There’s a Time post making the rounds today: A journalist from Canal+, the French premium cable station, asks a man identified as a
As Newsweek reports, the man, Patrick Moore, is not a Monsanto lobbyist but an environmentalist who is a proponent of genetically modified foods. Read about him on Wikipedia. Glyphosate has been cast as a villain particularly because it is the herbicide that Monsanto’s best-selling genetically modified crops (brand name: RoundUp Ready) are engineered to resist. That means farmers can douse their fields in RoundUp without their soybeans, corn, or canola being harmed, and that people who are convinced, without evidence, that GMO crops are dangerous hate the pesticide by association. Moore, who is not a Monsanto representative, stupidly asserts that glyphosate is so safe that “you could drink a quart of it and it won’t hurt you.” It is true, as he says, that lots of people who attempt to commit suicide by drinking glyphosate fail, and that it is viewed as among the safest weed killers for humans, other mammals, and birds. But you wouldn’t want to drink a quart of it.
A 1991 paper reported on 93 cases of exposure to RoundUp in China. Eighty of the 93 patients intentionally ingested RoundUp at its 41% concentration (home gardeners use a much weaker 1% concentration). Only seven of them died. But 66% had damage to their gastrointestinal tract and 43% had sore throats.In the seven cases that were fatal, the average amount of weed killer ingested was 184 milliliters (about .7 cups) with the highest dose at about 500 mL, or about 2 cups. A 2004 toxicology review says that damage usually occurs when drinking more than 85 mL – just a third of a cup. This 62-year-old man was saved using hemodialysis after drinking a whole bottle of RoundUp, and this 37-year-old died after drinking 500 mL.So again, don’t drink a quart of RoundUp, and I’m glad Moore (who is not clearly identified in the clip) didn’t. But this has absolutely nothing to do with the argument Moore and the French journalist were having: whether or not RoundUp causes cancer. A World Health Organization panel says it “probably” does, in sufficient doses; human data link it to lymphoma and lung cancer. Monsanto has angrily taken issue with this statement.
As ably explained in this NPR article, the risk here would be to agricultural workers who deal with glyphosate all the time, not to people who are exposed to it through food. In any case, whether or not you can drink weed killer has nothing to do with whether passive exposure to that weed killer will give you cancer. And neither of these things has anything to do with the real reason that this story has legs: glyphosate’s link to genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. There is, by the way, no evidence that current GMOs are harmful to eat, although there are certainly environmental questions that one can ask about their use. I recommend this series, by Grist’s Nathanael Johnson, as a place to start.
So this video? It’s meaningless theater. It’s a man making a stupid statement (you shouldn’t drink a quart of weed killer), a journalist making a dumb assertion that he should drink some weed killer, and then the man who made the stupid argument storming off. It’s an argument about nothing that tells us nothing except that people do stupid things. Enjoy watching it.
