United States farm workers are suing Monsanto. The two lawsuits have been filed on the basis that Monsanto’s herbicide, Roundup, has caused their cancers and also that the company has deceived the public, employees, and regulators of the safety and dangers of the herbicide. Both suits were filed six months after the World Health Organization’s cancer research division listed the operating weed-killing ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, as “probably carcinogenic to humans”, in other words it has the ability to directly cause cancer.
One of the cases was filed in Los Angeles on September 22, 2015 by 58-year-old Enrique Rubio, who used to work on farms in California, Texas, and Oregon. His job used to consist of spraying fields with the herbicide Roundup, which he is alleging caused his bone cancer in 1995. 64-year-old Judi Fizgerald in New York filed the other lawsuit. She used to work at a horticultural products company and was exposed to Roundup in the 1990s. She is attributing her diagnosis of leukemia in 2012 to the herbicide.
Charla Lord, a Monsanto spokeswoman, stated that the claims these lawsuits make are without merit and that glyphosate is safe for humans when used as labeled. The lawsuits have claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency has since changed its classification on the dangers of glyphosate from “possibly carcinogenic to humans” to “evidence of non-carcinogenicity in humans”. This very concerning change could quite possibly be due to pressure from Monsanto.
There has been hardly any coverage in the corporate media on the contents of this article. Fox News Health online was the only corporate news source that reported on it, but it is a section on the website that is hard to get to and was not on their main page nor has it been reported on further.
Source: Carey Gillam, “U.S. workers sue Monsanto claiming herbicide caused cancer,” Reuters, September 29, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/monsanto-lawsuit-idUSL1N11Z20Y20150929 – vCq1eP9QBBeUvDCA.97
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