Bayer AG has recently faced a second U.S. jury over allegations that Roundup, its glyphosate-based weed killer, causes cancer. Apparently, this has come six months after Bayer’s share prices were disturbed by a California state court verdict for $289 million.
Sources familiar with the matter cited that Edwin Hardeman, a California resident, has filed this lawsuit against Bayer which began on February 25, 2019, in the federal court. This trial is also a test case for a larger lawsuit. Among all 9,300 Roundup cases, over 760 are consolidated in San Francisco, in the federal court hearing Hardeman’s case.
The company has allegedly denied all allegations about Roundup causing cancer, saying decades of independent studies showed that the most widely used weed killer is safe for human use and noted that regulators from across the globe have approved the product.
Hardeman’s lawyer, Aimee Wagstaff, mentioned in the packed courtroom that Roundup’s chemicals made the weed killer even more toxic than glyphosate alone, causing the man’s cancer.
Further from the sources, evidence of corporate misconduct was considered to be key in the findings of a California state court jury earlier, regarding Roundup’s role in causing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in another man and the failure of the Monsanto unit of Bayer to warn consumers about the cancer risks of the weed killer. The damages awarded by that jury was later reduced from $289 million to $78 million.
According to court documents, Hardeman started to use Roundup in the 1980s for controlling poison oak and weeds on his property by spraying large volumes of the chemical on a regular basis for many years. He was later diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, in February 2015, at the age of 66, and filed his lawsuit a year later.
However, Bayer’s lawyer Brian Stekloff said that Hardeman’s history of chronic hepatitis C and his age were known risk factors for developing lymphoma. Stekloff further said that the most of the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma incidents either have no known cause or are idiopathic.
