Court orders EPA to reassess cancer risks of weed killer
In a major ruling on the world’s most widely used weed killer — the subject of tens of thousands of lawsuits by cancer victims nationwide, and tens of millions of dollars in damages awarded by Bay Area juries — a federal appeals court said Friday that the government ignored its own scientific evidence when it concluded that glyphosate, the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, was not a likely cause of human cancer.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not require the Environmental Protection Agency to ban Roundup, which the agency has classified as a safe product for more than 30 years. But the court ordered the EPA to discard its findings that glyphosate poses no serious risk to humans and to conduct a new assessment, giving proper weight to scientific evidence, by Oct. 1.
“EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and shirked its duties under the Endangered Species Act” on the possible dangers the chemical poses to more than 1,600 species of imperiled animals and plants,
Judge Michelle Friedland wrote in the 3-0 ruling. “EPA’s errors in assessing human-health risk are serious.”
She said such an herbicide can affect those who eat foods that have been sprayed with it as well as those who apply it and harvest the crops.
Attorney Amy van Saun of the Center for Food Safety said the ruling should require the EPA to find that glyphosate is a likely cause of cancer in humans. That was the conclusion in 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization.
Citing the international agency’s findings, California health officials ordered cancer warnings placed on containers of Roundup sold in the state, based on Proposition 65, a 1986 ballot initiative mandating warnings on products likely to cause cancer or reproductive harm. But a federal judge blocked the labeling order before it could take effect in 2018, saying Supreme Court rulings prohibit the state from requiring a company to say anything about its own products except statements that are “purely factual and non-controversial.”
After Friday’s court ruling, “I don’t see how EPA could lawfully issue the same approval, without more restrictions on use,” van Saun said. “It would be great if there was an outright ban, but I’m not going to hold my breath.”
“We need to halt glyphosate’s devastating impact on the farmworkers and farmers who suffer the deepest consequences of exposure,” said John Zippert, chairperson of the Rural Coalition, a plaintiff in the case.
Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer AG, announced last July that it would stop selling the current version of Roundup for U.S. home and garden use in 2023 and substitute a new active ingredient for glyphosate. The company said it was acting “to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns.”
It will continue to sell Roundup with glyphosate for agricultural use.
In response to the ruling, Susan Luke, a Bayer spokesperson, said, “We believe that the U.S. EPA will continue to conclude, as it and other regulators have consistently concluded for more than four decades, that glyphosate-based herbicides can be used safely and are not carcinogenic, and we are committed to working with the agency to minimize the environmental impacts of our products.”
Tim Carroll, an EPA spokesperson, said the agency would review the ruling and declined further comment.
Bayer has asked the Supreme Court to review a San Francisco federal court jury’s $25.2 million damage award to Edwin Hardeman, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of lymph cancer, after spraying Roundup on his North Bay properties for more than 26 years. President Biden’s Justice Department has asked the court to reject the company’s appeal and leave the verdict intact.
Other Bay Area juries have awarded $21.2 million to Dewayne “Lee” Johnson of Vallejo, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer after spraying the herbicide as a groundskeeper for the Benicia Unified School District, and $86.2 million to Albert and Alva Pilliod of Livermore, who used Roundup on their properties for 30 years and were also diagnosed with cancer. Bayer has agreed to pay $10 billion to settle pending lawsuits but has not yet reached agreement on a fund to resolve future suits.
In the ruling, the court said the EPA explained its no-likelydanger classification by declaring that there may have been other causes for cancer in animals that had been exposed to glyphosate. But under the agency’s own standards, Friedland said, such an assessment is not enough to support a finding that a substance is safe for humans.
She said the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Panel had criticized the agency’s disregard of the risks posed by exposure to high levels of the chemical, risks the agency dismissed as unlikely.