First plaintiff, nearing death, goes to court in case claiming Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup causes cancer

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Image Credit: Paul Grebliunas/Getty

On bad days, Dewayne Johnson is too crippled to speak. Lesions often cover as much as 80% of his body.

Doctors have said they didn’t expect him to live to see this day. But [June 18th] marked a milestone: Johnson, 46, is the first of hundreds of cancer patients to see his case against agrochemical giant Monsanto go to trial.
CNN reported last year that more than 800 patients were suing Monsanto, claiming its popular weed killer, Roundup, gave them cancer. … Johnson’s attorney, Timothy Litzenburg, said … he now represents “more than 2,000 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma sufferers who used Roundup extensively.”
In March 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said the key ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
But Monsanto long has maintained that Roundup does not cause cancer, and that the IARC report is greatly outnumbered by studies saying glyphosate is safe.
“More than 800 scientific studies, the U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the National Institutes of Health and regulators around the world have concluded that glyphosate is safe for use and does not cause cancer,” Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s vice president of strategy, said in a statement.
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