The idea of punitive damages being awarded to a single person in a situation like this seems unjust on its own. If Roundup is responsible for this person's cancer, it's almost certainly responsible for the cancer of many other people, alive and dead. Clearly I am not a lawyer, but in cases of such a finding, I feel like there ought to be some mechanism to identify an affected class, and make proceeds benefit that class. The alternative seems to be that the first individual plaintiff whose judgement drains the defendant of funds pulls resources from later plaintiffs whose case is just as sound.
Generally the first plaintiff (attorney) takes the greatest risk as there's no precedent of guilt. Afterwards the class action suits ride the single case momentum towards relatively easy payouts.
Shaving off a part of the company as a sacrificial lamb is like trying to say "my fingertip is responsible for the murder, here take some skin shavings from the tip".
Reforming how class actions are done is probably a very good idea. But Bayer has a market capitalization of over 45 billion. This judgement will probably get appealed and negotiated down. And if it isn't, there is a lot of value in Bayer to pay out in a class action if one succeeds.
If by "reform" you mean weaken class actions, I would argue that is a bad idea.
Larger businesses have already gone to great lengths to eliminate / curtail class actions.
I'd argue that this weakening is the root cause of a chunk of the aggregate problems I see discussed on HN.
It is in a company's interest to harm a great many people a little bit because the people often have to challenge the company as individuals rather than as a group. And the economics often make no sense in that way, so the company is functionally immune to the effects of its harm.
Further weakening the remaining viability of that case type stands to only encourage companies to commit more aggregate harms.
The primary function of the U.S. civil judicial system is to adjudicate disputes, which is what it did here. Making society more just is an overarching, but ultimately, secondary goal.
But the concept of punitive damages is about some claim on justice, right? Like, "in addition to causing harm to this other party worth $m, because your behavior was so bad, you should pay a further $n whose value is about your badness which demands punishment, rather than about their loss."
$7M in compensatory damages and $325M in punitive damages sounds like almost all the dollars in this are about justice, not dispute settlement.
The judgment was based on failure to warn of risk, not negligence in design.
On causation, as far as I can tell, the 2015 finding of epidemiological evidence for a 41% increase in non-hodgkins lymphoma (NHL) was rebutted by non-affiliated researchers, but paid experts are continuing to publish, and claim others have recently found a mechanism. But AFAIK there's no epidemiological or mechanistic proof, now or at the time they made warnings. (I would assume a failure to warn requires some proof they knew of the risk?)
In this case, 57 is barely on the young side of the affected population, but decades of exposure is hard to overlook.
Warnings are something of a fiction. Detailed legalese is regularly ignored, and if it's unclear any commercial gardener avoids glyphosate even today after all the scary news. But the hugely differential impact is a legitimate environmental justice concern, and the lawsuits might be the tip of the iceberg.
It would be best if Monsanto/Bayer negotiated a pool to pay affected people and more importantly to do outreach and monitoring for those who might be affected.
The incentives are all wrong here: huge 100X punitive damages based on failure to warn when there's no proven risk just make any rational decision-makers dig in if not suppress research. It'd be better for companies to pitch in for investigations and treatment over the lifecycle of the product, in exchange for protection from legal lotteries.
see no judgment happend when Monsanto was US owned but the Moment it was bought up by a non US company somehow judges flipped their opinion and even did ruling on non peer reviewed non fully published studies (which later turned out to fail to proof that it causes cancer...)
nothing against banning this and similar roundups on suspicions of them being bad (actually I'm quite in favor of that)
but whats happening there in this case(es) really doesn't look like a proper state of law acting but like some geo political nonsense
How does its[1] MSDS compare to any other herbicide/pesticide in common use[2]?
All the handling instructions for the them are nearly word-for-word identical. It seems to be a good idea to wear a hazmat suit when you're spraying a field with anything that's supposed to kill weeds.
I used to work in the agriculture sector, and we had to fully suit up to spray anything whatsoever, even neem oil.
But there were good reasons for this:
1. Human error: If the last user didn't clean it properly, there could still be residue in the sprayer from a different (more dangerous) chemical. Or you may have accidentally added the wrong chemical.
