Monsanto has been ordered to pay $289 million to a man after a jury ruled the company’s glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, caused his cancer.

The case of school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson was the first lawsuit to go to trial alleging glyphosate causes cancer.

Monsanto, a unit of Bayer AG, faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the United States.

After deliberating for 3 days, the jury found that Monsanto had failed to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risks posed by its weed killers.

It awarded $39 million in compensatory and $250 million in punitive damages. Monsanto denies that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, causes cancer.

Dewayne Johnson was awarded $289 million in damages after it was found that Monsanto’s pesticide Roundup contributed to his terminal illness

Johnson’s case, filed in 2016, was fast-tracked for trial due to the severity of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that he alleges was caused by Roundup and Ranger Pro, another Monsanto glyphosate herbicide. Johnson’s doctors said he is unlikely to live past 2020.

A former pest control manager for a California county school system, Johnson, 46, applied the weed killer up to 30 times per year.

He testified that during his work, he had two accidents in which he was soaked with the product. The first accident happened in 2012. He said he began to get rashes shortly after the incident.

Two years later, in 2014, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Brent Wisner, a lawyer for Johnson, in a statement said jurors for the first time had seen internal company documents “proving that Monsanto has known for decades that glyphosate and specifically Roundup could cause cancer.” He called on Monsanto to “put consumer safety first over profits.”

Over the course of the four-week trial, jurors heard testimony by statisticians, doctors, public health researchers.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September 2017 concluded a decades-long assessment of glyphosate risks and found the chemical not likely carcinogenic to humans. But the World Health Organization’s cancer arm in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Akashic Times is the UK’s only online, fully independent not-for-profit newspaper that brings you real news from across the globe.

If you want to keep ahead of what is really going on in the world, subscribe to our newspaper via the subscribe button and join our Facebook & Twitter pages. Subscription is completely free ofcourse

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

(Spamcheck Enabled)