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People who have been exposed to the chemical got cancer. Internal Monsanto documents show the link and their concern. A man got a court to rule in his favour f
by abe_duarte 4y ago
People who have been exposed to the chemical got cancer. Internal Monsanto documents show the link and their concern. A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-trial-cancer-dewayne-johnson-ruling https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr...
- WillPostForFood 4y agoPeople who have been exposed to <everything possible in the world> got cancer, but that is meaningless in showing causation. Internal documents show concern, but show no evidence that it causes cancer, or that Monsanto had internal data showing it caused cancer.
- zzzeek 4y agoright and that's why they just settled instead of proving their product is safe
- omginternets 4y agoYou don’t prove a product is safe. You fail to prove it isn’t.
- mushbino 4y agoConsidering how much money they have and the size of their very highly paid legal team, I'd say that says a lot.
- foobiekr 4y agoActually, for _most_ products, the best they do is _in different trials it appears safe_. They don't even try and prove the product isn't safe.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIn a civil lawsuit, the actual legal standard is "preponderance of evidence". Factor that by cost of defending the case and potential risk of payout in that and future cases as well. A multimillion dollar settlement suggests some doubt on the part of the defendant to establish their case.
- omginternets 4y agoI was speaking scientifically.
- zzzeek 4y agoi was speaking legally
- dredmorbius 4y agoAgreement on terms and context is critical to discussion. (Applies to this entire thread, not just parent comment.)
- dredmorbius 4y ago... and just because this is still bothering me: A surprisingly common form of conversational failure is when two (or more) parties are discussing some matter all with different ideas as to what is being discussed or the context of the discussion. I'd run across a good description of that recently though I can't seem to recall where / find it presently. It's not included in this discussion of Wiio's Laws, though there's enough other material there that's excellent guidance for communication that I'm linking it regardless: https://jkorpela.fi/wiio.html https://jkorpela.fi/wiio.html
- yarg 4y agoIf X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
- aetherson 4y agoCompanies settle lawsuits all the time for claims they believe are meritlesss, for two reasons: 1. Going through a lawsuit all the way to conclusion, even if you win, is a long, expensive process that potentially exposes you to a considerable amount of negative publicity and causes a degree of internal chaos. 2. Juries are unpredictable and even a small chance of a bad outcome may be worth paying to avoid.
- emodendroket 4y agoIf this is to be believed, they've set aside _billions_ for cancer-related claims and pulled the product from the residential market, and there are still questions about the EPA's ruling that it is safe. Definitive, no, but certainly raises serious questions. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/court-rejects-trump-era-epa-finding-that-roundup-weed-killer-is-safe https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/court-rejects-trump-era-...
- xattt 4y agoThis type of rhetoric isn’t helpful, except to companies and manufacturers looking to minimize the attention around specific products with known carcinogenic properties.
- whimsicalism 4y agoWhat? It's about thinking about causality in a clear way.
- kspacewalk2 4y agoThis type of rhetoric isn’t helpful, except to people who wish to replace basic critical thinking and healthy skepticism with vacuous opinionated polemics on evil corporations and their general evilness.
- xattt 4y agoBlind acceptance is just as dangerous as toxic skepticism.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agowell it also doesn't help to make assumptions based on skewed correlations. Every living animal, including us, drinks water. Every living animal dies. Is there something in the water maybe? I don't see how this line of reasoning can be helpful honestly. --- There is no limit on how much damages this mentality can do. Think about the recent stream of people got COVID vaccine, then died
- rascul 4y ago> Is there something in the water maybe? It has DHMO in it. It's pretty bad. https://dhmo.org/facts.html https://dhmo.org/facts.html
- vixen99 4y agoMany consider glyphosate as the most heavily used weed-killer in history. If 'internal documents show concern', what should we conclude? https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/03/glyphosate-most-heavily-used-weedkiller-history https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/03/glyphosate-most-heavily... https://www.greens-efa.eu/legacy/fileadmin/dam/Documents/Studies/Environment_health/EUMP-results.pdf https://www.greens-efa.eu/legacy/fileadmin/dam/Documents/Stu... (All members of the EU Parliament from 13 countries, excrete glyphophosphate in their urine). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18110-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18110-0 (Quantifable urine glyphosate levels detected in 99% of the French population, with higher values in men, in younger people, and in farmers)
- chasil 4y agoThe wiki summary says two important things. Glyphosate is the "penicillin of agriculture," a foundational discovery that has revolutionized the industry. Glyphosate alone has not been found to be a strong carcinogen in scientific studies, but testing with the surfactants, adjuvents, and other additives with which it is normally used may increase the carcinogenicity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- djcannabiz 4y agousername checks out ;)
- phkahler 4y agoIt's safe to drink, here have some: https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM
- hyperdimension 4y agoThis comment contains allegations known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.
