Roundup Herbicide Ingredient Connected To Epidemic Levels of Chronic Kidney Disease (phys.org) 106
A study conducted by Duke University researchers suggests that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, may be a potential cause of the mysterious kidney disease CKDu that has affected rural communities in Sri Lanka and similar regions around the world. The findings have been published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters. Phys.Org reports: Roundup is a glyphosate-based herbicide used to control weeds and other pests. Because it is supposed to break down in the environment within a few days to weeks, its use is relatively under-regulated by most public health agencies. But when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard -- like magnesium and calcium -- glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to seven years in water and 22 years in soil. In certain agricultural areas of Sri Lanka, the high, dry climate combined with its geological formations creates the perfect conditions for hard water. It is also in these regions that CKDu has reached epidemic levels, with as many as 10% of children aged 5-11 years exhibiting signs of early onset kidney damage.
[Nishad Jayasundara, the Juli Plant Grainger Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Health at Duke] believed that glyphosate may play a role in CKDu incidence because of the region's hard water, even though Sri Lanka has banned use of the herbicide. To test his hypothesis, Jayasundara teamed up with environmental chemist Lee Ferguson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke and his Ph.D. student Jake Ulrich. In collaboration with Mangala De Silva, a professor at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka, the Duke team sampled more than 200 wells across four regions in Sri Lanka. Ferguson's lab at Duke employs high-resolution and tandem mass spectrometry to identify contaminants -- even the barest trace of them -- by their molecular weights. It's a highly sensitive method of identification and quantitation that allows a broad view into the pollutants present in a water system. Through this technique, the researchers found significantly higher levels of the herbicide in 44% of wells within the affected areas versus just 8% of those outside it.
"We really focused on drinking water here, but it's possible there are other important routes of exposure -- direct contact from agricultural workers spraying the pesticide, or perhaps food or dust," said Ferguson. "I'd like to see increased study with more emphasis looking at the links among these exposure routes. It still seems like there might be things we're missing." To this point, Ulrich also found elevated levels of fluoride and vanadium -- both of which are linked to kidney damage -- in the drinking water of most all of the communities with high incidence of CKDu. The researchers agree that more attention must be paid to the potential contributions each of these contaminants is playing, either individually or in concert with others. But given the reasoning for their glyphosate-based hypothesis going into the study and the herbicide's high levels of use worldwide, they also believe these results should serve as a serious warning when considering risk of exposure to glyphosate.
[Nishad Jayasundara, the Juli Plant Grainger Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Health at Duke] believed that glyphosate may play a role in CKDu incidence because of the region's hard water, even though Sri Lanka has banned use of the herbicide. To test his hypothesis, Jayasundara teamed up with environmental chemist Lee Ferguson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke and his Ph.D. student Jake Ulrich. In collaboration with Mangala De Silva, a professor at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka, the Duke team sampled more than 200 wells across four regions in Sri Lanka. Ferguson's lab at Duke employs high-resolution and tandem mass spectrometry to identify contaminants -- even the barest trace of them -- by their molecular weights. It's a highly sensitive method of identification and quantitation that allows a broad view into the pollutants present in a water system. Through this technique, the researchers found significantly higher levels of the herbicide in 44% of wells within the affected areas versus just 8% of those outside it.
"We really focused on drinking water here, but it's possible there are other important routes of exposure -- direct contact from agricultural workers spraying the pesticide, or perhaps food or dust," said Ferguson. "I'd like to see increased study with more emphasis looking at the links among these exposure routes. It still seems like there might be things we're missing." To this point, Ulrich also found elevated levels of fluoride and vanadium -- both of which are linked to kidney damage -- in the drinking water of most all of the communities with high incidence of CKDu. The researchers agree that more attention must be paid to the potential contributions each of these contaminants is playing, either individually or in concert with others. But given the reasoning for their glyphosate-based hypothesis going into the study and the herbicide's high levels of use worldwide, they also believe these results should serve as a serious warning when considering risk of exposure to glyphosate.
How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Interesting)
I realise it won't be on the same level as pharma, but surely they do some some testing of their product on people, wildlife and with natural chemicals that may be found in the enviroment and see if they react and what effects the compounds may have on ?
It reminds me of the neonicotinoids situation. "It doesn't kill bees or other pollinating insects!". No, it doesn't, but it does cause some kind of neuro toxicity whereby they lose their sense of direction and can't find their food and/or way back to the hive. Clearly only cursory testing done with the insects.
Luckily banned in europe now.
