Monsanto’s German owners insisted Saturday that the weed killer Roundup was “safe”, rejecting a California jury’s decision to order the chemical giant to pay nearly $290 million for failing to warn a dying groundskeeper that the product might cause cancer.
While observers predicted thousands of potential future claims against the company in the wake of Monsanto’s defeat, Bayer — which recently acquired the US giant — said the California ruling went against scientific evidence.
“On the basis of scientific conclusions, the views of worldwide regulatory authorities and the decades-long practical experience with glyphosate use, Bayer is convinced that glyphosate is safe and does not cause cancer,” the company said in a statement.
It said other court proceedings with other juries might “arrive at different conclusions” than the jury which ruled in the California lawsuit, the first to accuse glyphosate of causing cancer.
Scientific EVIDENCE HAAA ha haaaa HAAAAaaaaa….whew. It doesn’t matter. See DDT, malaria, mosquitoes. Also silicone breast implants.
They don’t fucking care.
The infamous justice in California (only limited by the 9th Circuit Corruption) all about Civil “EMOTION”….More likely than not is a 51% ruling… The Court & the Lawyers would not survive a Criminal Case (If they were charged)…beyond a reasonable doubt that they are corrupt…..The Dung State have shiny TURDS.. ..Stinking Drug Cartel enforcers & emotional female Judges…..FLUSH & Wash your hands
JMHO
screw science…we’ll get a jury
I just spilled a hot cup of Roundup on my crotch….can I get a billion?
(even though 100’s of millions of people have been exposed to Roundup and did not get cancer)
My testosterone levels have fallen quite low (yeah, yeah, TMI) … and … I have used RoundUP for years. Someone NEEDS to PAY!!! Hey Lawyers?! Who wants to take my case? All I want is $60M … after all, Obama asked me … “how much does anybody need?”. Answer: $60M unearned dollars will suffice for me.
mine have too, but then I am in my mid seventies.
science by a lefty court, nuff said
This is what our science is being turned into.
https://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Atheism_and_the_suppression_of_science
Will this be next?
https://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Lysenkoism
The case is plain extortion. A few ambulance chasers saw the early death of some piece of ghetto trash (a certain DeWayne Johnson) as an excuse to get a payday, knowing full well a California jury stacked with ghetto trash and barrio trash would vote to convict whitey every time.
Nobody actually knows for sure what causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma of the sort Johnson had.
“A few ambulance chasers saw the early death of some piece of ghetto trash ….” Anyone scanning this site and coming across writing like this could easily conclude they had stumbled across a KKK site. Try to stifle your racism or take it elsewhere!
My only brother died at age 28 of a Non-Hodgekins lymphoma which at the time was called malignant histiocytosis (I believe it has been renamed/categorized now). He first felt ill at the end of November, and was DEAD in April. A very nasty, aggressive cancer. I took him to Stanford Oncology, multiple times per week for chemo, which initially helped greatly … and then when the cancer returned with a vengeance … experimental treatment.
He was an auto mechanic who was up to his elbows in brake fluid, parts cleaning solvents, gas and oil. No gloves, no hazmat suits (like mechanics today). He also smoked cigarettes (and dope). So what killed him? What initiated the cancer? What defeated his natural immune system? We will never know … but he volunteered for unreasonable risk factors, and took none of the precautions which are now the minimum standards. Should I have found a shyster lawyer looking for a giant payday from a stupid jury decision? To what end? The best we did was allow the medical community another opportunity to learn and gather more data in the fight against cancer. It was the saddest day of my life … racing to Stanford before my brother died … only to say goodbye to his corpse. But I never thought to sue Big Oil for murdering my brother. That would have made a mockery of my brothers life.
Kenji, much sympathy about your brother, was down the Non-Hodgkins road with my sister-in-law, same early success with chemo and then bad news.
Anyway, a Cal jury once ruled in a civil case that it is impossible for soil to freeze (it’s in a paper in Canadian Geotechnical Journal, early 1990s). This would come as a surprise to many of those who’ve had to dig in winter (or in permafrost).
Obviously I don’t trust this jury at all, but I trust Monsanto much less.
