BREAKING: Court Finds That Monsanto’s Roundup Caused California Man’s Cancer
In the second of many cases involving Roundup and cancer, a court ruled on Tuesday that the herbicide did indeed cause one man’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Over 11,000 cases have been filed against Monsanto—and now its parent company, Bayer AG—alleging that Roundup, Monsanto’s glyphosate weed-killer, causes cancer. This case, with Edwin Hardeman as plaintiff, is only the second to go to trial. But as in the first case, the court sided with the plaintiff.
Monsanto developed glyphosate, which it sells under the brand name Roundup, in the 1970s, and since then it has become the world’s most popular herbicide. (The company doesn’t release specific sales numbers, but this much is known.) The most important development in its connection to cancer happened in 2015, when the World Health Organization labeled it a “probable” carcinogen. Studies have variously indicated that it does and does not cause cancer; the science is muddled as much of the research is industry-funded (or comes directly from Monsanto itself), and the industry obviously has a vested interest in findings that mark glyphosate as clean.
Last summer, the first case on whether glyphosate causes cancer went to court; initially, a jury awarded the plaintiff, a school groundskeeper, $289 million, though that was later reduced to $78 million, and Monsanto/Bayer is still appealing that verdict.
In this case, Hardeman, who used Roundup consistently on his property for decades, finds himself in a two-part trial. The first part, which just concluded, aimed to decide whether glyphosate caused Hardeman’s cancer, and whether Monsanto misled him, and the public, about the safety risks of the product. In a unanimous verdict, a six-person jury decided that glyphosate was a “substantial factor” in Hardeman’s cancer, according to the New York Times.
The second part of the trial, beginning Wednesday, will decide the possible liability of Monsanto, whether the company knowingly downplayed the connection between glyphosate and cancer in order to sell more product.
In response to the verdict, reports Reuters, Bayer’s shares took their biggest drop in 16 years, reducing the company’s valuation by a whopping $9.1 billion.
We’ve reached out to Monsanto for a statement and will update if they respond.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].BREAKING: Court Finds That Monsanto’s Roundup Caused California Man’s Cancer
by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
March 20, 2019
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
In 1964, The Stauffer Chemical Co. was awarded patent no. 4,160,632 by the US Patent Office for Glyphosate as an antibiotic. In about 1974, Montsano took over the Stauffer Chemical Co. and Glyphosate which it incorporated into RoundUp as the active ingredient calling RoundUp an herbicide. Please check out the patent information. The court determined glyphosate caused cancer in a man. As an antibiotic, and as widely distributed as it is (90+% of people tested reveal the presence of glyphosate in their system) glyphosate is likely to undermine the whole gut biome killing off ‘good’ bacteria, etc., and enabling harmful… Read more »