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US Supreme Court rejects Bayer's bid to end Roundup lawsuits:
The US Supreme Court has rejected Bayer's bid to dismiss legal claims by customers who say its weedkiller causes cancer, as the German company seeks to avoid potentially billions of dollars in damages.
The justices turned away a Bayer appeal's on Tuesday and left in place a lower court decision that upheld $25m in damages awarded to California resident Edwin Hardeman, a user of its product Roundup, who blamed his cancer on the pharmaceutical and chemical giant's glyphosate-based weedkillers.
The Supreme Court's ruling dealt a blow to Bayer as the company manoeuvres to limit its legal liability in thousands of cases. The justices have a second Bayer petition pending on a related issue that they could act upon in the coming weeks.
Roundup-related lawsuits have dogged Bayer since it acquired the brand as part of its $63bn purchase of agricultural seeds and pesticides maker Monsanto in 2018.
[...] The lawsuits against Bayer have said the company should have warned customers of the alleged cancer risk.
[...] Bayer plans to replace glyphosate in weedkillers for the US residential market of non-professional gardeners with other active ingredients.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @01:47PM (8 children)
Sure, the appeals process is about matters of law only, and there aren't necessarily any violations of the legal process here, and certainly no Constitutional issue.
But mostly this goes to show that juries do horrible things. There's basically no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is a very common cancer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5515989/ [nih.gov]
I know a lot of people think liability determination should be made on the basis of who they like better, but I think it should be made on the basis of whether or not the thing actually happened, and if so, whether whoever was responsible should have known about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @01:55PM
Which is why it's banned in much of Europe? There's a difference between there being no known evidence and it not being true
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @02:44PM (2 children)
And that's the insidious deception that many people including researchers help spread. Even if glyphosate is safe, Roundup isn't only glyphosate. You can deceive people about the safety of Roundup just by focusing on the safety of glyphosate.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weed-whacking-herbicide-p/ [scientificamerican.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 23 2022, @06:52PM
>amplified the toxic effect on human cells—even at concentrations much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns.
This is something that most people gloss over, and it's a huge factor in bio-availability and potency of drugs, toxins, etc.
There is a great drug: Nuedexta that is a simple combination of dextromethorphan and qunindine. By itself, dextromethorphan is too weak and short acting to be a practical treatment for PBA, but the quinidine makes the dex dwell in the brain much longer, and two pills a day give significant control over unwanted impulses.
I worked with some holier than thou academic researchers who were 100% convinced that adding a GRAS component to a drug would be a zero effort approval for the new compound as part of their compliance system - breathe into a cheapo mass spectrometer which can detect the presence/absence of the GRAS component, becomes "proof" that the drug/medication was ingested and absorbed. I, being 30 years younger than them and only having 15 years experience with FDA matters, advised them that the FDA was highly unlikely to agree with them, they, of course due to their superior resumes and multiple PhDs, dismissed my advice as naive and overly conservative. 6 months later, FDA informed them that the compound of a drug and a GRAS component is not automatically approved for the same uses as the drug alone.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 24 2022, @08:57AM
It's good to know that there's still some forms of abortion that are vehemently defended in the USA.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday June 23 2022, @02:57PM (2 children)
Drink a bottle of Roundup and get back to us.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @03:32PM
It is commonly understood that the toxicity in Roundup comes from the stuff they add in addition to glyphosate, specifically their surfactant and some other additives. Rodeo also uses glyphosate and is fully approved for wetland use -- i.e. the EPA lets you spray it directly into water ways.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @07:02AM
That is akin to asking god botherers to live according to the rules inflicted upon others. Imagine males covering themselves head to toe to prevent tempting a female to rape them. They never like the medicine they prescribe for others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 23 2022, @03:07PM
Absence of evidence (which is not wholly true in this case) is not evidence of absence.