- more_corn 4y agoBoy, the Monsanto shills are out tonight.
- pvaldes 4y agoThe real question is why there is herbicide in your urine. Everything else is a smoke curtain. Why if it does not cause cancer but is behind the obesity epidemic?, or related with the autism increase starting at exactly the same years?. "Not causes cancer" does not mean "is harmless". This stuff shouldn't be there
- user3939382 4y agoAs far as I’m concerned Bayer and Monsanto are like evil incarnate and last time I brought up this lawsuit on HN I was shocked people were defending them. We’re talking about the company that intentionally sold HIV infected blood to people. If it was legal and they could increase profits by lighting people on fire they would do it. Yet people trust corrupt research that they paid for showing their product is safe. Well their crap poison is on almost all the produce in every grocery store in the country so I guess they get the last laugh.
- marc_abonce 4y ago> Bayer [...] intentionally sold HIV infected blood to people. I had no idea about this. For anyone else that's curious: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/aids.suzannegoldenberg https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/aids.suzannego... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...
- emodendroket 4y agoNot only impressively cynical but seems pretty reckless.
- hiptobecubic 4y agoJesus Christ.. Imagine being in jail for selling weed to someone who wanted it, meanwhile everyone that orchestrated this is still relaxing on their yachts. Unbelievable.
- teachrdan 4y agoI love the fact that Beyer retired the Monsanto brand. It's a real bad sign when a company whose most famous product is Zyklon B tells you that your brand is toxic. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/04/monsanto-to-ditch-its-infamous-name-after-sale-to-bayer https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/04/monsanto-to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B
- telesoft 4y ago
- adrr 4y agoThere’s more than glyphosate in roundup. Also if glyphosate increased the risk of cancer, we would see cancer increase when it started to get widely used. Cancer rates except for skin cancer keep falling.
- lostlogin 4y agoIt’s possible that rates would have fallen further if glyphosate wasn’t present.
- aetherson 4y agoSure. Anything's possible. This is a fully generalizable argument. Maybe you, personally, cause 10% of the world's cancer, but other factors have caused an overall falling cancer rate, but when you, personally, die or turn off your magical cancer-causing powers, rates will fall even further.
- emodendroket 4y agoAs far as I can tell the lawsuits they've lost have concerned non-Hodgkin's lymphoma where the picture looks a bit more mixed. https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/nhl.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/nhl.html
- User23 4y agoVirtually everyone who eats food has been exposed to glyphosate at this point. You could use the same logic to conclude water is a carcinogen. Every case of cancer is clearly linked to water exposure.
- HPsquared 4y agoIt also works the other way: people who stop consuming water almost never die of cancer.
- gruez 4y ago>A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr... You seem to be presenting this fact as some sort of that bayer is guilty, but it's not really convincing. For one, it's a 8 person jury in san francisco. I'd expect them to rule against bayer on ideological grounds (ie. little guy vs multi bililon dollar multinational corporation) alone. Second, if there's no scientific consensus on the effects of glysophate, I doubt a panel of laypersons would do better.
- emodendroket 4y agoIf the jurors all just ruled against Bayer "on ideological grounds" then their counsel was asleep at the wheel.
- noirbot 4y agoPerhaps, but there's also a reason most lawyers do their best to make sure their case is heard in a favorable jurisdiction. You can only strike so many jurors for something as banal as "doesn't like large multinational corporations", which it's not obvious that would entirely bias them. It's not to say that every juror walked in already decided on it, but I'd somewhat expect a panel of urban CA citizens to be at least 60/40 in favor of a person against a big corp, and so if the evidence is already somewhat in that direction, then that's how it goes.
- smsm42 4y agoWhy would that be? Lawyers aren't magicians, if the jury is predisposed to rule in certain way, the lawyer can flap their lips as long as they wanted, and change nothing. Ingrained convictions are remarkably hard to change, even if presented with undeniable contradicting evidence - see example of apocalyptic cults surviving failed prophecy repeatedly. Councils aren't wizards, and they can reject only so many potential jurors. If there are none to be found that would listen, then council can't do much.
- 4y ago
- randomdata 4y agoThe jury believed that surfactants added to the product sold under the Roundup brand, not glyphosate itself, was the cause of cancer in that case.