An accident on the job for DeWayne “Lee” Johnson of Vallejo, California, has cost him his health, he says — and possibly his life. As a Benicia Valley School District groundskeeper, where he worked from 2012 to 2016, Johnson was drenched in the herbicide Roundup, manufactured by Monsanto, when spraying gear failed to work properly — twice. Today, doctors tell him he may only have a few months to live. "I figured if it could kill weeds, it could kill me," Johnson said. "I took it seriously. That's why I wore anything I could to protect myself." In 2014, the 46-year-old father of three was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer that affects white blood cells, and occurs when the body produces too many abnormal lymphocytes. It has been widely speculated that the herbicide has a potentially carcinogenic effect, thanks to an active ingredient in it called glyphosate. However, conclusions drawn about its dangers have not been unanimous. The World Health Organization deemed glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015, while in 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency disagreed. For the last month, Johnson has stood before the San Francisco Superior Court arguing that not only is the chemical responsible for his cancer, but also that Monsanto—which was recently acquired by the parent company Bayer in June—has been aware of its carcinogenic effect, but has covered it up for decades. As of Thursday afternoon, jury deliberations, which began on Wednesday, were still in session. According to CBS, the case is expected to conclude on Friday, Aug. 10, when Johnson is scheduled for his third round of chemotherapy. Johnson’s lawyer R. Brent Wisner has asked jurors to award more than $39 million in compensatory damages and $373 million in punitive damages. Wisner remaked in his opening statement that there are “mountains of data” supporting the claim that glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and that Monsanto has taken actions such as paying scientists to ghostwrite research for the company. “Monsanto has specifically gone out of its way to bully and to fight independent researchers,” Wisner said as he presented internal Monsanto emails at the trial. “They fought science.” Sheldon Krimsky, a Lenore Stern Professor of Humanities & Social Sciences at Tufts University, worked with journalist Carey Gillam to review the court-released discovery documents from the case and found evidence to suggest corporate malfeasance. Their research was published in The Journal of Public Health Policy. “What we found was that their business model was involved with manipulating science,” Krimsky told Salon. “As soon as someone writes a paper that opposed their work then they would contract with a scientist to write another paper that shows they are correct.” “They aren’t interested in the truth in their products, only about making money,” he added. The EPA has based some of its opinion, which have influenced regulations, on glyphosate based on research provided by Monsanto. Krimsky said this is called “the Funding Effect,” which refers to when a scientific study is more likely to be in favor of the study’s sponsor. “American regulatory agencies allow data from the companies who do the studies,” he explained. “When corporations fund research, there is a great likelihood that the result will come out in the benefits of the corporation.” George Lombardi, an attorney for Monsanto, has vehemently refuted claims that the research indicates anything other than there is no link to the chemical and cancer. “The message of 40 years of scientific studies is clear: this cancer is not caused by glyphosate,” Monsanto’s lawyer George Lombardi said in the trial, according to Reuters. Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, tells Salon that this case is controversial because the data has not been so cut and dry. “On one end of the spectrum you have very potent carcinogens like asbestos, and tobacco smoke, that affect a broad swath of people, on the other hand you have very innocuous things that would never give you cancer even if you drank liters a day,” he explained. “In-between those, you have everything else, and a mild-to-moderate carcinogen such as glyphosate can be terribly difficult to pin down.” “Will glyphosate cause non-Hodgkins lymphoma to everyone exposed? No, but that doesn’t mean certain people aren’t at a higher risk,” he said. “Those who have been affected should be compensated and those responsible should be held accountable.” Donley added that this case raises awareness about the role of U.S. government regulatory agencies like the EPA. “I think that people like to believe that regulatory agencies really have our best interest at heart, but ultimately I would argue they are political agencies and they are run by political appointees,” he said. If Johnson wins, according to Curtis Weyant, the content director of ConsumerSafety.org, it could open the door to more people coming forward. More than 450 lawsuits are pending against Monsanto Co. in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, according to the non-profit U.S. Right to Know. “Greater awareness of the potential link between Roundup and cancer could certainly lead to more people coming forward,” Weyant told Salon. “In addition, public pressure makes it more likely that Monsanto could take the product off the market completely.” Nicole Stock contributed reporting to this story. Today's hottest topics Check out the latest stories and most recent guests on SalonTV. TRENDING<doc-sep>SAN FRANCISCO — Hundreds of lawsuits alleging that Roundup weed killer causes cancer cleared a big hurdle this week when a federal judge ruled that cancer victims and their families could present expert testimony linking the herbicide to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said evidence that the active ingredient in Roundup — glyphosate — can cause the disease seemed "rather weak." Still, the opinions of three experts linking glyphosate and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma were not "junk science" that should be excluded from a trial, the judge ruled on Tuesday. The lawsuits say agrochemical giant Monsanto, which makes Roundup, long knew about the cancer risk but failed to warn people. The ruling allows the claims to move forward, though the judge warned it could be a "daunting challenge" to convince him to allow a jury to hear testimony that glyphosate was responsible for individual cancer diagnoses. Many government regulators have rejected a link between cancer and glyphosate. Monsanto has vehemently denied such a