New glyphosate lawsuit against Bayer in the USA

After a long hiatus, a lawsuit against the chemical company Bayer has again been brought to court in the USA over the controversial weed killer glyphosate. The plaintiff Michael Langford blames the decades of use of the glyphosate-containing Bayer herbicide Roundup for his cancer, as his lawyers announced. In 2007, the California man was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and later developed other types of cancer. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco, California, and a possible trial date has not yet been set. A Bayer spokesman said the company has compassion for everyone who develops cancer. Regulators around the world continued to confirm that the Glyphosate-containing Roundup products are not carcinogenic. The company stands behind its products and will defend itself resolutely. Bayer shares were hardly changed in early trading. "Of course that's not positive, but it was expected that there would be more lawsuits," said a trader. Bayer CEO Werner Baumann recently said that further glyphosate lawsuits could come to court in the United States in July. So far, the group has lost three lawsuits in the first instance - with multi-million dollar damages - and suffered defeats in two of the appeal proceedings. Further legal proceedings had been postponed to avoid a distraction in the settlement negotiations. In June of last year, these resulted in a settlement that is now around $ 11.6 billion. Most recently, however, agreements were still pending for almost 30,000 of the most recently known 125,000 threatened lawsuits. At the end of May, the group suffered a setback in a decisive part of the settlement for dealing with future lawsuits, as the judge in charge rejected it. Bayer therefore put the sale of Roundup to US private customers to the test, as these make up the vast majority of the plaintiffs. Bayer has always rejected the allegations against glyphosate. Authorities around the world have classified the agent as non-carcinogenic. Only the cancer research agency IARC rated the active ingredient in 2015 as "probably carcinogenic". The plaintiffs relied on this assessment.