Re:How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we turn the table on all those chemical products: prove they are non-toxic before anyone can use them on our foods, dump them into our drinking water supply, or in the environment at all.
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Only a communist state would impose such regulations on the free enterprise /s
Re: How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about we turn the table on all those chemical products: prove they are non-toxic before anyone can use them on our foods, dump them into our drinking water supply, or in the environment at all.
Great idea and something that is known as The Precautionary Principle [wikipedia.org]. It is something which the EU and especially Germany has implemented. On the other hand, the USA and other countries have actively tried to block it. If we look at why Brexit was funded by right wing oligarchs in the UK, then this is one of the key reasons.
Re: How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Informative)
Great idea and something that is known as The Precautionary Principle [wikipedia.org]. It is something which the EU and especially Germany has implemented.
Implemented is a big word. It is a principle that exists, but in practice, has been killed by the Lobbying groups. The Dutch Government refused to vote for banning Glycophosphate as a resultt. Same with GenX and other forever chemicals - despite knowing the harm, companies have been permitted to dump them into drinking water reservoirs (!) for decades. All they need to do is come up with one botched study that clears chemical X and you are good to go. Even worse is the permitted use of chemical cocktails, where a dozen of pesticides are mixed, each at the maximum permitted dose and then sprayed onto crops. Just because an individual dose is safe, does not mean that using dozen is. But that is what happens with Strawberries, where they might use between 7 and 17 (!) different pesticides. Anyone with some sense would argue that that might be very unsafe untill proven otherwise, but no... So Precautionary Principle, great on paper, not in practice.
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It's more a question of benefits and risks. Look at the COVID vaccines as an example. We needed them fast, and inevitably when you give millions of people almost anything, some of them are going to have a bad reaction to it. Should nobody be allowed access to those vaccines, because a small number might get ill or even die from them?
When it comes to weed killer, it's more a question of if there are good alternatives, if it can be washed away before entering the food chain, if workers using it can be better
Re: How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the psychopath's understanding of benefit vs risk - as long as the right kind of people benefit, it doesn't matter what risks and harms other people suffer.
With vaccines, as with other medications, the benefits go to those who take the risk - and they're generally choosing to take that risk because they want to avoid even worse risk, like getting measles or influenza or covid or whatever (your chances of catching and dying from one of those is FAR greater than the risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine), or because they want the benefit of being able to socialise with sane people who don't want to mingle with plague-carriers.
With glyphosate and other herbicides and pesticides, the benefits go to the corporations that sell and use them. The risks are borne by everyone else, involuntarily and unknowingly.
These two things are not the same. Not even remotely similar.
BTW, RE: "washed away" - where the fuck do you think toxins are "washed away" to? Do you imagine they just disappear completely? Wrong, they end up in the rivers, lakes, wetlands, seas, and oceans. And while some chemicals can and do eventually degrade to less harmful (or even harmless) chemicals, many of them don't. Many are "forever" chemicals, and many accumulate in the food chain and/or destroy entire eco-systems.
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That was kind of my point. If the main benefit is that it makes more profit for farmers, then yeah, screw that.
As for washing away, I mean in the sense that they are not on the surface of stuff we consume, or concentrated to the point where they can cause harm. Like in the US you wash chicken in chlorine to get rid of bacteria, and then wash them again in water to make them safe to eat. Personally I wouldn't eat that chicken, but it's how you guys roll.
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is there a chance AmiJoJo is talking shit? nah, couldnt be...
Is there a chance you will back up your statement instead of hand waving? Nah, couldn't be.
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Bro, if I were trans curious, it would be just like if I were gay. You would know because I would be posting about it in detail just to make you sad.
That's politically untenable (Score:1)
The main thing is for voters to learn what moral panics are and how to avoid them. Increased critical thinking and claims evaluation skills would be good too. That said corporations fight hard to prevent teaching those things in school for just that reason.
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And exactly how do you prove that something isn't harmful? Glyphosate is one of the most highly tested chemicals out there. It's been found to be safe, to any reasonable degree. But it's impossible (not just hard) to prove that there are no harmful effects under any circumstances. In this case, even if there re
Re:How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Glyphosphate has been studied and tested to an insane degree [wikipedia.org], with several thousand studies. Which is actually the problem: it pretty much guarantees that there will be some bad studies done, and then the media will run off and tout those studies without understanding how much cherry-picking what they're doing is.
Including... cough... Slashdot.
