Hawaii residents want pesticide alert!!

[PaulW]

Uh, is this the same person who offered up their cat as evidence?

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Seriously rainyjim, what makes your conclusions any more valid than Chicken Little's?

glinda,
You used the illness developed by your cat when sprayed with roundup as an example of it's toxicity.
I would contend there are at least 10 products in your home at this moment, which if poured on your cat, would also result in serious harm to your pet. If used properly, they would not cause any harm.

What makes rainyjim's conclusions valid are whether or not they are conducted according to label instructions in order to determine their toxicity.

Portion of Hawaii’s drinking water that comes from underground wells : 9/10
Gallons of raw sewage that leak into the ground from Hawaii cesspools each day : 53,000,000 - Harper's Index

[rainyjim]

Hi Glinda,

Wow, you sure take offense when someone disagrees with you!

What nonsense. Where, what studies, what research, what evidence do you have to suggest your words are any more than hysterical ramblings?
Umm. Well my research is mostly on plant pathogens, but if you can be more specific I could try to point you to what you are looking for...not sure what you're asking for here to be honest.

Seriously rainyjim, what makes your conclusions any more valid than...do you actually know what you are talking about?
Well, for starters I'm a scientist that works in plant and environmental protection at UH and have a restricted use pesticide applicators license issued by the HDOA - is that enough?

You call people's concern for their health, for the communities health, an ideological crusade. What are you saying? That you know better and everyone else can go jump in a lake? That sure is what it sounds like.
Well, some people are attributing problems in Hawaii (birth defects and cancer for example) to causes (pesticides and GMOs for example) that have zero evidence to support them - so i'm saying policy making should be evidence based not fear based.

Glinda, I sympathize with peoples genuine desires to protect the environment and their families. I think some people just aren't qualified to rationally access the best way to achieve this goal.

[glinda]

I would contend there are at least 10 products in your home at this moment, which if poured on your cat, would also result in serious harm to your pet.

I think that's a weak argument. Those products, bleach, drano, windex? are not put on food, nor are they put into the environment in an appreciable way. They are not in our food, and certainly not covering our land.

Saying what's written on the label is the definitive word on a products safety is silly.

Can anyone post a link to an actually study, or any other body of evidence to support the safety of Roundup, that is not produced or paid for by Monsanto?

But still, as rainyjim says, to suggest that Roundup is anything but great is an ideological crusade. And that.. that someone would brand people's concerns for their health as an "ideological crusades" is the real problem.

[glinda]

From: https://euobserver.com/environment/137741

The EU's conclusion that a potentially dangerous weed-killer was safe to sell was partially based on scientific evidence that was written or influenced by Monsanto, the manufacturer of the product, an investigation by EUobserver and Dutch magazine OneWorld has revealed.
Earlier this year, a US court released a cache of hundreds of Monsanto's internal emails that showed the firm's involvement in at least two academic reports on glyphosate, sold under the trade name Roundup.

A Monsanto employee admits in one of the emails that the company wrote a study on glyphosate and later attributed the work to academics.

Another study on glyphosate was “redesigned” with help of company scientists in order to create a more favourable outcome, the internal emails suggest.

EUobserver and OneWorld have discovered that both of the studies were relied on by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) when it evaluated the safety of glyphosate in 2015 as part of the EU licence renewal process.

The documents, unsealed by an American federal court in California on 13 March, raise questions about the safety of the company’s flagship herbicide.

“You cannot say that Roundup does not cause cancer,” writes Monsanto toxicologist Donna Farmer in one of the emails, dated 29 September 2009. Farmer, who is writing to colleagues in Australia on how best to respond to a critical press report, says the chemical company has not done the necessary “carcinogenicity studies” to prove it.

Monsanto is facing around 225 lawsuits in the San Francisco court from people that claim that Roundup is the cause of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare type of cancer. Most of the claimants are farmers who have worked with the weed-killer and fallen ill, or relatives of the deceased.

More at the link above.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

not put on food, nor are they put into the environment in an appreciable way

What about the amount of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere every hour of the day? It's probably a far more pervasive problem than roundup. Yet we're gonna float around in the kettle and argue about a little too much salt getting sprinkled into the water, as the temperature around us slowly rises 'til we're cooked?

Portion of Hawaii’s drinking water that comes from underground wells : 9/10
Gallons of raw sewage that leak into the ground from Hawaii cesspools each day : 53,000,000 - Harper's Index

[kalakoa]

Suppose herbicides are illegal: now County/State have to hire 10x the workers and outfit them all with string trimmers ... which burn gasoline ... is the environment better off?

Maybe they should hire 50x the workers and give them all hand tools to cut the weeds? Now they need a fleet of vehicles to transport them to the worksite. Vehicles which burn gasoline.

Perhaps the string trimmers could be battery-powered and recharged from solar panels ... the manufacture of which involves large-scale environmental pollution ...

Why, it's almost as if the problem is really population density and lifestyle choice, with industry and chemicals merely supporting that decision.

[EightFingers]

Glinda said “I think that's a weak argument. Those products, bleach, drano, windex? are not put on food, nor are they put into the environment in an appreciable way. They are not in our food, and certainly not covering our land.”

Just where do you think Those products ultimately end up? Two ways at least: they evaporate into the atmosphere or leach into the ground water. I think a lot more people use those products than glyphosate.

So anyway, where are all the studies about glyphosates?

[MarkP]

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here other than to point out inconsistencies that make me uncomfortable. If he casually round-upped a cat on the neighbor's property he must have also even more casually round-upped plants on that same property. Not saying anybody is lying but the story relies heavily on a one-off event where the cat gets an almost lethal dose of an almost innocuous herbicide with no mention of the infinitely greater and more likely collateral damage to plants. This is not about how much you like your cat vs how much you like your plants. If someone killed my pet I would not consider the damage to plants, but that's just in the heat of the moment. Remove the emotion and one is left wondering how this careless glyphosate slingen' neighbor had the bad luck to deliver a near fatal dose the very first time he sprayed along the property line. To me it suggests that the cat got into something stronger and that the timing was coincidental.

I was also unaware that there were tests that could be used to test for glyphosate on a pets fur and that a vet would have that around.

Lastly I have dosed myself pretty good a couple of times by accident and experienced no noticeable effects.. I hope I don't get kidney disease later in life but it is a common human foible to mix and match such things: for example if a lifetime of low level exposure will cause cancer then the stuff is bad and a single acute exposure must logically have horrible consequences like vomiting blood exorcist-style. This does not in fact logically follow. All the evidence suggesting a correlation between round-up exposure and kidney disease say nothing about symptoms of short term exposure if there even are any, and none of the literature that I am aware of call out those symptoms. I therefor suspect that the symptoms were from something else.

[kalakoa]

the cat gets an almost lethal dose of an almost innocuous herbicide

Was there a tox screen/autopsy of the cat to determine its cause of death, or is the Roundup being blamed for being "nearby".