink a solution of it similar to what you could tolerate with a salt water solution. But this says nothing of long term effects and is not a realistic situation and is fucking stupid. Glyphosate on its own is completely ineffective, it requires adjuvants in order to do its work, for the same reason you use dish soap when washing plates. You will never see pure glyphosate used unless you’re working in research where you’re intending to mix it with something. It’s like all that research that equivocates coffee with caffeine, but even worse. Roundup is always glyphosate plus surfactants, in fact the water/surfactant mix will typically be the majority of the bottle. Not only will these surfactants strip the protective mucus from your gut, it’s help the gylphsate cross barriers it would never be able to on its own, where it causes all sorts of havoc. If someone drinks undiluted roundup, they will die in a painful way, though that requires managing to get it down, which typically only happens in suicide attempts. A fully diluted solution intended for spraying is much, much safer, but still likely to make you very sick on ingestion or significant skin exposure like if you get drenched in it. Any study on the short or long term safety of pure glyphosate is worse than worthless, it’s outright misleading because Glyphosate is not Roundup. Bonus: most adjuvants (which often make up the majority of the chemicals we actually spray out) are exempted from the types of registration and safety trials we typically apply to pesticides. Only a few states are starting to make changes to that (California and Oregon or Washington I think, been a while since I’ve looked at it).
  - stogot 2y ago
    You buried the lead. Do you think roundup is unsafe or safe?
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      It seems pretty clear to me that they think that Roundup, in the form that is sold to regular consumers, is unsafe to drink. They even provided a detailed and rational explanation for why they hold this opinion.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Salt saturated water is also dangerous and lethal to drink. Does that mean that eating a little bit of salt, or any regular portion you'd usually come across in food, would be unsafe and lethal?
- pkaye 2y ago
  > In 2022, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) carried out a hazard assessment of glyphosate and concluded that it did not meet the scientific criteria to be classified as a carcinogenic, mutagenic or reprotoxic substance. EFSA used ECHA’s hazard classification for the purposes of the EU risk assessment on glyphosate. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/glyphosate-no-critical-areas-concern-data-gaps-identified https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/glyphosate-no-critical-ar...
  - josefx 2y ago
    Assessments by EFSA/ECHA are mainly based on studies and reports collected by the manufacturers. They rely in those being complete and honest. Monsantos internal email correspondence was rather explicit on how they would rather reach out to their contacts and kill any study they did not approve of before it could become problematic.
yuliyp 2y ago
I gave up reading the article about halfway when they hadn't mentioned at all how the program committee of the conference is assembled. That corporations sponsor academic conferences is natural: there are a lot of reasons it's useful: recruiting, networking, cooperating with other researchers, etc. And they're the part of those scientific communities that has the spare money to be able to provide sponsorships. That the article spent so long trying to convince me that this was sinister is bizarre.
- fabian2k 2y ago
  I also found the article to be far too verbose and the parts I read mostly tried to imply some malfeasance, but there was hardly any specific accusations. Industry sponsorship is entirely normal for scientific conferences, they would not really be possible without it. This also isn't an issue usually, the sponsors get some advertisment on the conference and some space to represent themselves. If sponsors actually would affect the talk selection that certainly would be a very serious problem, but I didn't see any real evidence of that in the article.
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    They spell out that: "This face of Corteva Agriscience, ... that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the organization ... " and: "However, during hundreds of sessions on these subjects, a significant topic went missing: scholarly research on one of Corteva’s products – neonicotinoids, a factor in one of the most controversial, high-profile areas of research in entomology." The article discusses quite a few angles about neonics. Close to the conclusion it quotes a researcher from the Uni of Minnesota: "I don’t think the scientific meetings are run by them or overrun by them," she said. ... "You donate money, you get a perk. . . . It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t." So, an issue that even I (a civilian) have heard of fails to be mentioned at a massive conference that should be discussing it (int al). That conference has a major sponsor who also manufacturer's said "issue". Also it seems to be accepted that if you pay, you get perks.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
wazoox 2y ago
There is no controversy at all among entomologists and biologists : pesticides are responsible for the huge destruction of insects, birds and biodiversity in general; they're probably very dangerous even to us. But money.
- RoyalHenOil 2y ago
  Pesticides are a factor in insect loss, but they are VERY far from the major cause of lost biodiversity in general. The major causes are overwhelmingly environmental destruction (e.g., the clearcutting of virtually all old growth forests) and the introduction of invasive species and diseases.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    I think you're probably right globally and historically. However, I think the parent's point is still valid for many localities. Sure, the medium to large animal diversity is probably low in our already mostly destroyed habitats (cities, suburbs, etc) but the insecticides are likely to be destroying what's left for the remaining insects and small animals.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    > Pesticides are a factor in insect loss, but they are VERY far from the major cause of lost biodiversity in general Oh hey, look at that - the exact position of the insecticide industry... ...which does not explain why bee die-offs in various countries (at different times) have coincided with the introduction of neonic pesticides in that country.
    - RoyalHenOil 2y ago
      It's the exact position of anyone who studies ecology and conservation. Bees are certainly being killed by pesticides. However, the claim is not about bees. It's about Earth's biodiversity in general. Pesticides are certainly a factor here, but pesticides are not why tuna are overfished, or why elm trees are being wiped out, or why domestic cats are killing songbirds, or why the Amazon rainforest is getting bulldozed, or why polar bears don't have enough ice to hunt seals, etc., etc.
MostlyStable 2y ago
So....this seemingly just reflects a shift in research priorities, and there is no evidence provided to the contrary, and no reason to remark at all, except that >Several entomologists who organized panels in bee science for the conference said that they were surprised to hear that research about the effects of neonicotinoids on bees had all but vanished from the program. but then also: > they also said that the field has shifted to an approach that accounts for multiple stressors on individual bees and hives, rather than studies of individual factors, and that the research presented at the conference reflects that way of thinking. This seems like a real nothing-burger of an article. Research interests ebb and flow. Science is as subject to fads as almost anything else, and conferences more than most things tend to reflect these fads.
