SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Justice Michael Lee handed down his judgement in the class action against widely-used herbicide Roundup on Thursday afternoon.
The case, launched by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, claims Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate caused the cancer of more than 800 Australian non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients.
Justice Lee ruled there is not enough current evidence to say glyphosate is carcinogenic and capable of causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.
The judge only needed to consider the question of general causation – not the specific claims of lead applicant Kelvin McNickle or the other class action group members.
Justice Lee ordered the proceedings be dismissed.
Bayer, which acquired Roundup's producer Monsanto in 2018, has previously stated glyphosate-based herbicides have been rigorously tested in hundreds of studies and it is safe when used as directed.
Related:
•Study First to Link Weed Killer Roundup to Convulsions in Animals
•US Supreme Court Rejects Bayer's Bid to End Roundup Lawsuits
•Bayer Loses Appeal of Ruling That its Weed Killer Causes Cancer
•Widely Used Herbicide Linked to Preterm Births
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday July 28 2024, @04:24PM (5 children)
I almost guarantee the problem, if it's ever solved, is going to be like the pet food - melamine scandal.
Pet food is "mostly harmless" to pets. To save money some companies ground up melamine and added it to the pet food and killed many pets.
Likewise, glyphosate is biochemically almost certain to be harmless to anything that's not a plant unless you literally drown in it. Like if you drink so much that your pee or breath can kill weeds. However, in an infinitely large would there will be companies trying to save a buck whom use pure liquic dioxin or straight benzene or some damn thing to "save money" because of course glyphosate will get the blame LOLs while they get the fat pay checks.
Crazy fact, Glyphosate is odorless. If someone's spraying it and you smell anything, you're smelling god knows what, probably something way more toxic than glyphosate. Sort of like paint, sniffing paint is quite harmless there's dried paint all over the inside of my house that is very near odorless and seems harmless, although a continuous snort of paint THINNER fumes is extremely bad for your brain.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Sunday July 28 2024, @04:52PM (4 children)
The Internets may say so, but that's not true -- I've worked with pure glyphosate in the 90s, and it does smell.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday July 28 2024, @07:43PM (3 children)
Well don't leave us in suspense, LOL... what did it smell like?
Its vapor pressure is close enough to zero that an open jar of dry crystals shouldn't evaporate away faster than it'll get covered by dust; however maybe if it's really warm etc.
I never messed with that in ochem lab, and apparently, you did, but every technical resource I look up claims its completely odorless... HOWEVER you can buy it as a sodium salt or other salts, which I bet are odorless, or if you buy as a monoammonium, I bet the breakdown products could smell very faintly like ammonia. The isopropylamine salt "should" smell vaguely ammonia-like also if it breaks down. Its not going to break down fast. But if you had a giant container and stuck your nose in it after a "long time" I bet it smelled faintly ammonia-like, from the ammonia.
If you figure water has a vapor pressure in the "meh twenties mm" at room temp and the data sheets say glyphosate is around 10-8 so figure it evaporates (sublimates) about a billion times slower than water. So I think it plausible an open jar would crust over with settled outside air dust before it sublimated away. In a fume hood maybe it would sublimate away but its gonna take awhile...
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday July 29 2024, @04:31PM (2 children)
I've never seen them in salt form. What I used was a pure white liquid with high viscosity; the smell reminded of paint. To further dilute, distilled water was used.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 29 2024, @09:25PM (1 child)
It's a crystalline solid, although it's pretty soluble so they could have dissolved it in near anything.
Huffing the paint solvent fumes is very likely more dangerous than the glyphosate itself. Paint chems are probably a "good" idea for killing weeds; some kind of viscosity lowering stuff so its easier to spray and something that works into pores like a penetrating oil and maybe something to slow evaporation and probably some kind of interesting pH buffer to keep the above list happy; generally none of that stuff is good for people, of course.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday July 30 2024, @11:48AM
This was a project for Monsanto; as far as I can recall, you couldn't buy this product as an end-user. If there was a solvent used other than water, I should have known about that.