In your coverage of the debate over the use of pesticides in Malibu parks, your reporter continually mentions that Roundup Pro — the low-toxicity herbicide used by the city — contains glyphosate, which has been declared a possible carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO). This sounds scary until one realizes that, as the biostatistician Donald Berry once said, “anything is a possible carcinogen.”
Other possible carcinogens on the WHO list include aloe vera, talcum powder, coffee, pickled vegetables and carpentry. As epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine pointed out, of nearly 1,000 agents assessed by the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer since it began the practice back in 1971, only one has been categorized as “not likely to cause cancer.” The point is that it is extremely difficult to prove a negative, and saying that something might possibly cause cancer is quite a ways from saying that it probably or definitely will.
Allan Mayer