Roger that, Andrew; conniving bastards.
Having said that, having cancer, and proving a specific cause, are two vastly different issues. If all the World’s Health authorities can’t agree on whether Roundup is a carcinogen (the opposite in fact) then a jury decision is simply ridiculous. Bayer has deep pockets; this isn’t going to end well for the plaintiff(s). He’ll be dead and dust before this is done.
We don’t use herbicides simply on the precautionary principle. Hand weeding is a pain, but not the end of the World. Roundup was aimed at commercial farmers, it’s use by homeowners is totally unjustified.
Weeding by hand is fine, but the BIG difference for me is that the herbicide RoundUP prevents a return of the weeds next season. I don’t need to weed seasonally. This is esp. true for the Bermuda grass infecting my yard it has rhizomes under the soil that cannot be pulled out … RoundUP kills the Bermuda permanently dead as it is systemically distributed through the plant. And I don’t dump the stuff on my head. And I don’t eat paint. Nor do I swallow brake fluid, gasoline, or paint thinner. For some reason, that all just seems logical to me, because percentages, concentrations, and dilutions … matter. You may have 0 parts RoundUP in your system … which is absolutely no better than the 4-parts per billion RoundUP in my system.
Kenji; YOU may be a conscientious user but I see Chinese customers at Costco and Home Depot buying it in quantity (BC Lower mainland). Many can barely (if at all) speak English, never mind read and comprehend the instructions!
This would be the same segment of the population that blissfully and illegally harvest shellfish from clearly marked contaminated beaches.
.
Did he ever smoke tobacco? Did he ever eat carrots? It turns out lots of things in our environment contain dangerous, toxic, even mutagenic, chemicals.
from
https://www.healthknot.com/natural_food_toxins.html
“It would be nice if plants were made just to be our food. But what they have in mind is, in the first place, their own survival. Part of it is that they often contain what could be broadly called “natural pesticides”: substances that are toxic to mold, insects and, sometimes, animals.
We are not talking just poisonous mushrooms and exotic wild plants. It includes foods that we eat almost daily: carrots (contain carotatoxin and myristicin, nerve poison and hallucinogen, respectively), parsley, parsnip and celery (contain psolarens, increasing skin photosensitivity and vulnerability to cancer), black pepper and nutmeg (carcinogen saffrol), some herbs, like comfrey (contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, inflicting liver damage), and many others.
Naturally occurring plant toxins, just as manmade pesticides, usually disrupt metabolic processes by blocking certain enzymes. Possible effects range from hallucinogenic to degenerative and mutagenic.”
Did he ever read the labelled precautions? While in industry, I found we were constantly after workers to wear their personal protective equipment and follow directions for using chemicals. It was a constant battle.
A kernel of wheat has four carcinogens in its natural gene pool.
Everything causes cancer. Man has a limited lifespan as does every living thing.
It’s another O.J. Trial. Jury Nullification. The Jury nullified the SCIENCE … because they’ve read (on Mother Jones Mag.) that Monsanto (and now Bayer) is baaaaaad mmmmmmkayyyy … and wanted to PUNISH them. Punish alllll those baaaaaad chemicals that are giving us every cancer, everywhere. The jury wanted to … send a message to corporations everywhere that they’re coming for you.
“Science” has become whatever one … feels … it is. Science used to be objective. Now it is entirely subjective.
This is what decades of disinformation taught in our public schools looks like.
“Science” has become whatever one … feels … it is. Science used to be objective. Now it is entirely subjective.
Lysenkoism has become rampant.
But but he drank coffee didn’t he?
Or at least inhailed the aroma … and in California coffee has to have warning labels now.
In California, everything causes cancer. Including cancer.
As someone who worked outside, did he ever use anything that contained Aloe-vera? that causes cancer in California
Did he drink alcohol? that causes cancer in California
ever cut down some trees, and exposed to wood dust? causes cancer in California
smoked or been exposed to second hand smoke? causes cancer in California
filled up a gas can, and been exposed to gasoline vapors? causes cancer in California
according to california’s own study, there is no significant risk level at 1129 μg/day of ingestion.
