Yolanda Mendoza lives every day like it's her last. The mother of
three is very happy and healthy now - a stark change from three years
ago, when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
"What was going through your head?" CBS News correspondent Mireya Villarreal asked.
"That I was going to die," Mendoza recalled. "I had only like a few days."
During
her five-month battle with the disease, her children were only allowed
to visit once a week. There were moments when she didn't think she'd
make it, but Mendoza said her kids helped her through them, and the most
difficult part was "not being there for them."
After intense
chemotherapy, her cancer is now in remission, but Mendoza is fighting a
battle against the product she says made her sick - the popular weed
killer "Roundup." She used the backpack sprayer once a week on her
one-acre property.
"I would strap it on and I would walk around spraying," Mendoza said.
Attorney
Robin L. Greenwald's firm Weitz & Luxenberg represents Mendoza and
more than 30 other suing or planning to sue Monsanto, the agriculture
company that discovered Roundup's main ingredient, glyphosate. She said
her clients used Roundup frequently at work and at home.
"Some
people are landscapers, some people are migrant farm workers, some
people are farmers," said Greenwald, who is head of environmental
protection. "What everyone has in common is that they all used Roundup
and they all have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma."
The lawyers base their
cancer claims on a 2015 report from the International Agency for
Research on cancer - or IARC - a division of the World Health
Organization. It found glyphosate to be "probably carcinogenic." The
report says glyphosate caused cancer in lab tests on animals and found
that the chemical damaged DNA in human cells.
But Dr. Donna Farmer, who has studied the chemical at Monsanto for more than 20 years, strongly disagrees with IARC's findings.
"I
can tell you glyphosate is safe. The data that they look at, they
cherry pick it and then they interpret the studies completely different
than research who actually did it," Farmer said.
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