A California man is
dying of cancer, and he is blaming the glyphosate found in Monsanto's Roundup
herbicide. From the WHO to the EU, international bodies show the research is
anything but clear. DW examines the case.
A San Francisco court
began hearing opening statements in the first US trial of its kind on Monday: A
California man dying of cancer is suing agrochemical giant Monsanto, claiming
the popular weed-killer Roundup is to blame for the disease.
The trial of
46-year-old Dewayne Johnson was expedited due to his likely death in the coming
months from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to his lawyer.
What happened?
Johnson, who worked as
a groundskeeper at a school near San Francisco for two years, argues that
Monsanto's Roundup herbicide caused his cancer and that the company failed to
warn against the product's fatal effects, according to court documents.
Johnson sprayed Roundup
on school grounds "20 to 40 times per year, sometimes hundreds of gallons
at a time," his lawyer told AFP news agency.
Two years after
starting his job in 2012, Johnson was diagnosed with cancer. He filed the
lawsuit against Monsanto two years later after being unable to work due to the
disease.
Johnson has
"suffered severe and permanent physical and emotional injuries" and
"endured economic loss (including significant expenses for medical care
and treatment) and will continue to incur these expenses in the future,"
according to the lawsuit.
Glyphosate has been
found in Ben & Jerry's ice cream samples from France, Germany, the
Netherlands and the UK, according to a report by the Health Research Institute
(HRI). The weed killer is used on crops such as oats and wheat — ingredients
used in the Unilever-owned brand's products. The attested quantities could be a
health risk, says the US-based Organic Consumers Association.
Does glyphosate cause
cancer?
While critics are quick
to describe glyphosate — the main chemical substance in Roundup — as
carcinogenic, research is far from definitive on the question. Here's what
international bodies, environmental authorities and researchers have to say:
The EU's European Food
Safety Authority said in 2015: "EU peer review experts, with only one
exception, concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard
to humans and the evidence does not support classification with regard to its
carcinogenic potential."
The WHO's International
Agency for Cancer Research in 2015 classified glyphosate as "probably
carcinogenic to humans." At the same time, it said that, "For the
herbicide glyphosate, there was limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans
for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The evidence in humans is from studies of exposures,
mostly agricultural, in the USA, Canada and Sweden published since 2001."
The US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) in 1985 labeled glyphosate a "possible human
carcinogen," but that classification was rescinded in 1991 by an internal
committee, saying there wasn't enough evidence to claim that it was
carcinogenic. It was consequently labeled a chemical with "evidence of
non-carcinogenicity for humans." A new review process launched in 2015
said data "at this time do no (sic) support a carcinogenic process for
glyphosate."
No comments:
Post a Comment