Sunshine causes cancer – evacuate California!
Smog causes cancer – end cars in LA
First, the article is by Yahoo, and the excerpt by Kate sure shows Yahoo’s bias. Yes, Science by jury indeed! All you need is a sentence in this biased article:
Johnson wept openly, as did some jurors, when he met with the panel later.
Right. That is what an unbiased jury does, deciding logically and unemotionally, purely on the available evidence, such as millions of people have used this product, and have not gotten this particular form of cancer. How do you determine that this particular person got this particular cancer by using this product? $290 million dollars? Are you kidding me? The verdict ought to be overturned just for the ridiculous sum of the award.
When I lived in Hong Kong as a child, lo sixty some years ago, it was still third world in many ways. The standing water from the summer monsoons bred mosquitoes. You could have window screens and sleep in mosquito tents, and the mosquitoes could still get through. My mother, as hundreds of thousands of other housewives, absolutely believed in DDT. Every night, she used a squirt gun to put DDT on all the floorboards and all the nooks and crannies, and all around our beds. The thing is, as far as I know, there is no claim that anyone have gotten sick in Hong Kong from DDT, no cancer from residual effects. (Oh, they knew it was a poison alright. Drinking DDT was a favorite form of suicide, but no one unintentionally got sick.) The UN could have done a case study of millions of people living in close proximity to heavy doses of DDT, and discovered no correlation to any illness or death, except to mosquitoes.
The progs are convinced by the results of faulty models that predict horrendous climate resulting from AGW, and think they are on the side of “science” rather than just consistently discredited models. And yet, with DDT, and the case here, and genetically altered crops, and the whole hoopla of “organic”, they insist that “natural” is good and “unnatural” is bad. They don’t realize that “unnatural” is on the side of science.
Natural was all humans had for millions of years. They probably died from the first disease they had, and had a span of not twenty years for their miserable lives. Every advance was “science” in its own way — fire, growing crops, domestication of animals, living in snug buildings rather than drafty caves. The people who advocated these things probably met resistance until overwhelmed by their beneficial reality. Along the way, some people probably sued Prometheus because they got burned by manmade fire. The resistors were the ones who were anti-science, the advocates represented scientific advancement.
Of course, as with any tool, you have to be careful with what was given you to use. Before we created the electrical grid, hardly anyone got electrocuted. The family of the girl who dropped the hair dryer into the bathtub probably can sue the power company these days and win. The final effect of all these liability suits may be to truly deny us of any scientific advance, so that we go back to living in dark caves and survive by foraging.
” Johnson used Roundup and a similar product, Ranger Pro, as a pest control manager at a San Francisco Bay Area school district, his lawyers said. He sprayed large quantities from a 50-gallon tank attached to a truck, and during gusty winds, the product would cover his face, said Brent Wisner, one of his attorneys.
Once, when a hose broke, the weed killer soaked his entire body.”
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Wondering what plant he was trying to kill that would require him to use large quantities of Roundup ….. broadcast no less (drift????) ……on school grounds…..and to have to do it repeatedly….. Think about what they are alleging. Does it really make sense?
Oh, and did I mention that in all probablility he had to be a “certified pest control operator” in order to hold his job. That means classroom learning about pesticide safety and many other things related to application.
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Once years ago I was in Haiti overseeing fumigation of Haitian mangos for the U.S. market. The product used to fumigate was ethylene dibromide, a liquid at room temperature. Nasty stuff. To use it as a fumigant required pouring it into what was essentially a hot plate to volatilize it. The fumigator’s hand slipped and he poured it all over his arm. I told him he needed to immediately wash with soap and water. He said, “nay, it’s nothing”.
Another time I watched a fumigator on the Mexico border who was using methyl bromide (lethal) attempt to fix a spewing, leaking hose joint with his bare hands and without a mask.
I knew a young women who sprayed the sheets and pillows of her bed with Raid (and then slept in them) because her dog slept with her and had fleas. She didn’t understand why she felt sickly for a week after.
I see a parallels with the statement about the broken hose above. You can’t fix stupid.