3lit3krew 2y ago
Obviously nobody can trust The Science any more, too much big money involved. The best you can do is try to keep up with bro-science, which is often decades ahead of The Science, and avoid any new chemicals, food additives, drugs or therapies for several decades until we learn if they're really, actually safe or not by observing what happens to the guinea pigs called the general public. At this point we've all seen enough evidence to have destroyed either some, or all trust in The Science, anybody left using Science Juice or Science Gas or Science Pills either doesn't care, or wouldn't even if they knew.
- fincycaden 2y ago
  Absolutely. I began thinking this way when I was the guinea pig, and suffered a permanent life-alerting effect from a medication, which was anecdotally reported despite there being no official correlation or link by the "science"
doubloon 2y ago
you know whats funny is how we have become so efficient at producing food the government literally has to stop companies from producing it more efficiently or it would crash prices and cause economic disruptions. and restaurants throw out millions of tons of edible food every night but if you try to eat it you get arrested for stealing. your true crime was upsetting supply/demand. if people realized they could get free food at like 9pm every night then demand would plummet, so would prices, the restaurants would all go out of business. artificial scarcity is the business model of a huge section of the economy. but then there is also all this attempt by companies to make new chemicals to grow food more efficiently. and the government wont stop that. its ok if you are more efficient just not TOO much more efficient. if you made a chemical that could drop the price of corn by 99% ... the government would probably have to stop that in order to support prices. its like we have this weird machine where we have 5 different brake pedals and 5 different accelerators and different people are constantly trying to push all 10 of them. the bees get caught in the middle.
- rulalala 2y ago
  I am a food system scholar and endorse this 100%
  - RugnirViking 2y ago
    have you got any further reading on this topic?
    - rulalala 2y ago
      A tough question indeed. The literature IMHO only covers some limited aspects and partial views to the whole system. Then there is the paywall problem for scientific literature. Honestly I don't know where to start. EDITED: A suggested starting point https://eatforum.org/ https://eatforum.org/
      - rulalala 2y ago
        The research community is talking about creating a body to summarise existing knowledge for the public and decision-making communities --- the IPCC sort, but no one knows why is it not happening yet.
allemagne 2y ago
The clear implication of this headline is that pesticide research was deliberately covered up. A few paragraphs in the writer makes it obvious that faceless corporations are to blame. Here's the lede: >Only four papers and posters that examined [the effects of neonicotinoids on bees] made it into the conference, out of nearly 100 papers, posters and symposia on bee science. (Now it makes sense why the headline says all but vanished) Specifically, this is referring to a conference of the Entomologist Society of America. "Entomology" being the study of all insects. Bees, ants, katydids, flies, etc. How much out of a sample of 100 papers/posts/symposia should insect scientists be presenting new research on neonicotinoids and bees? Should it be more or less than 4%? Should it be 30%? 50%? I don't know, how on earth would I know that? Actual entomologists quoted: "I’ve never had a problem getting a neonic paper in a symposium", "For any given subject within entomology, what is covered in ESA conference programs reflects the ebb and flow of interest in it among the community and the focus of research being conducted in the field." However, this writer knows it's a lot more than 4%. How does she know this? Well here's an extensive study of a (probably nefarious) corporate partnership program by the ESA that accounts for... 3 to 3.5 percent of the society’s total annual revenue, and here's some people who argue that corporations are too involved with science. You do the math! The writer also repeats some variation of "pipeline to industry" six times in an attempt to horrify the reader. Why you should be surprised or angry that entomologists are by and large working regular jobs for private businesses after graduating, is also left as an exercise for the reader. Including this particular anecdote is also pretty telling: >Emily May, a pollinator conservation biologist who studies pesticides for the Xerces Society, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit group, recounted facing intimidation by agrochemical industry attendees after her talk. >She spoke at the meeting about how government regulators focus on the effects of individual pesticides on pollinators without factoring in the cumulative effects of a range of chemicals. >After she spoke, she said, five people from the audience stepped up and fired off highly technical questions, such as whether she had completed indexes of cumulative effects. >“Questions came in with ‘Have you done indexes about toxicity?’ . . . They were just getting very technical in their specific pushback on approaches to looking at cumulative toxicity,” May said. >“It was like my worst-case scenario, really. It made me nervous about the next conference I presented at, to be honest. It’s hard. People wanted to make me look bad.” >The source of that onslaught of technical questions: Employees of agrochemical companies, May said. Am I crazy to think that a conference is not where you get your ideas uncritically accepted, but challenged on a "specific" and "technical" level? Am I crazy for thinking that agrochemical industry stooges should probably be torn to shreds when up against a biologist who has done the research? We don't need to close our eyes and pretend like there's nothing to fear from corporations. There was an entomologist quoted saying "I’m not going to deny that there is an uninterest, or a bias, to not talk about pesticides and bees", which isn't nothing, but this was clearly drawn out as a response to some kind of pointed question from the writer about the ESA and neonicotonoids. I get that it gets clicks and eyeballs to play into certain narratives. Are we even slightly worried that if you rely on lazy and dishonest innuendo too much, everyone will become just as lazy and won't believe you when you finally break an important story that goes against their priors?
esel2k 2y ago
As someone who has worked for one of these multinational, I could have never imagined the stigma I would have when I said where I worked. On a wedding for example the discussion literally went silent when I said I worked for such a company. What nobody knew is that worked in GIS maps to warn farmers not to apply these pesticides near waterways. So I became more careful about clickbait titles and the hate against these companies and what is really having an effect in these ecology. Of course we spent millions on marketing and selling more was the target of our sales teams. The problem is more that the whole field faces immense pressure, stigma and lack if alternatives - making it unsexy for funding or to even talk about it. I would welcome more innovation in that space and a constructive discussion instead of feeding the stigma.. ps: I don’t work there anymore…