2. Bad luck: You never know who's going to have an allergic reaction to something, like a dye or a surfactant in the product.
3. Liability: Future research may reveal risks that we do not currently know about (e.g., who knows, maybe people with prior exposure will turn out to be more likely to get long covid or some random thing like that). Requiring a suit for absolutely everything means your employer doesn't have to stress about future lawsuits over unknowns like these.
I read the wiki article you linked, but could not find any such argument there. UCC seems to have (successfully) argued that UCIL was a separate company, rather than a partial acquisition.
Doubt they even blinked, these companies hire people to calculate risk and so they can continue to get away with it. Just a cost of business. Bayer's gross revenue for just 2022 was 53.4B. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BAYRY/bayer/revenu...
Maybe 332M was a lot when you were a child. Thanks to compounding monetary inflation year after year, 332M is actually not much any more. It's enough though to make normal people believe that some kind of justice has been served.
Monsanto before it was brought by Bayer won all cases.
The moment they where bought by Bayer (i.e. no longer US owned) somehow they start losing cases and judges doing fun things like making ruling based on not peer reviewed not yet fully published studies....
Actually what they found is that Roundup is potentially cancerous, not glyphosate. Roundup has a host of additive chemicals aside from glyphosate which have been shown to be likely cancerous. Glyphosate by itself is fairly benign.
1. Glyphosate is one of the more heavily studied chemicals known to man.
2. The evidence for it causing cancer is poor. Studies routinely fail to find evidence for it.
3. The subset of studies that do find evidence for such a link, find it in occupational exposure, by people who have been working knee-deep in it for decades. [1]
Yes, people probably should look at you like you're crazy, because you're extrapolating from cherry-picked evidence that supports your priors.
[1] Whose exposure is dramatically higher than that of someone eating food grown with it.
> people probably should look at you like you're crazy, because you're extrapolating
People who claimed that UK government gave them AIDS, on purpose, were called crazy. 50 years later, it turns out they were right.
"The blood was imported from the US after a UK shortage, where people such as prisoners could donate in return for cash.
The minutes ..shows that officials knew that haemophiliacs were being given dangerous blood from the US that was making them ill with hepatitis... No one raised the alarm to stop the spread of the blood and instead, officials hoped the imported goods would not get a "bad name".
There was a major effort to supress this information. People has to extrapolate based on limited data.
These situations are not rare - when the workers in Teflon factories were having birth defects and cancers, and started questioning that maybe it's related to their job, they were called crazy too.
In my family we extrapolated based on limited data, twice, and doctors were looking at us like we were crazy, and it turned out we were right. If we didn't press the issue, two family members would have been dead.
So now I am jaded and I have limited faith in Medical establishment and institutions doing their homework.
While I'm in essential agreement with the comment above it's still worth fleshing out the case against for those interested.
The specific papers (worst effects of a great deal of exposure) oft cited are:
Myers, J.P.; Antoniou, M.N.; Blumberg, B.; Carroll, L.; Colborn, T.; Everett, L.G.; Hansen, M.; Landrigan,
P.J.; Lanphear, B.P.; Mesnage, R.; et al. Concerns over use of glyphosate-based herbicides and risks
associated with exposures: a consensus statement. Environ. Health 2016, 15, 19.
Leon, M.E.; Schinasi, L.H.; Lebailly, P.; Beane Freeman, L.E.; Nordby, K.-C.; Ferro, G.; Monnereau, A.;
Brouwer, M.; Tual, S.; Baldi, I.; et al. Pesticide use and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoid malignancies in
agricultural cohorts from France, Norway and the USA: A pooled analysis from the AGRICOH consortium.
Int. J. Epidemiol. 2019, 48, 1519–1535.
I'm in a grain growing district and glyphosate isn't being applied to grain ready to eat | harvest here, just sprayed pre harvest to kill weeds and mid season to suppress weeds coming up in competition.
is a decent balanced paper - it points out the vast number of studies show no real cause for concern while also giving the papers that show issues for farmers and the possible future for glyphosate free farming.
It would seem that #2 and #3 directly contradict one another and that the truth is that it does indeed cause cancer at a particular rate / exposure over time.
