Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer

timr•about 2 hours ago

The actual paper [1] is quite bad. They mine the literature for chemicals with any publication that suggests a link to cancer (or appearance in certain databases based on the same approach), and then spend most of their efforts determining amounts of production and use of the chemicals in question.

This is almost pure propaganda. No actual science has been performed, and the quality of the result is directly dependent on the underlying quality of thousands of individual studies that haven’t been reviewed.

(To be completely fair to the authors, the Guardian article is completely misleading. Their goal was not to identitfy carcinogens, but rather, to engage in “risk reduction analysis” for the universe of chemicals that might plausibly be considered a carcinogen if you didn’t have any other evidence and cast a ridiculously wide net. Still a dumb goal, IMO, but not as dumb as the article makes it sound.)

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/evhpaz/article/doi/10.1021/EHP.6c00022/...

loeg•about 2 hours ago

As usual in this kind of thing, "linked to" in this context does not mean anything like "actually known to cause breast cancer in humans." Just as we have cured cancer in rodents repeatedly, we have also caused cancer in rodents repeatedly, sometimes by giving them extremely high doses of chemicals that do not correspond to how much a human might consume.

VladVladikoff•about 2 hours ago

I really hope that Canada joining the EU forces some stricter regulations on crops grown in Canada. It’s sad how poor of a job our government does to protect its citizens.

refurb•about 2 hours ago

What EU regulation related to crop growth are you most interested in Canada adopting?

VladVladikoff•about 1 hour ago

Banning Atrazine, Diquat, Mancozeb, Chlorothalonil and Bromoxynil would be a good start. I’ve noticed significantly less pollinator species in the past 20 years, many insects are dying out because of these pesticides. I won’t comment on cancer or other side effects as I’m not educated enough to know the truth, but it seems if we have one large world government universally agreeing that these things are bad, and should be banned, it feels weird that other g7 nations continue on with their head in the sand.

mattmaroon•about 3 hours ago

“Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.

vardalab•about 2 hours ago

Article does say the breast cancer rate has been increasing by one percent annually. That's significant.

thesmtsolver2•about 2 hours ago

How much of it is due to other sources of death being addressed?

hackernud3s•about 1 hour ago

Whoa, at that rate it will be over 100% by 2120.

rdiddly•about 2 hours ago

"Linked to" by having been studied and shown to increase tumor rates in rodent testing. That not good enough for ya? Too pseudo-sciencey?

timr•about 2 hours ago

Yes, that’s not good enough. Rodents are not humans. Then you have to deal with the dose, the setting, the difference in healthy lifespan, and a million other factors that differ from actual people in the real world.

On top of all of that, this paper did no actual research - it just mined existing literature for any chemicals with at least one paper saying that it did something cancer-related in mice or other assays.

Based on prior experience, almost certainly a substantial proportion of these papers are crap, but they don’t make any effort to figure that out (because that would be science, and therefore hard.)

Madmallard•about 2 hours ago

This problem with things like this is that the real science is extremely costly to do and the usage of chemicals across the entirety of our environment is exploding borderline exponentially with time and obviously these things we didn't evolve to tolerate and low and behold so many new health issues are just skyrocketing in incidence.

So what do?

Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk

abisheakp197•about 2 hours ago

You are right

jeffybefffy519•about 2 hours ago

But also, another way to frame this is "Linked to" is a keyword indicating we dont know enough positive or negatively for human impact, and therefore its a long term experiment.

loeg•about 2 hours ago

If that's the meaning, the article is uninteresting and meaningless -- telling us nothing new.

Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer

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