Professional review bodies reviewing the whole body of studies, around the world, continuously find low risk to people. That said, plaintiffs sometimes manage to convince courts that there's problems, or producers settle out of court to avoid the insane costs of litigation in these suits.
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according to the EPA https://www.epa.gov/ingredient... [epa.gov].
EPA scientists performed an independent evaluation of available data for glyphosate and found: No risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate. Glyphosate products used according to label directions do not result in risks to children or adults.
Scientists don't lie not this or COVID or Climate Change ;-)
Re: How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:1)
Yea, it's the same scientists office directed by lizards that does all the research, puts out all of the papers. Everybody knows the world is as simple as a sitcom. /s
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EPA scientists performed an independent evaluation of available data for glyphosate
(emphasis mine) So you mean, they did absolutely zero testing?
That reminds me of when NASA did their study on toyota sudden unintended acceleration... and they didn't inspect half of the code [embeddedgurus.com] that ran on the PCM.
Federal TLAs (and ETLAs) are there to rubberstamp malfeasance. They don't care about us. They're just getting paid.
Re:How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Interesting)
Roundup Herbicide Ingredient Connected To Epidemic Levels of Chronic Kidney Disease
I realise it won't be on the same level as pharma, but surely they do some some testing of their product on people, wildlife and with natural chemicals that may be found in the enviroment and see if they react and what effects the compounds may have on ? It reminds me of the neonicotinoids situation. "It doesn't kill bees or other pollinating insects!". No, it doesn't, but it does cause some kind of neuro toxicity whereby they lose their sense of direction and can't find their food and/or way back to the hive. Clearly only cursory testing done with the insects. Luckily banned in europe now.
It's actually really difficult to get research like this done. Companies like Monsanto/Bayer have embedded themselves into universities & research centres that do ag research & made them dependent on funding. The rule is, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you!" It'll be interesting to see what happens to these scientists' careers as a result of this. It happens in education research too, e.g. https://www.texasobserver.org/... [texasobserver.org]
What you describe is an integral part of the process of creating what some people around here call: 'a business friendly environment', an environment where you get away with killing off entire species that are essential to farming planet wide and causing epidemic levels of kidney disease.
Re:How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a feeling there are a lot of chemicals being ingested that are harmful to humans but that the powers that be will never acknowledge because the financial fallout to these companies would be too great.
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Look at the number of substances banned in the EU, compare that to the number banned in the USA, and marvel.
Maybe the EU ain't perfect either but there are at least signs that they care. In the US it's corporate corruption all the way down.
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Even with billion dollar settlements, making and using these products is required for high crop yields. High crop yields allows for certain parts of the planet to grow without insance poverty and hunger.
The same people who ran for half a dozen sho
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And that problem goes far beyond universities. When we allowed a company to patent the food supply and sue anyone who owns land that unwittingly contains crops with those patented modifications, there's only one hand to feed us.
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Also, there are lots of studies showing that glyphosate is relatively safe. BUT Roundup is not just glyphosate. It contains other stuff:
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Until now, most health studies have focused on the safety of glyphosate, rather than the mixture of ingredients found in Roundup. But in the new study, scientists found that Roundup's inert ingredients amplified the toxic effect on human cells -- even at concentrations much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns.
One specific inert ingredient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself - a finding the researchers call "astonishing."
"This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Roundup formulations are not inert,"
Re: How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:2)
Only for non-professional use it is banned in EU. Agricultural companies are still using it. For how long is an open question and topic of hefty debate these days: https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com]
Re: How much testing do chem companies do? (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Only for non-professional use it is banned in EU. Agricultural companies are still using it."
Which is probably exactly BACKWARDS. It is the mass spraying and daily exposure by companies and employees using it that might be dangerous. The home owner, using it to kill some weeds in the driveway and beddings a few times a year is probably zero threat.
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I think you got it backwards.
A professional will take professional care and wear mask etc.
A homeowner will not use it a few times a year, he will use it when ever he thinks: look at this pesky weed! Here it is again!! I get the can!!
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My wife uses roundup to kill things she hates. I warn her to use per the instructions, but weeds are her mid summer enemy. My farmer friend buys thousands of dollars of mixers and pumps as not to use a gallon more than he needs to because he is applying to 5000 acers per application. He can blow his kids college fund in a single application if he u
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The big corporations have a reason to use the minimum amount that will have the desired effect, because they have enough crops to use it on that the total amount can add up significantly. The homeowner has no economic reason not to overuse the product because they are using it on a much smaller number of plants.
In reality neither should be using it, in one case because of scale and in the other case because of the probability of overuse.
