Two U.S. workers are suing Monsanto over charges that the company’s Roundup herbicide caused their cancers while accusing the agrochemical giant of deliberately misleading the public and regulators about the dangers of being exposed to its product.
The suits, both filed separately last week, come six months after the World Health Organization declared glyphosate, the key weed-killing ingredient in the herbicide, a “probable carcinogen.” Earlier this month the California Environmental Protection Agency also announced it would begin labeling the chemical with the same designation.
One suit, filed Sept. 22 in a New York federal court, claims that plaintiff Judi Fitzgerald’s exposure to Roundup while working at a horticultural products company in the 1990s was a contributing cause of her 2012 leukemia diagnosis.
Filed on the same day in a Los Angeles District Court, the second suit (pdf) charges that former farm worker Enrique Rubio’s weekly exposure to Roundup products—which he sprayed on fruit and vegetable fields in Oregon and California— was “a substantial and contributing facto[r] in causing [his] grave injuries,” referring to his 1995 bone cancer diagnosis.
“For nearly 40 years, farms across the world have used Roundup without knowing of the dangers its use poses,” Rubio’s suit states. “That is because when Monsanto first introduced Roundup, it touted glyphosate as a tehnological breakthrough: it could kill almost every weed without causing harm either to people or to the environment.”
“Of course, history has shown that not to be truth,” the statement continues, citing the WHO’s recent designation.
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