A Washington man has filed a complaint claiming that Monsanto Co.’s glyphosate herbicides caused his cancer, joining a slew of similar lawsuits across the country.
William White of Clallam County, Wash., alleges that he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from using the company’s “Roundup” brand of glyphosate.
The complaint, like others filed in multiple federal jurisdictions, argues that Monsanto misled consumers by claiming that glyphosate is biodegradable and practically non-toxic, despite studies linking the chemical to cancer.
Monsanto said the lawsuit’s claims are “contrived” and “based on the erroneous conclusions of a French-based, non-governmental agency of the World Health Organization,” referring to a controversial 2015 report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
“IARC and its findings have been thoroughly discredited and rejected by the rigorous scientific research of governmental authorities around the world,” said Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s vice president of global strategy, said in a statement to Capital Press.
Proving that glyphosate was actually responsible for causing the plaintiff’s illness in court is going to be “pretty damn hard,” said William Funk, a law professor at Lewis & Clark University who has studied torts, or wrongful acts resulting in legal liability.
Attorneys for the plaintiff would to need rely on expert testimony from doctors and scientists to convince a jury that glyphosate caused the cancer, Funk said.
Glyphosate must be shown to be responsible for the illness by a “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning there’s more than a 50 percent chance that it was the culprit, he said.
Some legal claims against Monsanto may also be barred by federal law.
Source: www.capitalpress.com