Bayer AG is planning to stop private sales of Roundup herbicide as a part of ongoing settlement talks to resolve thousands that it is facing for causing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
There are more than 40,000 lawsuits against the company throughout the United States, which claims that their glyphosate-based weed killer causes cancer.
Ken Feinberg, the prominent attorney leading Roundup settlement negotiations said that the number of lawsuits from the private users is rising tremendously, which may sum upto 85,000 individual lawsuits.
Bayer recently agreed to postpone several Roundup trials scheduled for January and February to advance settlement discussions. Also, a federal judge in San Francisco suspended all deadlines in the multidistrict litigation for 28 days, at Feinberg’s request.
Roundup herbicide was once considered the best gift for agricultural fields. It ruled the market right from the mid-70s until 2013 when some shocking hidden facts were unveiled about this product.
In March 2013 an email sent by a senior toxicologist from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to her colleague mentioned the carcinogenic attributes of Roundup herbicide, which were not disclosed to the public
due to Monsanto’s strong control over EPA.
Finally, in the year 2015, World Health Organization (WHO) declared that there was a linkage between glyphosate and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other types of cancer. Roundup herbicide was labeled as a category 2A- product by the IARC, which means it is probably carcinogenic.
Bayer will continue to sell the weedkiller to farmers and other commercial users, but the herbicide will not be available to the private users who use it for home gardening.
