Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication
43 points
1 hour ago
| 6 comments
| lemonde.fr
| HN
delichon
21 minutes ago
[-]
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.

I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.

So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.

reply
hammock
9 minutes ago
[-]
You sound neurotic. Anyway just pull the weeds out with a towel and you hands, or use boiling water to kill them
reply
moab
20 minutes ago
[-]
How about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.
reply
analog31
42 seconds ago
[-]
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.

But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.

reply
derriz
4 minutes ago
[-]
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?

The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.

We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?

Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.

reply
delichon
16 minutes ago
[-]
I live in an extremely high wildfire risk area. I also have an extreme rodent problem. Keeping the vegetation low around structures is indicated.
reply
triceratops
11 minutes ago
[-]
Keeping vegetation low is a different problem from removing weeds in a targeted fashion. A simple mower or trimmer should suffice.
reply
moab
11 minutes ago
[-]
You can do that by mowing, fyi.
reply
delichon
3 minutes ago
[-]
I weed whack acres, it is a huge sink of my free time. But there are areas where I don't want to mow, I want to eliminate growth, like on my gravel driveway, and the area adjacent to my house. I should probably install concrete instead of gravel, but that's telling myself to just eat cake since I have no bread.
reply
Zach_the_Lizard
6 minutes ago
[-]
Can't do that in cracks in a sidewalk, between pavers, on a wall, etc. where plant growth can damage them.
reply
Zach_the_Lizard
8 minutes ago
[-]
Some weeds are quite unpleasant, such as sticker burrs. I'd rather not have a dog and children covered in those.

Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks, etc. or are poisonous.

It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.

reply
GaryBluto
16 minutes ago
[-]
How about letting him do what he wants with his own land and not insulting his ideal home?
reply
oftenwrong
8 minutes ago
[-]
[delayed]
reply
moab
12 minutes ago
[-]
You're entitled to your own opinion, but imo the point of posting anything on HN is to subject yourself to feedback. That's what I gave. Feedback.
reply
striking
8 minutes ago
[-]
Their comment asked for an alternative.
reply
GaryBluto
2 minutes ago
[-]
He wanted an alternative method to achieve X, not abandon X and do Y.
reply
snapdeficit
12 minutes ago
[-]
How about thinking about society and not just every man for himself? Clearly you didn’t read TFA.
reply
morkalork
3 minutes ago
[-]
No, this is HN where we voraciously advocate for the libertarian ideals of "I do what I want" then pontificate about the tragedy of the commons from an ivory tower when it inevitably all goes wrong.
reply
zzzeek
6 minutes ago
[-]
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.

but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.

reply
rybosworld
9 minutes ago
[-]
The sole surviving researcher attached to that paper is still actively publishing:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/author/24433485700/gary-m-will...

reply
Havoc
23 minutes ago
[-]
Corporations will keep misbehaving until the consequences are suitably sized to provide an incentive not to.

One of the reason I’ve been glad to see EU hand out chunkier fines. Or at least attempt it…but there is remarkable enthusiasm for defending billion dollar corporation‘s misbehaviour because that would be over regulation

reply
striking
6 minutes ago
[-]
reply
samlinnfer
9 minutes ago
[-]
So what's the current speculation on how it causes cancer?

Glyphosate acts on the Shikimate pathway that doesn't exist in humans.

Is it killing gut bacterial?

reply
jeffwask
29 minutes ago
[-]
Faking research data that then leads to the death of citizens from your product should result in a corporate death sentence.
reply
oftenwrong
13 minutes ago
[-]
The problem is always how well one can prove that any harm was done, or that theoretical harm would be done.
reply