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>"The homeowner has no economic reason not to overuse the product because they are using it on a much smaller number of plants."
Have you seen the consumer pricing of Roundup? It is VERY expensive. There certainly is a cost reason to use only as much as needed. Just saying.
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The US EPA stopped publishing the data on this in 2004 so the most recent data I could find was 2001. I've compiled a table of use of glyphosate by market sector for that year. The home and garden market sector uses a relatively small amount of glyphosate but it's not minuscule.
There are a number of reasons to take the home market seriously
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> Luckily banned in europe now.
Oh you optimist...
Maybe from this year: https://www.pan-europe.info/pr... [pan-europe.info]
TLDR: banned since 2020, allowed by per-state derogations until now.We shall see if another trick is used next year.
And Europe still produces them: https://www.publiceye.ch/en/me... [publiceye.ch]
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Hm (Score:5, Informative)
So this hypothesis has been around since 2014. Not entirely debunked, but what they are saying is Roundup (glyphosate) in combination with hard water is toxic. Glyphosate degrades in normal water, but in hard water it forms complexes. Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Their study led to Sri Lanka banning glyphosate virtually overnight and the economy collapsed .. the people burned down the residences of their prime minister and other leading politicians.
Reference:
https://www.vox.com/future-per... [vox.com]
https://time.com/6175067/sri-l... [time.com]
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Re:Hm (Score:4, Insightful)
I think what he's saying is be careful when messing with complex systems as that may have unforseen consequences.
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- and no the researchers aren't all paid 'by Monsanto'.
That's true but the way that Monsanto/Bayer have embedded themselves into universities & ag research centres (to create as much dependency as possible) means that researchers' careers can be strongly affected by publishing papers that identify share-price reducing properties of their products. The rule is, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you!"
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Are you criticising a govt for protecting its population or for the way it protected its population from being poisoned?
Sri Lanka has a lot of other issues, but that organics only switch was a real trigger point. At issue is is an extremely important question.
Can the world support it's present population - around 8.1 billion people - if all agriculture has to be organic? The answer is no.
Now don't get me wrong. Glyphosates are a real problem. Why would a herbicide be a problem for humans? Glyphosates are endocrine disrupters, so yeah, they affect non plant life. There's even some evidence they are responsible for a lot
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Currently, the average yield for organic farming is about 80% of fossil fuels intensive industrial farming.
Do you know what the measurement metrics are? If the average is 80 percent, that means at the most efficient levels, they are probably at 100 percent.
With better plant husbandry organic farming yields can be greatly increased, e.g. at one point the world record yields for rice & potatoes we essentially organic farming methods (also used less water!). We waste a lot of food - obscene amounts of food goes to waste - so efficiency savings are an avenue that needs more attention & effort. Then there's the sheer quantities of (often subsidised) meat production, which is a highly inefficient way to produce food, & for those who consume excessive amounts (& that's a lot of people in western countries), also a public health issue.
The whole issue of food efficiency is seriously complicated. And you are correct that us nerds are not necessarily the best to judge what the best solution is. But there are interesting issues regardless. Let's take a shallow dive into the pool.
Let's say we eliminate any and all subsidies for any meat, and have a 75 percent reduction in meat consumption. The
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No cow poop? Well, we're still trying to work out how to deal with the sheer quantities of human
Organic does not mean pesticide free (Score:2)
Sri Lanka seems to have banned the use of chemicals to avoid spending the money on those chemicals (the patents of which were owned by foreign nationals). This feels like an attempt to become more self sufficient. It backfired because it wasn't well thought out.
The lesson is to listen to farmers first (and by "farmers" I mean "agriculture scientists") and only then policy wonks.
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it means not using certain pesticides [orst.edu], often much, much more of them to get the same effect. Sri Lanka seems to have banned the use of chemicals to avoid spending the money on those chemicals (the patents of which were owned by foreign nationals). This feels like an attempt to become more self sufficient. It backfired because it wasn't well thought out.
Okay - it seems like not spending money, and the presumption that Organic can feed everyone, they shouldn't be skipping meals, they should be saving money, plus showing the world the path forward of chemical free agriculture, pure and healthy.
I don't know it my remark was sarcastic, or just the answer to people who believe that we can go chemical free and feed the world at the same time. Sardonic perhaps?
Anyhow, perhaps it is just a couple years, and Sri Lanka will be doing just fine organically.
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> Their study led to Sri Lanka banning glyphosate virtually overnight and the economy collapsed
Nah, that's not why. Sri Lanka banned glyphosate because it ran out of money to import it. The ban was just to mask the lack of money, by virtue signalling "we're going green + organic".
