USA, ruling confirms the link between glyphosate and cancer:Bayer will have to pay 78 million

Chemical giant Bayer has been ordered to pay $78 million to a Pennsylvania man who said he developed cancer due to prolonged use of Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide made by the company.The sentence was handed down yesterday by a Philadelphia jury.This is only the latest verdict resulting from a long series of lawsuits against the German multinational, which in 2018 acquired Monsanto, the company that originally put the herbicide on the market.The World Health Organization classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic" in 2015, but despite this, at the end of 2023 the European Union the authorization for the use of the substance was renewed, albeit with new restrictions.

The 51-year-old who won the lawsuit against Bayer, William Melissen, used Roundup consistently from 1992 until 2020, when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.The man then took Bayer to court in 2021, claiming cancer the consequence of his exposure to the chemicals present in the herbicide.Tom Kline and Jason Itkin, lawyers for Melissen, said in a statement that Bayer had "acted with reckless indifference to the safety of people" and that the company "has not yet gotten the message that it needs to change its behavior ».Condemning the multinational, the jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and $75 million in punitive damages.Bayer has reacted to the sentence with a note in which he stated:“We disagree with the jury's verdict, as it conflicts with the enormous weight of scientific evidence and the consensus of regulatory bodies and their scientific assessments around the world.”In the United States, the courts are increasingly condemning the multinational company to compensate those who have fallen ill due to exposure to the controversial substance.Finally, last November, the company was hit from a ruling in which three of the thousands of farmers who brought legal action in this sense were in favour.The judges have in fact decided that Bayer will have to compensate over 1.5 billion dollars to the farmers, who declared they had contracted cancer due to the use of Roundup.Based on its most recent financial report, Bayer resolved most of the pending weedkiller lawsuits in 2020, paying almost 11 billion dollars out of court.

Although the scenario, as confirmed by the sentences, appears so critical, last November the European Commission has established than glyphosate it can be used within the EU for another 10 years, «based on comprehensive safety assessments conducted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (Echa)» together «with the Member States».While for years there has been discussion on the impact on biodiversity and, above all, on the food risks for consumers produced by glyphosate - classified by the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer as potentially carcinogenic in 2015 -, a group of European multinationals chemistry with strong commercial interests in the most used herbicide in the world (among which the names of Syngenta, Nufarm and Bayer itself stand out) had made a request for an extension.In the press release announcing the decision, the Commission wrote that the use of glyphosate will come anyway subject "to certain new conditions and restrictions", making it known that, if evidence emerges that "indicates that the approval criteria will no longer be met", "a review of the approval" may be initiated at any time.The representatives of 17 states spoke in favor of the extension, while 3 countries voted against it and 7 abstained.Among the latter is Italy, which in a previous vote was instead declared favorable.Diplomatic sources specified that our country had requested that glyphosate be used prohibited for any use in the context of pre-harvest.Since this request was not incorporated into the basic text, Italy decided to abstain.

[by Stefano Baudino]