connection, saying hundreds of studies have established that the chemical is safe. The company is facing hundreds of lawsuits in state and federal courts that claim otherwise. Chhabria is presiding over more than 400 of them. A separate trial is under way in San Francisco in a lawsuit by a school groundskeeper dying of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma — the first case a jury has heard alleging Roundup caused cancer. In response to Chhabria's ruling, Monsanto Vice President Scott Partridge noted the judge excluded some of the plaintiffs' experts and called the opinions of those he is allowing to testify "shaky." "Moving forward, we will continue to defend these lawsuits with robust evidence that proves there is absolutely no connection between glyphosate and cancer," Partridge said in a statement. "We have sympathy for anyone suffering from cancer, but the science clearly shows that glyphosate was not the cause." Michael Baum, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he was still reviewing the ruling but was pleased the judge rejected Monsanto's effort to have the lawsuits thrown out. "We look forward to taking the next step — getting our clients their day in court," he said in a statement. The judge wanted to determine whether the science behind the claim that glyphosate can cause non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had been properly tested and met other requirements to be considered valid. Chhabria spent a week in March hearing dueling testimony from epidemiologists. He peppered them with questions about potential strengths and weaknesses of research on the cancer risk of glyphosate. Beate Ritz, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, testified for the plaintiffs that her review of scientific literature led her to conclude that glyphosate and glyphosate-based compounds such as Roundup can cause non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Ritz said a 2017 National Institutes of Health study that found no association between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had major flaws. Monsanto brought in its own expert, Lorelei Mucci, a cancer epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who praised the 2017 study. "When you look at the body of epidemiological literature on this topic, there's no evidence of a positive association between glyphosate and NHL risk," she said of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In his ruling Tuesday, the judge said Ritz and Mucci could both testify before a jury. Monsanto developed glyphosate in the 1970s, and the weed killer is now sold in more than 160 countries. Farmers in California, the most agriculturally productive state in the U.S., use it on more than 200 types of crops. Homeowners use it on their lawns and gardens. The herbicide came under increasing scrutiny after the France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization, classified it as a "probable human carcinogen" in 2015. A flurry of lawsuits against Monsanto followed, and California added glyphosate to its list of chemicals known to cause cancer. Monsanto has attacked the international research agency's opinion as an outlier. The Environmental Protection Agency says glyphosate is safe for people when used in accordance with label directions. A federal judge in Sacramento has blocked California from requiring that Roundup carry a label stating that it is known to cause cancer, saying the warning is misleading because almost all regulators have concluded that there is no evidence glyphosate is carcinogenic.<doc-sep>On Friday, a California jury hit Monsanto with $289 million in damages in a lawsuit brought by a patient suffering from terminal cancer, accepting the plaintiff's claims that his disease was caused by the company's popular herbicide, Roundup. The suit neatly sidestepped the complicated epidemiology of the active ingredient in the herbicide—glyphosate—and instead made the claim that the cancer was the result of glyphosate's interactions with other chemicals in Roundup—a claim for which there is even less evidence. The suit is one of hundreds in progress and will almost certainly be appealed by Monsanto, which was recently purchased by chemical giant Bayer. According to CNN, the suit was filed by Dewayne Johnson, a former groundskeeper for a school system near San Francisco. As part of his job, Johnson regularly used the popular herbicide and claimed that he suffered extensive exposure during two accidents within the past decade. The degree of exposure can be an issue with glyphosate. High levels of exposure in animal testing has hinted that the chemical could cause cancer, and some small epidemiological studies found a link between cancers and extensive exposure during agricultural work. That was enough for the World Health Organization to label the idea that glyphosate caused cancer as "probable." Advertisement But there have been questions raised about the significance of the animal studies even as the WHO report was being prepared. And a meta-analysis of epidemiological studies found no consistent association of glyphosate with cancer. European safety regulators have come to an opposite conclusion to that of the WHO, determining that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. Exposure outside of working directly with the chemical produces levels that are widely considered safe. For example, FactCheck.org calculated that people would have to eat more than 35 kilograms of agricultural products containing glyphosate a day just to reach the strictest safety limits. So it would be difficult to judge whether Mr. Johnson's two accidental exposures would cause any cancer risk whatsoever. But that issue was sidestepped during the trial, as Johnson's lawyers argued that his cancer was caused by the combination of glyphosate and other chemicals present in Roundup. The evidence there is even less certain: glyphosate has been off patent for decades and is found in products from many manufacturers beyond Monsanto. As a result, most studies focus specifically on the herbicide, since studying individual formulations would leave the work without much statistical power. For Bayer and its recently purchased subsidiary Monsanto, the verdict is a disaster. A quarter-billion of it is purely punitive damages, meant to punish the company for "acting with malice and oppression." There are also thousands of other cases focusing on Roundup pending. The company has already stated that it plans to appeal the verdict, and a Bayer spokesman has told the BBC that glyphosate is safe to use.