By Dietrich Knauth
NEW YORK, Sept 29 (Reuters) – Attorneys for three cancer patients told a Missouri jury on Tuesday that Bayer’s Monsanto unit failed to adequately test its Roundup weedkiller before selling it, starting a trial that could help determine the viability of some Roundup lawsuits after a US Supreme Court ruling in Bayer’s favor this year.
Bayer is facing approximately 65,000 claims in US state and federal courts from plaintiffs who say they developed cancer after using Roundup at home or on the job. The company is seeking to resolve nearly all existing and future claims through a $7.25 billion class action settlement that is under review by a Missouri state court judge in St. Louis.
Tuesday’s case before a different St. Louis judge involves three women who are not participating in the proposed settlement and are pursuing claims that Roundup was defectively designed and unsafe for sale, legal theories that the Supreme Court’s June ruling did not directly address.
Plaintiffs Theresa Aretino, Cynthia Fernandez and Betty Larkin used Roundup regularly and later developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and Fernandez died before the trial began, according to the women’s attorneys.
“Monsanto did not adequately test Roundup,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Greg Dovel said in opening statements on Tuesday. “To this day, they’ve never done all the testing they’ve needed to do.”
Bayer has denied the claims and said that decades of studies have shown glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, is safe and does not cause cancer.
Reuters viewed the trial on Courtroom View Network.
EARLY TEST
The trial could provide an early indication of how courts and juries will treat design-defect and other claims that do not rely on allegations that Roundup’s label failed to warn consumers about cancer risks.
The litigation has weighed on Bayer since its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, costing the company billions of dollars and driving down its share price.
Bayer has argued that the design-defect claims are foreclosed by the US Supreme Court’s ruling that barred lawsuits alleging that Roundup’s warning label failed to adequately warn consumers about cancer risks. The court said federal law requires herbicide makers to use the exact label approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and EPA has concluded that Roundup’s label does not require a cancer warning.
Dovel told the jury on Tuesday that EPA’s review of Roundup’s safety was outdated and based on incomplete science. The EPA is in the midst of a new review of glyphosate. It has estimated it will complete the re-evaluation by the end of 2026.
“EPA approval of Roundup doesn’t mean that it is safe,” Dovel said.
Bayer’s lawyer Paul Boehm told the jury the plaintiffs cannot prove that glyphosate-based herbicides are too dangerous to sell, because that argument contradicts decades of safety reviews by regulatory bodies worldwide, including the EPA.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Rod Nickel)
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