The US regulatory environment treats artificially prepared chemicals as innocent until proven guilty. A safer approach (recently adopted in Europe) would be to guarantee the safety of industrial, agricultural, and household chemicals before they are allowed to go to market.
On a potentially related note, sperm counts in the western world have been declining precipitously since 1990. I'd bet that glyphosate and/or other common poorly regulated chemicals have something to do with this.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropp...
You … find it disheartening that regulations require sound evidence? That’s odd.
> Among bee-keepers, asserting that "roundup kills bees" is about as controversial as "rain makes things wet."
You may be confusing Roundup with neonicotinoids here. The latter are known to harm bee ecosystems by weakening the bee immune system. Glyphosate generally hasn’t, despite previous studies (which showed no effect on bees). That’s why the new study is actually surprising (if it holds up, and there are already some potential concerns).
> I'd bet that glyphosate and/or other common poorly regulated chemicals have something to do with [reduction in sperm counts].
There is no evidence for this, and no good reason to assume so (for one, there’s no known biochemical connection here, and the general population does not come into contact with glyphosate in noticeable amounts). A much more plausible reason is the presence of residues from hormonal contraceptives in drinking water. But even that is tenuous, and general changes in nutrition are a more plausible candidate.
In sum, nothing of what you’ve said is supported by evidence.
I'm gonna invite you to a game called the Pepsi challenge, wherein you're obliged to imbibe a glass full of unknown chemical X and survive 24 hours before you spray it on food that other people eat and/or insert it directly into the foodchain. Wanna play?
It's not scare tactics to be careful with food specifically and the ecosystem in general. You see, we now have the science to actually do experiments and test things for safety before industry belches out thousands or millions of tons of the stuff into the foodchain, whereas 100 years ago we did not. IMO it is actually irresponsible to not do so. What we lack is the political will, and default positions like yours are not helpful.
In my very honest opinion, 100% serious--I think it's entirely reasonable to require proof of safety before society grants you permission to inject your newly designed chemicals into the food chain.
I think the onus and liability should be on the companies "inventing" new food stuff to prove that they are safe to introduce on the market before actually doing that. I mention liability, because if the stuff is later found to actually be dangerous and it's found that the companies lied/were misleading with their own studies, then people should be going to jail (no, not just fines, regardless of how big they are - we know they aren't going to bankrupt the company anyway).
Seems like the burden of proof would be to establish safety. If that’s not possible, why is it being used?
And where is this evidence you have that is is safe?
But it feels right!</sarcasm>
There have been many unexpected effects from the human introduction of long lived synthetic compounds into the environment. E.g. we had to learn the hard way about bioaccumulation and hormonal disruption. Now we are starting to see more and more cases [e.g. 1] where damage to microbiomes may be causing harm and we may need to make such effects part of safety screening and environmental monitoring. Could microbiome effects explain the crash in many insect populations around the world [2-4]?
1 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1365-2656.12...
2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/17/where-ha... 3 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... 4 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Theo_Zeegers/publicatio...
Free porn on internet looks like a simpler explanation. Or maybe we could speculate that everybody touching plastic keyboards for many hours a day can't be healthy.
Poor countries in Africa and Asia doing extensive and not-so-regulated agriculture should have an even bigger decrease in sperm count if pesticides are the only reason. It pours Glyphosate there. Probably is a combination of many factors.
This is also associated with birth control. The problem is that is hard to do extensive studies on this and get compelling evidence, but it is true, we are not "better safe than sorry".
Look at Figure 1B. The variation in the gut microbes is large at the start of the study (day 0). Feeding the bees 5 mg/liter glyphosate, they have a statistically significant difference from the control (no glyphosate) in 5 microbes out of 8. But feeding 10 mg/liter, they get no statistically significant differences from the control.
They have no explanation for why glyphosate seems to have an effect at 5 mg/litre concentration but not at the higher 10 mg/litre concentration ("The relative lack of effects of the G-10 treatment on the microbiota composition at day 3 posttreatment is unexplained"). They do give speculations, though.
What I do care about is what Roundup does. There are many many curious compounds in Roundup, and some of them appear to be much nastier than glyphosate. If for instance all of these stomach problems people have been having lately are caused by application of Roundup to aid in grain harvesting, we need to know sooner rather than later. And it doesn’t really matter as much to me which chemical is the culprit. It’s the same bad actors regardless.
Yeah. I dunno why that's surprising.
We put surfactants in pesticides so that the bugs absorb more. Stabilizers in other things so they don't break down. This is just another Thursday.
The recent development of gene drive on doublesex gene for mosquitoes gives hope that it can work for majority of insects.
And if we find a way to use similar technique for plants, the resulting reduction of pesticide use will be helpful not only for the people but also for remaining species of insects and plants.
But it's a great first study; there will be lots of people looking a lot closer at the link now.
From the study:
Glyphosate concentrations were chosen to mimic environmental levels, which typically range between 1.4 and 7.6 mg/L, and may be encountered by bees foraging at flowering weeds.
They fed the bees concoctions of Glyphosate between 5 mg/L and 10 mg/L, which at the top end is a bit more than 7.6 mg/L, but still quite near normal parameters found in a normal environment.
From a personal experience (I'm a farmer) the concentrations used in a residential context are exaggeratedly above the recommendation. They are mismeasured and generally high.
Plus, glyphosate preparations need to be corrected in pH (below 5 for maximal efficacy), which is something many people don't do.
The professionals doing weed control in cities absolutely must have training and adequate PPE. The same thing applies to pest control.
I'm not against professional usage of pesticides, but I would be OK with forbidding most insecticides and herbicides for personal usage. The every day insecticide spraying can? That thing is poison. Does anyone use a FFP2 mask or even a simple cotton mask? Many permetrine-based insecticides don't even mention that this active substance is specially deadly to cats.
