The Jury of the US court took the time. Actually, you had to decide last week, but the issue was complicated and highly explosive. And you can’t even answer hundreds of scientific studies, up to today, finally, Can be the cause of the plant protection product, Roundup Ready, in the controversial Phosphonate compound glyphosate, cancer? On Wednesday, the six jurors in San Francisco, answered this question unanimously with a Yes. The herbicide was a “significant factor” in favour of the plaintiff, the now 70-year-old Edwin Hardeman, was suffering from cancer of the lymph nodes. So your spectacular decision. Again and again, to have on his property in Santa Rosa with the means of weed destroyed.
For the seed and agricultural chemical company Monsanto, and more specifically for its new owner, Bayer AG, this decision is a significant defeat. And it is already the second. Once, in the year 2018, had spoken of a court of glyphosate guilty.
at the Time, 78 million US dollars to the janitor Dewayne Johnson and this is the reduced sum of damages was awarded. He had used as a place of a school in San Francisco were regularly Monsanto’s weed killer glyphosate, based on lawn care. One day, Doctors diagnosed him with a Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the same malignant cancer of the lymphatic system, such as in the case of the man from Santa Rosa. The sports were – so it is said by U.S. media, from the process – to have been exposed to the herbicide multiple times throughout the year. Because the sprayer was broken, he had been sometimes wet with the medium. Out of the bottle on the back it licked, so to him, the poison had run the body down.
The wave of lawsuits is just los
These two cases are only the beginning of a wave of lawsuits in the United States, in the hundreds of farmers, hobby gardeners, local residents besprühter fields or otherwise with Roundup Ready in contact come and later ill people from Monsanto to court to demand damages. The sums of payments for the Bayer group, could go into the billions.
glyphosate – Background: glyphosate
was First synthesized glyphosate in 1950. Since the seventies, the substance is used in agriculture. As an essential ingredient of plant protection product Roundup of the group’s Monsanto, it kills weeds in fields with oilseed rape, Maize and other crops.
Up to today, glyphosate is by far the most widely used pesticide. Its use has doubled in the past ten years, such as the study of a pesticide researcher shows (Benbrook et al., 2016). In Germany, farmers buy every year, around 5,000 tonnes of glyphosate-plant protection products – the proportion of the active ingredient at all-selling herbicides, is a good third.
First of all, the chemical was used before sowing, in order to rid Fields of weeds. However, since there are genetically modified plants that are glyphosate-resistant, it can also be used after sowing.
All articles on the topic of glyphosate, there is the TIME-ONLINE-page themes.
