LEVERKUSEN (dpa-AFX) - Bayer (BAYZF.PK, BAYRY.PK, BYR.L), the German pharmaceutical and life sciences major, has been ordered by a jury in Georgia, U.S., to pay about $2.1 billion to a plaintiff who alleged that its Roundup weedkiller caused cancer.
The verdict includes $65 million in compensatory and $2 billion in punitive damages, according to a statement from plaintiff law firm Arnold & Itkin LLP.
The law firm stated that the plaintiff, John Barnes, developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) after using Roundup for over two decades at his home in Georgia. Between 1999 and 2019, he frequently purchased the glyphosate-based herbicide from Home Depot stores, unknowingly exposing himself to a carcinogen that Monsanto had falsely marketed as safe. In March 2020, he was diagnosed with NHL-a devastating illness that research has consistently linked to prolonged exposure to glyphosate.
Roundup is based on the ingredient glyphosate which was introduced by Monsanto in 1974.
In 2020, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that 'there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label' and that 'glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen.'
The European Commission and Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency had also approved its usage citing there is no evidence that linked glyphosate to being carcinogenic.
However, in 2015, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer found that glyphosate is 'probably carcinogenic to humans.'
In 2020, Bayer had paid around $10 billion in settlement of many Roundup cases.
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