WILMINGTON, Del. (Legal Newsline) – A product found by the Environmental Protection Agency to not cause cancer should still have a warning label that indicates it might, a new class action says.
Monsanto faces thousands of cancer claims regarding its weed-killer Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate. Now class action lawyers are advancing a new theory – that Monsanto failed to disclose Roundup could cause cancer in humans on its package.
Doing so certainly would have hurt its defense of the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma litigation.
“Although the (EPA) under the current administration has stated glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, Defendant, at the very least, should inform consumers there has been an ongoing scientific dispute over its potential carcinogenicity,” says the lawsuit, filed in August on behalf of plaintiff Scott Gilmore.
The lawsuit doesn’t allege Gilmore has become ill as a result of using Roundup. Instead, it makes false advertising claims under Delaware’s Consumer Fraud Act.
Monsanto, which is owned by Bayer, is trying to finalize a mass settlement of thousands of NHL claims. It also recently lost the liability argument in the appeal of a key California decision that now stands at $21.5 million for a groundskeeper with NHL.
Nearly every regulatory body in the world says glyphosate does not cause cancer, with the exception of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Its former non-voting chairman, Chris Portier, signed on as a paid plaintiff expert shortly after IARC reached its conclusion.
The U.S. Department of Justice has submitted its opinion to courts that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, and a California judge recently ruled it was wrong to place one of California’s infamous may-cause-cancer Prop 65 labels on the product.
All that didn’t deter attorneys at Rhodunda Williams & Kondraschow of Delaware and Milstein Jackson in Los Angeles from filing the false advertising claims. Their case is another modest spinoff from the cancer litigation, with Bayer also facing a lawsuit from shareholders.