Then came the infernal spiral of having to financially help farmers. But they quickly found out you can't eat money.
Every single person I know who supports organic farming facepalmed at that moment: that's not the way to do it.
Re: Hm (Score:2)
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Iain Tolhurst and his farm would disagree.
Yes, he's one in a million organic farmers who made it work spectacularly, but it can be done.
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Iain Tolhurst and his farm would disagree.
Yes, he's one in a million organic farmers who made it work spectacularly, but it can be done.
Iain Tolhurst and his farm would disagree.
Yes, he's one in a million organic farmers who made it work spectacularly, but it can be done.
I don't know what you mean by spectacularly, but his products are rather expensive.
He is doing well in a niche, but there's no way that farm can be scaled to feeding a country.
Here's his price list. A British pound is about $1.20 right now.
https://www.tolhurstorganic.co... [tolhurstorganic.co.uk]
By way of comparison, A bushel of wheat from commercial farms (60pounds) is about $6.80.
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Spectacularly in terms of yield per unit of land.
I never in my wildest dreams ever thought of it being economically (work-wise) equal, just that quantity-wise it might just about feed us.
Now I'm unsure whether it was this organic guy, or a farmer going "sustainable" that had equal yields as industrial...
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Found an old magazine cutout... Joke's on me: the comparison is with input-based horticulture, not agriculture.
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You can get much higher yields with intensive organic farming, but you can't use machine cultivation. And the profits of big ag depend on that. Using more humans is a non-starter because John Deere's shareholders don't get a piece of that.
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That is not a fact that is nonsense.
Look at EU. Probably half the farms are organic.
Or my farm in Thailand, we mostly plant rice.
No way to use fancy fertilizers, as the it would just flow away when the fields are flooded. And as we all plant different kinds of rice, and the fields are small and surrounded by wood, there is hardly ever any problem with insects/pests.
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You don't use any insecticide or weedkiller of any kind?
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No.
There are not any insects ever.
And the fields are done in traditional way.
That means depending on rain season the water is 30cm to 80cm deep on the fields. And stays like that for roughly 2 or 3 month (this year only two).
The weeds do not survive that.
Submerged rice, I mean the plant is completely under water, survives roughly 15 days, and grows slowly. Depending how the water rises or goes down again, the rice growing quick enough, etc. the rice survives, the weeds don't.
Of course we have lots of weeds
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It takes at least a decade to transition land from poisoned to naturally fertile.
Not just poisoned but also, they banned the use of fertilizers which they had been using up till then to make up for total lack of naturual fertility in over-used and abused land. That means the land won't even go back to naturally fertile in that decade unless you deliberately and carefully add lots of organic things to rebuild the soil.
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What is hard water? I am having serious issues defining that.
According to Wikipedia, it''s anithing 6.75 dH and up.
Since Switzerland uses fH, I found a conversion table. My location has 27-39fH. Which should be equivalent to 15-22 dH roughly speaking.
However, according to that table. 6.75 dH is soft water.
Do you know off the top of your head what these studies define as problematic hard water?
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Hard water has large amounts of dissolved minerals in it. When it evaporates it leaves a film of those minerals [reddiplumbingwichita.com] which can build up over time to clog pipes [blogspot.com] or damage fixtures.
The usual method to combat this is a water softener which your water is run through first before you use it. It's generally filled with a salt mixture which removes most of those minerals.
Hard water, compared to soft water, also has a different taste to it because of those excess minerals.
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Hard water is water with a lot of chalc aka lime, potassium, magnesium and other minerals.
The stuff that settles in your water kettle as a white powder.
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Hard water isn't (to me) a well defined term. It approximately means "water with lots of dissolved minerals", but not all minerals are the same. It's possible that in this case it's only the pH that matters, but often in chemical reactions it matters just which ionic species are present. (There's a big difference between sulfates, acetates, and nitrates.)
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If you want to use edge cases for argumenting, then you have to know what really went on.
Sri Lanka had a heavy subsidized agriculture complex. Basically fuel and fertilizer were given for free to the farmers.
The "new government" in its wisdom stopped that.
Has nothing to do with a ban of glyphosate - which is a weed killer and not a fertilizer. Working only really effectively on fields that farm glyphosate resistant GMO food, because there you can "just spray".
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I am also skeptical.
The reason is this: hard water is common in many agricultural areas in the developed world.
An example is Southern Ontario.
