Bayer AG has won a legal victory in the USA for the first time in a long-standing dispute over the allegedly carcinogenic weed killer glyphosate.
In her lawsuit filed with a court in Los Angeles in mid-September, the mother blamed the agent for the fact that her son had what is known as Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare and particularly aggressive type of cancer. According to the complaint, the child was exposed to the weed killer when the mother sprayed it on her property. The boy was only four years old when he was diagnosed with Burkitt’s lymphoma in 2016. This lymphoma is one of the fastest growing types of tumors.
But the California court found that the drug was not a substantial cause of the cancer in the child. “The jury’s verdict on the question of causality in our favor ends the legal proceedings and corresponds to both the assessment of the responsible regulatory authorities worldwide and the extensive scientific findings from four decades,” said the German group in a statement on Wednesday night.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs said they were considering an appeal. The ruling is the fourth of its kind related to the compound known under the brand name Roundup. Bayer lost the previous three.
Last August, the Leverkusen-based group took action before the US Supreme Court. Bayer applied for a revision of the so-called Hardeman case there.
In this case, a federal appeals court in San Francisco had upheld in May a condemnation of the group to pay millions in damages to Edwin Hardeman, who had cancer and who had used Roundup for years. The reason given in the case was, among other things, that Monsanto had not warned enough of the health risks of using Roundup.
In May, Bayer got out of a settlement proceeding with the aim of reaching a billion-dollar settlement with tens of thousands of plaintiffs. Instead, the group developed a five-point plan to counter future legal risks to Roundup.
Does the weed killer cause cancer?
In 2018, Bayer incurred immense legal risks in connection with glyphosate and other agricultural products with the purchase of US seed giant Monsanto, which cost more than $ 60 billion.
After Bayer received high damages judgments in the first three lawsuits, more and more people accused the company of getting cancer through the use of Monsanto’s weed killer.
The Leverkusen-based group always emphasizes that Roundup is safe when used properly and refers to corresponding assessments by, among others, the US environmental authority EPA and the supervisory authorities in the EU and Germany. The International Agency for Cancer Research, which is part of the World Health Organization (WHO), however, stated in 2015 that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic in humans”.