Monsanto ordered to pay US$80M to California man in cancer trial
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E-mail Xinhua, March 29, 2019
A U.S. district court in San Francisco on Wednesday ordered agribusiness giant Bayer AG-owned Monsanto to pay more than 80 million U.S. dollars to a California man who was diagnosed with cancer for allegedly using Monsanto's weedkiller.
The six-person jury of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said that there was a credible connection between the cancer of the California man Edwin Hardeman and Monsanto-produced glyphosate-based herbicides.
Bayer bought Monsanto and its glyphosate-based products for more than 60 billion dollars in 2018.
Hardeman claimed that he had developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma for prolonged exposure to Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller containing the chemical glyphosate. The 70-year-old Hardeman said he had used Roundup on his 56-acre (226,624 square meters) property for more than two decades.
The San Francisco district court ordered Monsanto to pay 75 million dollars in punitive damages and about 5 million dollars in compensatory damages, in addition to 200,000 dollars in medical costs.
Hardeman's victory in the lawsuit against Monsanto represents a major setback for the company, which is facing thousands of similar cases in the United States that centered around health risks from Monsanto's glyphosate-based products.
However, Bayer vowed to appeal the case in a statement issued Wednesday after the San Francisco jury awarded the verdict.
"We are disappointed with the jury's decision, but this verdict does not change the weight of over four decades of extensive science and the conclusions of regulators worldwide that support the safety of our glyphosate-based herbicides and that they are not carcinogenic," Bayer said in the statement.
Monsanto insisted that Roundup products and their active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe and have been used worldwide for more than 40 years.
Last year, Monsanto lost a legal battle after a state jury in California ordered the company to pay 78 million dollars to a Californian groundskeeper for developing cancer by frequent use of Roundup.
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