The state Supreme Court rejected a challenge by Monsanto Co. on [November 17] to $86.2 million in damages to a Livermore couple diagnosed with cancer after spraying the company’s Roundup weed killer on their crops for 30 years.
The jury verdict for Alva and Alberta Pilliod was the third and largest in three Bay Area trials of suits by cancer patients against the manufacturer of the world’s most widely used herbicide. German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG, which acquired Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018, has agreed to pay $10 billion to settle thousands of pending lawsuits across the United States.
Bayer has also announced that, starting in 2023, it would find a substitute for Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, in sales for home and garden use in the United States, while continuing to sell the current product for agricultural use. The company insists glyphosate poses no danger and cites decisions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and regulators in several other nations, approving the sale of Roundup.
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However, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, found in 2015 that glyphosate was a probable cause of cancer in humans.