199 points by stareatgoats 2y ago

My local garden place use to tell me roundup was safe to drink. A few years later the that big cancer lawsuit hit the news.

hammock 2y ago
Not to take away from your comment, but for those who clicked comments before reading, this article is about neonics not roundup
google234123 2y ago
A lawsuit != scientific evidence... which points the otherway
- memkit 2y ago
  Sure... but Roundup definitely causes cancer in humans. It's well established at this point. "One international scientific organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), classified glyphosate in Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans" in 2015. In 2017, California environmental regulators listed glyphosate as “known to the state to cause cancer.”" That's not to mention the strong-arming, harassment, and threats towards researchers publishing papers that paint Monsanto and Bayer in a negative light. [1] 1. https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists/ https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists...
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    It's really not.
    - memkit 2y ago
      I mean what do you make of the threats towards researchers? Surely that has limited the amount of scientific evidence published against the safety of Bayer's products, no? It's also a damning piece of evidence in and of itself, at least stochastically speaking.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >I mean what do you make of the threats towards researchers? source?
        memkit 2y ago
        This is a decent summary of one tiny fraction of their unethical doings: https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists/ https://usrtk.org/monsanto/attacks-on-scientists-journalists...
        gruez 2y ago
        Skimming the first few parts, since the linked article is long and I'd like to avoid engaging in a gish gallop: >when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, her scientific analysis of the harms of DDT, Monsanto engaged in targeted personal attacks to try to undermine her research They said mean things, but calling it a "threat" seems like a stretch. Moreover after clicking through some of the links I still have no idea what they actually said aside from some well chosen quotes. >In the lead up to IARC’s report, Monsanto rolled out an “an unprecedented and harsh strategy” to discredit experts, wrote Colorado School of Public Health Dean Jonathan Samet. Monsanto’s attacks, he said, amounted to an “attack on expert review” itself. I skimmed the linked article and it doesn't offer specifics about what the "attacks" actually were. >Journalists at France’s largest newspaper Le Monde, in their award-winning series about the Monsanto Papers, described the Monsanto-led attack on IARC as “an effort to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible.” Skimming the linked source, it looks like the "attacks" in question are FOIA requests. >Following that email exchange, GLP went on to publish dozens of articles critical of the cancer agency — many of them personal attacks on the scientists involved in the glyphosate review, and some of them written by former chemical industry lobbyists and climate science skeptics. See first reply in this comment. >Engaging climate science denialists bad/questionable, not exactly "threatening" >Another document reveals that Monsanto consultants drafted at least one letter calling for an investigation of the “flawed” IARC process — and designed to look like it was written by a member of Congress. 1. The process is arguably flawed, as other commenters have mentioned. I think it's fair game to criticize them for that 2. I looked at the linked document and I can't imagine how anyone thinks it "look like it was written by a member of Congress". Nowhere does it claim that it's written by a congressman, and the signature block just says "NAME"? Is this even a real letter that was sent to Dr. Collins, or a draft letter that they wanted an actual congressman to send?
  - infecto 2y ago
    Is there anything in CA that is not known to cause cancer?
    - erik_seaberg 2y ago
      There's actually a list, but it's really big and includes possible exposure to toast (acrylamide) and beer (ethanol). There's also no compensation or incentive for doing any work to prove that a warning isn't justified, so everyone errs on the side of spamming them everywhere.
      - roywiggins 2y ago
        The evidence for alcohol consumption causing cancer is actually pretty strong: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > evidence for alcohol consumption causing cancer is actually pretty strong As it is for red meat and hot drinks. These are low-magnitude high-significance effects.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), classified glyphosate in Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans" Group 2A includes red meat and hot coffee [1]. To the extent glyphosphate is problematic, it's in being toxic [2], not carcinogenic. (Though again, we can speak similarly of barbecue [3].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2A [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4993204/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4993204/