If hard water causes glyphosates to persist AND cause kidney disease, the uptick would have been detected by now.
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Correlation vs causation and scapegoats (Score:4, Insightful)
To this point, Ulrich also found elevated levels of fluoride and vanadium -- both of which are linked to kidney damage -- in the drinking water of most all of the communities with high incidence of CKDu.
It's strange that these two chemicals get buried while the headline blames another chemical, not previously believed to cause kidney damage, for the CKDu cases.
But if people paid attention to details, who would get their jollies from copypasta about RoundUp that doesn't even apply to this study?
Re: Correlation vs causation and scapegoats (Score:3)
Beyond that, it's not like hard water only exists in Sri Lanka. This stuff had been used, extensively, in the west since the 60s. We have absurd amounts of population level data on glycophosphate at this point. The fact that there aren't massive localized uptick in disease in the American midwest is the indicator that any potential health effect is both extremely rare and likely part of a complex process.
Also, on the chemistry side... it's not rocket science that molecules can complex and those complexs can
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Only in America (Score:2)
I'd bet the major problem with glyphosate is the way it interferes with our guts' microbiome. [nih.gov]
The summary is misleading. (Score:3)
I looked into glyphosate, since I needed a stump killer for an invasive species. To say it breaks down in "days" is assuming very ideal conditions and rather misleading. A more typical number I've seen is a half-life of under seven weeks - meaning that after about seven weeks, about half the applied glyphosate will remain in the soil.
I did end up using glyphosate as a stump killer. It seemed better than the alternatives I could find. But then again, I applied it directly to stumps along my property line, and other usage like that. I don't use it as a weedkiller on my lawn. YMMV.
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Indeed it does not break down so quickly typically. The main thing is that with proper use it will bind to the soil practically immediately, making it harmless while it breaks down.
Of course proper use means using it on soil where it can properly bind to, and not like breathing in the droplets.
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My ex-boss had people running around the RV repair lot spraying roundup on weeds in high winds without PPE. I see people using it on weeds on the sidewalks and in parking lots here in Rio Dell regularly, right next to gutters that flow into the Eel River. Roundup was originally meant to be used by spraying on leaves only. But you can use it fairly safely as a stump killer if you put holes in the stumps, and put it in the holes. In this way you avoid it entering the soil in the first place for the most part.
It's not just hard water (Score:5, Insightful)
Glyphosate persists longer in anerobic conditions than is claimed [archive.org], even when the water is not hard. 14 days in aerobic conditions, 45+ days for anaerobic. Consequently in typical factory farming contexts where machine cultivation is used (creating hardpan, which traps water, causing anaerobic conditions) you can expect three times as much of it or more to persist in the soil than claimed by manufacturers like Monsanto (still the world's largest producer of Glyphosate.)
It might well be safe within certain limits of concentrations, but its use in accordance with labeling will lead to higher concentrations than claimed by its proponents, and this is a well-known fact but they are still permitted to engage in conspiracy to commit fraud by claiming otherwise.
poor quality food is the problem! (Score:2)
Stop eating crap food and health generally gets better by itself, sometimes amazingly fast. You'll also reduce your roundup exposure avoiding this stuff.
profit maximizing Crap foods:
* refined sugar / syrups
* grains (including whole grains)
* "vegetable" (seed) oils (fruit oils are generally ok)
* alcohol
Also, don't drink your calories.
Ageng Orange all over again? (Score:2)
I always wondered about that stuff, suspicious since Back In The Day when I had to work a little with Agent Orange. Luckily I was a school-trained Staff Chemical NCO and knew enough to treat it like the dangerous chemical agent it was. I wonder how smart and careful many of the people working with Roundup are?
Pay the right people. (Score:2)
It's only toxic if you don't pay for the right studies or don't pay the right politicians.
Wouldn't everyone have kidney disease? (Score:2)
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Hard water is water with a lot of calcium and/or magnesium in it. HTH, HAND.
What a waste (Score:1)
So it's the shrimp from Sri Lanka (Score:2)
that kills our kidneys.
Roundup? (Score:2)
Bleeding Heart Sanctimony!!! (Score:1)
You people and your incessant fear of "possibly" being poisoned by Glysophate, while you hammer away at your sanctimony through the the keys on your keyboard sipping on your favorite alcoholic beverage; a "Known Carcinogen". I'll see your hypocritical, bleeding heart, sanctimony and raise you your own cognitive dissonance!
Glyphosate / Fluoride / Vanadium (Score:1)
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Is that all the buzzwords you could think of?