The key words that oversight organizations keep repeating are basically "There's no evidence of long term health effects when used as directed."
The problem with glyphosate is that even if it does turn out to cause some kind of cancer, it's acute toxicity is incredibly low, lower than table salt. As as a result, people can easily ignore the directions for years with minimal, if any, health effects.
However, the anti-glyphosate crowd has completely failed for the last 40 years to provide any definitive proof that it causes cancer, what cancers it might cause, any kind of dose-response curve, or any other evidence that what we're seeing is anything else that chance. Non-hodgkin's lymphoma is relatively rare, but glyphosate usage is not. Take any popular product, nail polish, Nike shoes, Cheeze-its, and with enough scrutiny you will be able to correlate the population of heavy users with some rare and critical health condition. It's inevitable. You can tell such a claim is likely spurious by weak and contradictory findings, alongside frequent goalpost moving and changing claims from the product's critics. This is exactly what we see with glyphosate.
So why is glyphosate so criticised? Why did Greenpeace fight nuclear power so hard in the 60's and 70's, even though fossil fuels were far worse for their claimed cause? Why are there so many anti-vaxers? Why was golden rice destroyed? People don't need a rational reason to fervently take up a cause. Especially if they think they're fighting an evil empire.
The craziest thing is that even if glyphosate is as carcinogenic as its detractors claim, it's still far less toxic than most, if not all, of the other less controversial herbicides. In other words, anti-glyphosate campaigners are not choosing targets based on harm, they're choosing targets based on popularity.
From what I've read, glyphosate alone may not be carcinogenic, but it may interact with nitrite to form an n-nitroso compound that may be carcinogenic.
>>An email by Michael Cunningham (Monsanto) to several other colleagues found them discussing N-nitrosoglyphosate (“NNG”), a known carcinogen, that can be formed as reaction between glyphosate and nitrites, which are found in many foods. Specifically, Cunningham quoted Dr. Ruth Shearer from 1984: “The problem with glyphosate… is that it combines readily with nitrites, found in normal human saliva, to form an N-nitroso compound called Nnitrosoglyphosate. Although that particular compound has not been tested as a cancer-causing agent, over 75% of all other N-nitroso compounds so tested have been shown to cause cancer by way of tumour formation.”
Regardless of whether glyphosate and nitrite can interact to form a carcinogen, I suspect we often miss potentially dangerous chemical interactions because of the way we test things.
What I wonder is if n-nitrosoglyphosate is more/less carcinogenic than any of the other things nitrites could react with to create n-nitroso-x compounds.
Nitrites are heavily applied as a preservative. Not sure if that’s where the ones in saliva come from or if naturally occurring (in large amounts anyway).
If glyphosate does in fact turn out to be dangerous, then some sort of carcinogenic secondary product seems like the most probable source of carcinogenicity for glyphosate. However, there seems to be a lot of confusion from glyphosate critics about which products to test and as a result, I'm not aware of any definitive research that shows a) there are secondary products which are relevant for glyphosate used as directed that b) also definitely cause cancer.
From your first link, Dr. Perry's belief that glyphosate might be clastogenic is certainly interesting, but also a little weird. The proposed mechanism is that glyphosate causes oxidative damage to to DNA which causes strand breakage. This is not a subtle mechanism and I would expect evidence for it to be readily available from simple tests like the Ames test. If you have the research he's using to support this claim, I'd definitely be interested in seeing it.
At the end of the day, we're left with the same haunting question however, if glyphosate so definitely causes cancer, then why has it been so hard to figure out? Monsanto is much smaller than the tobacco companies were so it's hard for me to believe that Monsanto masterminded some global conspiracy when they were only about the size of Expedia when Monsanto were bought out. Many of the most important papers critical of glyphosate have a number of issues. The IARC monograph seemed to deliberately exclude contradictory data, including a study that one of the monograph's writers was directly involved in. Even then, the monograph wasn't particularly definitive. The oft cited metastudy that came out in 2019 seemed like a big deal, but on closer inspection, they had decided that out of nearly 40 years of research, they would only examine 7 papers. Not to mention they also relied on data from exposure levels far in excess of directions provided by Monsanto.
The strongest conclusions we have about glyphosate seem to be that for exposure levels 10-100 times recommended by major health organizations and Monsanto there may be an increased chance of some cancers, though the effect doesn't seem to be large. This conclusion can get funky because some data (the IARC panel was criticized heavily for this) suggest that past a certain point, higher levels of glyphosate correlate with lower cancer rates.
“ A California jury on Friday found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit filed by a man who alleged the company’s glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, caused his cancer and ordered the company to pay $289 million in damages.”
I don’t find it funny. Monsanto had a huge team of high priced lawyers, and all the corrupt junk science they paid for, against this lone nobody and their case was so bad they /still/ lost.
That's still not scientific evidence though. The legal process operates on entirely different principles. A jury is not peer review, and the lawyers get to choose which facts to reveal and which might cause PR nightmares and are best left out.
The problem with glyphosate is that even if it does turn out to cause some kind of cancer, it's acute toxicity is incredibly low, lower than table salt. As as a result, people can easily ignore the directions for years with minimal, if any, health effects.
However, the anti-glyphosate crowd has completely failed for the last 40 years to provide any definitive proof that it causes cancer, what cancers it might cause, any kind of dose-response curve, or any other evidence that what we're seeing is anything else that chance. Non-hodgkin's lymphoma is relatively rare, but glyphosate usage is not. Take any popular product, nail polish, Nike shoes, Cheeze-its, and with enough scrutiny you will be able to correlate the population of heavy users with some rare and critical health condition. It's inevitable. You can tell such a claim is likely spurious by weak and contradictory findings, alongside frequent goalpost moving and changing claims from the product's critics. This is exactly what we see with glyphosate.
So why is glyphosate so criticised? Why did Greenpeace fight nuclear power so hard in the 60's and 70's, even though fossil fuels were far worse for their claimed cause? Why are there so many anti-vaxers? Why was golden rice destroyed? People don't need a rational reason to fervently take up a cause. Especially if they think they're fighting an evil empire.
The craziest thing is that even if glyphosate is as carcinogenic as its detractors claim, it's still far less toxic than most, if not all, of the other less controversial herbicides. In other words, anti-glyphosate campaigners are not choosing targets based on harm, they're choosing targets based on popularity.