    - memkit 2y ago
      > To the extent glyphosphate is problematic, it's in being toxi [2], not carcinogenic. This is a fair assessment based on the published scientific literature. But you have to take into account the fact that the owners of glyphosate have 1) surveilled, harassed, defamed, and threatened individual scientists and 2) paid millions of dollars to ethically dubious scientists to publish articles in favor of the safety of glyphosate 3) paid billions of dollars to victims of glyphosate exposure because they were found liable (or thought they would be) of causing them harm Given those facts, I think it's reasonable to assume that glyphosate is pretty f*cking bad for you and it's truly mind boggling that people feel the need to defend it. It feels like everyone you talk to on the topic is a bureaucrat in the Soviet Union engaging in doublespeak. Clearly, the people harassing, threatening, surveilling, defaming, and bribing are the baddies. Clearly, they have something to hide.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > you have to take into account the fact that the owners of glyphosate have... Monsanto was absolutely shady. That doesn't change the biochemistry of glyphosphate. > it's reasonable to assume that glyphosate is pretty f-cking bad for you Almost every industry has someone being shady. Concluding adversely from that is not reasonable. (It's literally ad hominem, concluding an argument by way of the speaker's character and motives.) You said "Roundup definitely causes cancer in humans" and then provided sources. Your sources don't support that assertion beyond a very weak definition of causation, at which point we're back to it being similarly carcinogenic to widely-consumed foodstuffs.
Modified3019 2y ago
I work in agriculture as an agronomist, and did some time putting out small plots sprays. I absolutely fucking hate the drinking roundup meme. Yeah sure, pure Glyphosate has an acute toxicity similar to that of table salt (in rodents). So if you’re a rodent you can drink a solution of it similar to what you could tolerate with a salt water solution. But this says nothing of long term effects and is not a realistic situation and is fucking stupid. Glyphosate on its own is completely ineffective, it requires adjuvants in order to do its work, for the same reason you use dish soap when washing plates. You will never see pure glyphosate used unless you’re working in research where you’re intending to mix it with something. It’s like all that research that equivocates coffee with caffeine, but even worse. Roundup is always glyphosate plus surfactants, in fact the water/surfactant mix will typically be the majority of the bottle. Not only will these surfactants strip the protective mucus from your gut, it’s help the gylphsate cross barriers it would never be able to on its own, where it causes all sorts of havoc. If someone drinks undiluted roundup, they will die in a painful way, though that requires managing to get it down, which typically only happens in suicide attempts. A fully diluted solution intended for spraying is much, much safer, but still likely to make you very sick on ingestion or significant skin exposure like if you get drenched in it. Any study on the short or long term safety of pure glyphosate is worse than worthless, it’s outright misleading because Glyphosate is not Roundup. Bonus: most adjuvants (which often make up the majority of the chemicals we actually spray out) are exempted from the types of registration and safety trials we typically apply to pesticides. Only a few states are starting to make changes to that (California and Oregon or Washington I think, been a while since I’ve looked at it).
- stogot 2y ago
  You buried the lead. Do you think roundup is unsafe or safe?
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    It seems pretty clear to me that they think that Roundup, in the form that is sold to regular consumers, is unsafe to drink. They even provided a detailed and rational explanation for why they hold this opinion.
mardifoufs 2y ago
Salt saturated water is also dangerous and lethal to drink. Does that mean that eating a little bit of salt, or any regular portion you'd usually come across in food, would be unsafe and lethal?
pkaye 2y ago
> In 2022, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) carried out a hazard assessment of glyphosate and concluded that it did not meet the scientific criteria to be classified as a carcinogenic, mutagenic or reprotoxic substance. EFSA used ECHA’s hazard classification for the purposes of the EU risk assessment on glyphosate. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/glyphosate-no-critical-areas-concern-data-gaps-identified https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/glyphosate-no-critical-ar...
- josefx 2y ago
  Assessments by EFSA/ECHA are mainly based on studies and reports collected by the manufacturers. They rely in those being complete and honest. Monsantos internal email correspondence was rather explicit on how they would rather reach out to their contacts and kill any study they did not approve of before it could become problematic.

