From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Aug 24 1999 - 07:36:16 MDT
On Tue, 24 Aug 1999 Entropyfoe@aol.com wrote:
> I just wish bioengineering would hurry up and make humans immune to the
> effects of roundup and other biocides put on food !
Well, to bring some balance to the discussion, I did a little
research.
From: http://www.purefood.com/text3.html
> Monsanto's new genetically engineered soybean has been modified so
> that it can survive heavy doses of Monsanto's poisonous weed-killing
> herbicide, Roundup (glyphosate).
> Agribusiness already dumps more than 500 million pounds of
> herbicides on U.S. farmland each year, with Roundup leading the toxic
> parade. Herbicides contaminate ground water and the food chain,
> contributing to the cancer epidemic which now strikes one in
> three citizens.
Really... A "cancer epidemic". Golly gee willikers, what would
happen if we eliminated the epidemic. Well I guess more people
would die from heart disease and stroke. Would we then have
a heart disease and stroke "epidemic"? And if we eliminated
those, then people would probably mostly die of "old age".
People are still having sex, its been going on for quite
some time, they just don't understand its going to cause
an old age *epidemic*! Quick stop them now!
From:
http://withlacoocheewonderweb.org/withlacoocheewonderweb/glyphosate.htm
[**Journal for Pesticide Reform** ?!?]
> Glyphosate's acute oral median lethal dose (the dose that causes death in
> 50 percent of a population of test animals; LD50) in rats is greater than
> 4,320 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg) of body weight. This places the
> herbicide in Toxicity Category III (Caution).
Ok, lets see in a 60kg human, this works out to 260 grams or .26 kg.
A 750ml bottle of wine at 13% Ethanol is 97.5 ml of ethanol which
we will say is roughly .1kg. A discussion of alcohol (at
http://www.unhooked.com/sep/alchem.htm) says the lethal dose
of alcohol can be as low as 400 ml.
So Roundup is about 150% as toxic as alcohol, so we can generally
look at it as roughly as dangerous. Given the fact that
the amount of Roundup in their beer has to be a minimum
of a 1000 times *less than* the amount of alcohol in their
beer, I wonder why all those anti-genetic-engineering tree-hugging
organo-naturalist types aren't trying to bomb the Budwiser breweries?
I must not be seeing something....
Discussing the use of enzymes in the food processing industry,
http://safe-food.org/-consumer/enzymes.html, said:
> However, enzymes produced by genetically engineered organisms are cause
> for concern. Not enough is known about the long-term effects of these
> enzymes on humans and the ecosystem for them to be used across the board.
Gee, well, I'd say enough is known about the consequences of too much
alcohol on "humans" at soccer matches, should we stop them too?
Enzymes are proteins, proteins are broken down in the stomach or
upper intestinal tract. The only known hazard that has ever been
discovered from proteins, that I'm aware of, is the suggested risk
that proteins in cow milk may increase the susceptibility of
some individuals to childhood diabetes.
The general thrust seems to be -- if it is genetically engineered
it is new and therefore it must be bad, lets wait until we know
everything. Nobody explains that the only way you "know everything"
is to produce the variety of situations in which that knowledge becomes
known. Oh no, computers with keyboards and monitors that may emit
X-rays, oh gosh, lets not use them until we know for sure who might
use them too much and get repetitive strain injury or maybe even
cancer.
For those of you who want to study luddite tactics, there is a short
"Claims and *Facts*???" file at http://safe-food.org/-issue/claims.html:
This gives a good example of what are reasonable "claims" and some
questionable facts, to which there are quite good responses.
If there were a way to leverage it into the news, it would be
interesting to "Crit" the page. I'd love to see a CNN news
article -- "Scientists use technology to overcome luddite arguments".
For an interesting peek at the Ag-bio marketing slant try:
http://www.midwestseed.com/biotech.html
If you want a more balanced perspective (should be *required reading*
for the people writing the above pages), try an article from the
journal "Science of Food and Agriculture", January 1993:
http://www.cast-science.org/sfa51.txt
Of course it would be interesting to know who the professional
societies were behind the CAST. But the discussion about
[all] pollution being about 2% of cancer risk and 98% of the cancer
risk in foods is from "natural pesticides", fits with the
general data from peer-reviewed medical literature.
The problem Jay (returning to the original comment) is that
everything we eat, drink and most of our activities have some
risk associated with them and the only way to eliminate those
risks is to stop living. Short of that the best we can
do is educate ourselves regarding the relative risks and
adopt reasonable precautions and behaviors.
Robert
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