01/10/2026
Think twice and do some research before the next time you buy some Roundup for your lawn or garden....
The New York Times reports:
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”...
“This is a seismic, long-awaited correction of the scientific record,” said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, who is a pediatrician and epidemiologist and the director of the Program in Global Public Health at Boston College.
Dr. Landrigan recently chaired an advisory committee for a global glyphosate study that found that even low doses of glyphosate-based herbicides caused leukemia in rats.
“It pulls the veil off decades of industry efforts to create a false narrative that glyphosate is safe” he said. “People have developed cancers, and people have died because of this scientific fraud.”..
Thousands of plaintiffs, including farmers and gardeners diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, have sued Monsanto alleging that Roundup caused their cancer and that the company had covered up the risks. In an early case, a jury in a California state court awarded $289 million to Dewayne Johnson, a school groundskeeper, after concluding that glyphosate had caused his cancer. Monsanto, jurors said, had failed to warn consumers of the risk.
Since then, Bayer has paid out more than $10 billion to settle approximately 100,000 Roundup claims, and faces the potential of further costly lawsuits and jury verdicts, given the many thousands of people who may have been exposed. The settlements have not included admissions of liability or wrongdoing, and Bayer has continued to sell the product...
Bayer has also pushed Congress to pass a provision that would effectively shield pesticide makers from potentially having to pay further damages to plaintiffs. The Trump administration recently urged the Supreme Court to hear a case that could also shield manufacturers from liability.
The retraction points to a wider problem of research secretly funded by industries like to***co and lead, said David Rosner, co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. “Shading the science to favor the corporate interest,” he said, was likely “the rule rather than the exception.”
Problems with a 25-year-old landmark paper on the safety of Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, have led to calls for the E.P.A. to reassess the widely used chemical.