yuliyp 2y ago

I gave up reading the article about halfway when they hadn't mentioned at all how the program committee of the conference is assembled. That corporations sponsor academic conferences is natural: there are a lot of reasons it's useful: recruiting, networking, cooperating with other researchers, etc. And they're the part of those scientific communities that has the spare money to be able to provide sponsorships. That the article spent so long trying to convince me that this was sinister is bizarre.

fabian2k 2y ago
I also found the article to be far too verbose and the parts I read mostly tried to imply some malfeasance, but there was hardly any specific accusations. Industry sponsorship is entirely normal for scientific conferences, they would not really be possible without it. This also isn't an issue usually, the sponsors get some advertisment on the conference and some space to represent themselves. If sponsors actually would affect the talk selection that certainly would be a very serious problem, but I didn't see any real evidence of that in the article.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  They spell out that: "This face of Corteva Agriscience, ... that has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the organization ... " and: "However, during hundreds of sessions on these subjects, a significant topic went missing: scholarly research on one of Corteva’s products – neonicotinoids, a factor in one of the most controversial, high-profile areas of research in entomology." The article discusses quite a few angles about neonics. Close to the conclusion it quotes a researcher from the Uni of Minnesota: "I don’t think the scientific meetings are run by them or overrun by them," she said. ... "You donate money, you get a perk. . . . It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t." So, an issue that even I (a civilian) have heard of fails to be mentioned at a massive conference that should be discussing it (int al). That conference has a major sponsor who also manufacturer's said "issue". Also it seems to be accepted that if you pay, you get perks.
  - deleted 2y ago
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wazoox 2y ago