<doc-sep>(Reuters) - Hundreds of lawsuits against Monsanto Co by cancer survivors or families of those who died can proceed to trial, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday, finding there was sufficient evidence for a jury to hear the cases that blame the company’s glyphosate-containing weed-killer for the disease. FILE PHOTO: Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller atomizers are displayed for sale at a garden shop near Brussels, Belgium November 27, 2017. REUTERS/Yves Herman The decision by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco followed years of litigation and weeks of hearings about the controversial science surrounding the safety of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s top-selling weed-killer. Monsanto is now a unit of Bayer AG BAYGn.DE, following a $62.5 billion takeover of the U.S. seed major which closed in June. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last September concluded glyphosate is likely not carcinogenic to humans. But the World Health Organization in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Chhabria called the plaintiffs’ expert opinions “shaky” and entirely excluded the opinions of two scientists. But he said a reasonable jury could conclude, based on the findings of four experts he allowed, that glyphosate can cause cancer in humans. The plaintiffs will next have to prove Roundup caused cancer in specific people whose cases will be selected for test trials, a phase Chhabria in his Tuesday opinion called a “daunting challenge.” Lawsuits by more than 400 farmers, landscapers and consumers who claim Roundup caused them to develop non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of blood cell cancer, have been consolidated before Chhabria. Monsanto denies the allegations and in a statement said it would continue to defend the lawsuits with evidence proving there is “absolutely no connection between glyphosate and cancer.” The company said its position was supported by more than 800 scientific studies and reviews. The company had told Chhabria in March that none of the plaintiffs’ experts satisfied scientific or legal requirements for admissibility and urged the judge to dismiss the cases. Aimee Wagstaff, one of the lawyers representing the people suing the company, in a statement said she was pleased her clients will have their day in court. “It’s time to hold Monsanto accountable for putting this dangerous product on the market,” Wagstaff said. Monsanto faces 5,000 lawsuits nationwide alleging Roundup caused cancer, mainly in state courts. While Chhabria’s ruling is not binding on them, state court judges have been closely following the federal litigation and expert hearings. The California state judge who handles the most Roundup cases posted to her docket that she was attending the hearings before Chhabria in March.<doc-sep>
After opening arguments kicked off in California state court on Monday for a Bay Area man's landmark lawsuit alleging that Monsanto's popular weed killer Roundup caused him to develop cancer, a federal judge on Tuesday ruled that hundreds of unrelated but similar cases against the agrochemical company can also proceed to trial. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco concluded that although he believes the evidence presented by attorneys representing the cancer patients and their families, "seems too equivocal to support any firm conclusion that glyphosate," the active ingredient Roundup, causes in cancer, the matter should be taken up by a jury. As Reuters noted, his decision "followed years of litigation and weeks of hearings." It also follows the first day of trial for DeWayne "Lee" Johnson's suit in California's San Francisco Superior Court. Johnson is a 46-year-old father of three who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of working as a groundskeeper for school district, a position which regularly exposed him to a pair of Monsanto products containing glyphosate. Although the state of California and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO)—have classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, U.S. and European regulators continue to defy scientists and anti-pesticide activists' warnings by allowing farmers to keep spraying the world's most common herbicide. While Monsanto maintains that its products are safe—with a company attorney claiming in court on Monday that "scientific evidence is overwhelming that glyphosate-based products do not cause cancer"—some 4,000 plaintiffs have alleged that Monsanto's glyphosate products such as Roundup have made them sick. However, Johnson's case is the first to go trial. SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Never Miss a Beat. Get our best delivered to your inbox. During opening statements on Monday, the Guardian reports, Johnson's attorney Brent Wisner showed jurors photographs of legions on his client's body that were a result of his cancer and declared: "The simple fact is he's going to die. It's just a matter of time." As Johnson reportedly lowered his head and his wife cried beside him, Wisner added, "Between now and then, it's just nothing but pain." The attorney argued that Monsanto—which recently merged with German pharmaceutical giant Bayer—"has specifically gone out of its way to bully...and to fight independent researchers. "Wisner, the newspaper noted, "presented internal Monsanto emails that he said showed how the agrochemical company rejected critical research and expert warnings over the years while pursuing and helping to write favorable analyses of their products." In addition to internal documents, Wisner also said the trial will feature depositions from 10 former or current Monsanto employees, and that there is "a mountain of data," going back to 2000, which shows that exposure to glyphosate can cause genetic damage that could lead to the type of cancer Johnson has. "We're going to see for the first time evidence that nobody has seen before, evidence that has been in Monsanto's files that we've obtained from lawyers and the people in Monsanto," co-counsel Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I don't think it’s a surprise after 20 years Monsanto has known about the cancer-causing properties of this chemical and has tried to stop the public from knowing it, and tried to manipulate the regulatory process." Kennedy added that he believes this case will help the hundreds of other clients he is representing in cases filed against the company. "So many people have been exposed to this chemical, this group of chemicals, and many of them have been injured," he said. "The science is on our side. It is mountainous."