
Glyphosate perturbs the gut microbiota of honey bees - LolWolf
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/41/10305
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kryogen1c
>Since fewer than 20% of bees reintroduced to the hive were recovered,
recovered bees may not represent the total effect of glyphosate on treatment
groups.

I'll say! What a damning line. How many trial replications does it take to
create resultant certainty when each trail loses >80% of it's data?

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vixen99
its data

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dang
I sympathize with orthographic passion but can you please stop posting many
such corrections to HN? An unsubstantive comment is worse than a superfluous
apostrophe.

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sschueller
I am curios how it affects human gut microbiota if at all, as our gut
microbiota appears more and more to be vital for our health and also manage
general weight.

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jokoon
I think scientists know too little about the gut microbiota. There could be a
million things disturbing it.

I heard the main difficulty is being able to do experiments, and it might be
too difficult to reproduce the conditions to observe it.

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ianai
Glyphosate harms organisms shikimic acid pathway. It’s not supposed to “exist”
in non-plants(?). But it definitely affects microbiota. I would almost
guarantee it affects gut microbes in humans - for one because it affected
microbiota in bees.

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Obi_Juan_Kenobi
> It’s not supposed to “exist” in non-plants(?).

No, it exists in many clades, which include many bacteria. It's most notable
for being absent in Animalia. "exist" doesn't need to be in scare quotes, it
simply means that animal genomes don't have the genes that encode for this
pathway.

The basic premise of the paper - that glyphosate may be affecting animals
indirectly via their gut microbiota - is sound enough, but the paper itself is
of very poor quality. It follows a pattern of dubious papers critical of
glyphosate (e.g. Seralini) that 'throw data against a wall and see what
sticks'.

* 20% recollection rate of already small samples (n=80 IIRC, so just over a dozen to compute statistics on, patently absurd).

* No dose response: 10mg/L exposure shows no results, while 5mg/L does.

* The affected microbes appears random and likely a result of poor sampling and multiple comparisons.

The paper is a joke. A bad one. Any of those three issues should result in
immediate rejection. Think whatever the hell you want about glyphosate,
Monsanto, etc., but science matters and this isn't fucking science.

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ianai
I used quotes to indicate my lack of surety in using that term. This is the
more traditional use of quotes. Nothing passive aggressive/“scary” intended.

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klmr
Previous discussion on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18084054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18084054)

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swerner
Someone smarter than me discussing this paper:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdnW8ldDoZU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdnW8ldDoZU)

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ianai
Looks like not even organic food is free of glyphosate. Is there any way to
buy (vegan) food without any glyphosate?

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ianlevesque
Organic is the only route I know of to avoid it. Where did you find organic
food with glyphosate?

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kakarot
I used to work on an organic farm.

We used glysophate because it technically "doesn't touch the plants meant for
consumption", therefore it doesn't matter if it's not organic.

Wind and soil leeching obviously make this untrue, but legally our product was
still "organic" as long as we didn't directly spray our crops.

~~~
wanderr
This doesn't square with the experience my friends on a small family farm had
- they could not get organic certified because a neighboring farm was using
glysophate. That was admittedly ~16 years ago, so maybe something has changed.

~~~
kakarot
Interesting. What country/state was this?

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wanderr
US, Michigan. I assume organic requirements are the same across the US though.

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mothsonasloth
If colony collapse disorder escalates to all pollinating bees then we're gonna
have to figure out artificial pollination