There is no controversy at all among entomologists and biologists : pesticides are responsible for the huge destruction of insects, birds and biodiversity in general; they're probably very dangerous even to us. But money.

RoyalHenOil 2y ago
Pesticides are a factor in insect loss, but they are VERY far from the major cause of lost biodiversity in general. The major causes are overwhelmingly environmental destruction (e.g., the clearcutting of virtually all old growth forests) and the introduction of invasive species and diseases.
- giantg2 2y ago
  I think you're probably right globally and historically. However, I think the parent's point is still valid for many localities. Sure, the medium to large animal diversity is probably low in our already mostly destroyed habitats (cities, suburbs, etc) but the insecticides are likely to be destroying what's left for the remaining insects and small animals.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  > Pesticides are a factor in insect loss, but they are VERY far from the major cause of lost biodiversity in general Oh hey, look at that - the exact position of the insecticide industry... ...which does not explain why bee die-offs in various countries (at different times) have coincided with the introduction of neonic pesticides in that country.
  - RoyalHenOil 2y ago
    It's the exact position of anyone who studies ecology and conservation. Bees are certainly being killed by pesticides. However, the claim is not about bees. It's about Earth's biodiversity in general. Pesticides are certainly a factor here, but pesticides are not why tuna are overfished, or why elm trees are being wiped out, or why domestic cats are killing songbirds, or why the Amazon rainforest is getting bulldozed, or why polar bears don't have enough ice to hunt seals, etc., etc.

MostlyStable 2y ago

So....this seemingly just reflects a shift in research priorities, and there is no evidence provided to the contrary, and no reason to remark at all, except that >Several entomologists who organized panels in bee science for the conference said that they were surprised to hear that research about the effects of neonicotinoids on bees had all but vanished from the program. but then also: > they also said that the field has shifted to an approach that accounts for multiple stressors on individual bees and hives, rather than studies of individual factors, and that the research presented at the conference reflects that way of thinking. This seems like a real nothing-burger of an article. Research interests ebb and flow. Science is as subject to fads as almost anything else, and conferences more than most things tend to reflect these fads.

3lit3krew 2y ago

Obviously nobody can trust The Science any more, too much big money involved. The best you can do is try to keep up with bro-science, which is often decades ahead of The Science, and avoid any new chemicals, food additives, drugs or therapies for several decades until we learn if they're really, actually safe or not by observing what happens to the guinea pigs called the general public. At this point we've all seen enough evidence to have destroyed either some, or all trust in The Science, anybody left using Science Juice or Science Gas or Science Pills either doesn't care, or wouldn't even if they knew.

fincycaden 2y ago
Absolutely. I began thinking this way when I was the guinea pig, and suffered a permanent life-alerting effect from a medication, which was anecdotally reported despite there being no official correlation or link by the "science"

doubloon 2y ago

you know whats funny is how we have become so efficient at producing food the government literally has to stop companies from producing it more efficiently or it would crash prices and cause economic disruptions. and restaurants throw out millions of tons of edible food every night but if you try to eat it you get arrested for stealing. your true crime was upsetting supply/demand. if people realized they could get free food at like 9pm every night then demand would plummet, so would prices, the restaurants would all go out of business. artificial scarcity is the business model of a huge section of the economy. but then there is also all this attempt by companies to make new chemicals to grow food more efficiently. and the government wont stop that. its ok if you are more efficient just not TOO much more efficient. if you made a chemical that could drop the price of corn by 99% ... the government would probably have to stop that in order to support prices. its like we have this weird machine where we have 5 different brake pedals and 5 different accelerators and different people are constantly trying to push all 10 of them. the bees get caught in the middle.

