“The Supreme Court on Tuesday let stand a multimillion-dollar verdict against the manufacturer of the popular weedkiller Roundup for failing to warn of cancer risks,” Ann Marimow reports for The Washington Post. “The decision by the justices not to intervene clears the way for thousands of similar lawsuits against the company Bayer. The Biden administration had urged the court to deny the company’s request, a departure from the Trump administration’s position.”
The plaintiff, Edwin Hardeman, sued Bayer after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, saying that habitual use of Roundup caused his cancer, and that the company had failed to warn users of the cancer risks associated with key ingredient glyphosate, Marimow reports.
Chuck Abbott reports for the Food & Agriculture Reporting Network that the ruling won’t be “the final word in the company’s attempts to shield itself from lawsuits alleging its weedkiller causes cancer. Another Bayer appeal was pending before the Supreme Court and the company suggested a case being heard by an appeals court in Atlanta could be the third.”
The ruling is another blow to Bayer; last week a U.S. appeals court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t have enough evidence in 2020 to rule that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer. EPA “has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans,” Marimow reports. “California’s labeling laws are more stringent. After an international research group classified glyphosate as ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’ in 2015, the state required a warning label for glyphosate-based herbicides. The classification prompted a spate of lawsuits against the manufacturer of the nation’s most widely used weedkiller.”
The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky.
