My brother worked as a landscaper and spilled concentrated roundup all over his back and down his legs about two years ago when a backpack tank sprung a leak. About a year ago, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. 2 months ago, he passed away - less than a year after he was diagnosed.
Is there a cause/effect relationship between these events? I don't know but hearing about the various trials and studies of roundup just make me feel so helpless. How would I even go about helping his widow and children get justice? I don't want to encourage litigious behavior but man if there's a pair of companies that deserve litigiousness it's Bayer and Monsanto
I'm not telling you what to do, but I really wish this kind of thinking would stop.
I've spilled concentrated round-up all over my arms and legs many times because I used it regularly as weed control all over my property in Texas. I've also been regularly exposed to all sorts of noxious chemicals like acetone, gasoline, diesel, various alcohols, and many different organic compounds in general. On bare skin (solvents get your hands clean fast!). Part of my life is a mixture of agriculture, oil/gas, and just general West Texas grime.
I eat virtually 100% meat now which is also supposed to give me cancer. The teflon-coated pan I use to cook eggs doesn't have much teflon anymore because I've scraped most of it off through cooking (I never wash it). When I was a child, J&J baby power was an absolute staple in all households I ever visited and I've inhaled clouds of it. I have been sun-burned countless times in my life and still regularly seek long intervals of intense sun with no sun-screen. My family were early adopters of cellular phones so I've been exposed to brain-cancer causing RF/EM radiation for over 30 years now.
No cancer. No diseases. No allergies. No excess pains. No respiratory issues. No mental fog. No general health issue to report in any way. I'm the healthiest and fittest in my life at 47. I never go to the doctor any more because the last few times I went all of my lab work came back perfect.
Maybe one day I will get some fatal disease or just get run over by a truck. For now I'm going to just keep betting on the odds, though. Most of the health fears I see today seem to have an extremely low chance of occurrence (if at all) and many times is confined to very niche cohorts. The science behind most of it is pure garbage and popular opinion is generally driven by court case outcomes rather than verifiable facts.
I'm sorry for your loss, but there doesn't need to be "justice" for every case of bad fortune. There has never been a causal link to cancer with glyphosate and it has been well studied and used for many, many, many years by many, many, many people.
This stuff is all about risk. If two people add their personal experiences, we have two data points. What are we supposed to do with that? It's not enough to quantify risk.
You can do everything wrong and be completely fine or you can do a single thing wrong and suffer the consequences immediately. Those are the two extremes and then there will be a bunch of data points in between those extremes. What you want to pay attention to are averages. How likely is it that I suffer negative consequences from this? If I do, what is the magnitude of the negative effect going to be on average?
I grew up in the shadow of the Monsanto plant that makes most of the world's Roundup. About half of the parents of the kids in my classes growing up worked there. Have people gotten cancer? Sure. Have they gotten it at higher incidents than the other half of the parents? No.
As a matter of fact, none of the men who lived around me and worked at those plants have ever had cancer. Several of their wives have, though.
What’s strange about this case is that there are lot of carcinogens and evil pesticides out there that are not heavily regulated. For example processed meat has a very strong link with cancer and the nitrites added to processed meat are likely the culprit. No one seems to care and no one is suing the meat companies.
There are “export only” pesticides that are truly scary that contaminate the us food supply and cause birth defects and cancer for entire villages.
Roundup isn’t mechanistically tied to cancer and there isn’t a scientific consensus surrounding if/how carcinogenic it is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if your brother’s cancer was environmentally related but I would bet that a boring chemical like gasoline/exhaust would be the cause. Gasoline and exhaust products are known to be carcinogenic.
Is there a cause/effect relationship between these events? I don't know but hearing about the various trials and studies of roundup just make me feel so helpless. How would I even go about helping his widow and children get justice? I don't want to encourage litigious behavior but man if there's a pair of companies that deserve litigiousness it's Bayer and Monsanto