rulalala 2y ago
I am a food system scholar and endorse this 100%
- RugnirViking 2y ago
  have you got any further reading on this topic?
  - rulalala 2y ago
    A tough question indeed. The literature IMHO only covers some limited aspects and partial views to the whole system. Then there is the paywall problem for scientific literature. Honestly I don't know where to start. EDITED: A suggested starting point https://eatforum.org/ https://eatforum.org/
    - rulalala 2y ago
      The research community is talking about creating a body to summarise existing knowledge for the public and decision-making communities --- the IPCC sort, but no one knows why is it not happening yet.

allemagne 2y ago

The clear implication of this headline is that pesticide research was deliberately covered up. A few paragraphs in the writer makes it obvious that faceless corporations are to blame. Here's the lede: >Only four papers and posters that examined [the effects of neonicotinoids on bees] made it into the conference, out of nearly 100 papers, posters and symposia on bee science. (Now it makes sense why the headline says all but vanished) Specifically, this is referring to a conference of the Entomologist Society of America. "Entomology" being the study of all insects. Bees, ants, katydids, flies, etc. How much out of a sample of 100 papers/posts/symposia should insect scientists be presenting new research on neonicotinoids and bees? Should it be more or less than 4%? Should it be 30%? 50%? I don't know, how on earth would I know that? Actual entomologists quoted: "I’ve never had a problem getting a neonic paper in a symposium", "For any given subject within entomology, what is covered in ESA conference programs reflects the ebb and flow of interest in it among the community and the focus of research being conducted in the field." However, this writer knows it's a lot more than 4%. How does she know this? Well here's an extensive study of a (probably nefarious) corporate partnership program by the ESA that accounts for... 3 to 3.5 percent of the society’s total annual revenue, and here's some people who argue that corporations are too involved with science. You do the math! The writer also repeats some variation of "pipeline to industry" six times in an attempt to horrify the reader. Why you should be surprised or angry that entomologists are by and large working regular jobs for private businesses after graduating, is also left as an exercise for the reader. Including this particular anecdote is also pretty telling: >Emily May, a pollinator conservation biologist who studies pesticides for the Xerces Society, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit group, recounted facing intimidation by agrochemical industry attendees after her talk. >She spoke at the meeting about how government regulators focus on the effects of individual pesticides on pollinators without factoring in the cumulative effects of a range of chemicals. >After she spoke, she said, five people from the audience stepped up and fired off highly technical questions, such as whether she had completed indexes of cumulative effects. >“Questions came in with ‘Have you done indexes about toxicity?’ . . . They were just getting very technical in their specific pushback on approaches to looking at cumulative toxicity,” May said. >“It was like my worst-case scenario, really. It made me nervous about the next conference I presented at, to be honest. It’s hard. People wanted to make me look bad.” >The source of that onslaught of technical questions: Employees of agrochemical companies, May said. Am I crazy to think that a conference is not where you get your ideas uncritically accepted, but challenged on a "specific" and "technical" level? Am I crazy for thinking that agrochemical industry stooges should probably be torn to shreds when up against a biologist who has done the research? We don't need to close our eyes and pretend like there's nothing to fear from corporations. There was an entomologist quoted saying "I’m not going to deny that there is an uninterest, or a bias, to not talk about pesticides and bees", which isn't nothing, but this was clearly drawn out as a response to some kind of pointed question from the writer about the ESA and neonicotonoids. I get that it gets clicks and eyeballs to play into certain narratives. Are we even slightly worried that if you rely on lazy and dishonest innuendo too much, everyone will become just as lazy and won't believe you when you finally break an important story that goes against their priors?

esel2k 2y ago

As someone who has worked for one of these multinational, I could have never imagined the stigma I would have when I said where I worked. On a wedding for example the discussion literally went silent when I said I worked for such a company. What nobody knew is that worked in GIS maps to warn farmers not to apply these pesticides near waterways. So I became more careful about clickbait titles and the hate against these companies and what is really having an effect in these ecology. Of course we spent millions on marketing and selling more was the target of our sales teams. The problem is more that the whole field faces immense pressure, stigma and lack if alternatives - making it unsexy for funding or to even talk about it. I would welcome more innovation in that space and a constructive discussion instead of feeding the stigma.. ps: I don’t work there anymore…