Rather than saying it doesn't affect this group but does affect another group it would be more appropriate to establish the level of consumption/exposure that is likely to cause a statistical increase in the likelihood of developing cancer.
He was using glyphosate as a weed-killer and getting it on his hands and feet. Way higher levels of exposure than any foods. Also if you're afraid of glyphosate, the Roundup-ready crops are the ones to avoid especially - soy, corn, canola, sugar beets. There's no Roundup-ready wheat, oats, or nuts. (edit: apparently it's used as a desiccant so it winds up in cereals as well - lovely, though still there's no evidence it's got dietary effects).
I'm not really concerned about its dietary effects since there's no evidence there, but as an amateur entomologist the effects of Roundup on butterfly populations have been devastating - in the past milkweed was pretty hard to completely weed out by hand, but modern farming can clear hundreds of acres of every trace of milkweed with Roundup/glyphosate.
They probably do not have that high concentration on seeds itself. The problem is that it thousands of tons need to be dispersed on the environment and its effect as an antibiotic on big scale.
We have a very important microbiota that are bacteria themselves. The antibiotics on meat and environment can break havoc there, specially for people that work or live near those environments and can breathe or drink the pesticides.
Our digestive tracts aren’t fond of detergents either, and Roundup contains some. For that matter, so do the pods you use in your dishwasher, which is something that just came onto my radar recently. Are HE dishwashers removing enough detergent residue during the rinse cycle? Possibly not.
I haven't seen the data or reporting on glyphosate residues. Without clear, unbiased proof of safety following the precautionary principle, there is no assurances that this shit is safe to eat.
Also, yes, industrial meat ag is bad for creating new pandemics between human workers<->livestock animals packed together in CAFOs<->wildlife, antibiotic resistance (antibiotics injected to make animals grow faster), and climate change. Sometimes animal rights people tout animal cruelty, but few people are convinced because the cognitive dissonance "forcefield" is too strong to accept this idea. Adapting a quote by Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their tastebuds and drone-delivered fast food depends on their not understanding it." Probably a whole other area for discussion. :]
Most people lack subject matter expertise on topics they espouse opinions impertinently, don't look at the evidence, and don't take sensible precautions against unknowns, so their opinions don't matter.
In the absence of compelling precautionary evidence and systematic safety processes, it's clear that the faithful adherents of organic production are more likely to be safer than industrial megafarming done with the same blind faith in the miracles of chemical wizardry that brought us such hits as organophosphates, chlorpyrifos, DDT, and the over 85k compounds that are de facto unregulated because they are allowed until specific injury is proven after the damage is done ("whack-a-mole"-style), rather than first proven safe.
>the faithful adherents of organic production are more likely to be safer than industrial megafarming
But the "organic" label doesn't check whether the farmers were "faithful adherents of organic production", only that they fulfilled the organic checklist. They can use as much chemical fertilizer and pesticides as they want, so long they're on the approved list. In the same vain farming and "industrial megafarming" isn't mutually exclusive.
Glyphosate breaks down within a few days, doesn't remain in plants, and is passed out the body quickly even if you were exposed to it while spraying. You're not going to get any of it by eating oats.
Yet another invisible thing invented for substantial benefit and maybe serious harm over a long time; hard to prove cause-and-effect, difficult to protect yourself from, or to know how much you are exposed.
Isn’t the reason that people get ill from those foods is primarily due to excess calories causing obesity and inflation? Wouldn’t the same thing happen with other foods just as cheap and calorie dense?
If we're sharing thoughts, I need to point out that once you hit your late 60s, you're more likely to get cancer, and your risk keeps going up [1]. Our food is loaded with chemicals that can make you sick or even cause cancer [2]. That age is also when people usually retire and are no longer "productive".
Here's where I might lose you. In our country, illness is a way to make money [3]. If you're really sick and trying to stay alive, you'll spend everything you've got. So the quickest way to turn people's savings into profit while also reducing the population of non-productive people is for them to fall ill, pay as much as they can to survive and then ultimately die an early death, which triggers a death tax event [4].
Most "medical" research tends to never focus on actual nutrition. Probably because that would reduce profits for those with vested interest from selling treatments.
Maybe that’s why America has such high productivity. We’re have a culture and economy that agree that it’s better to die than be unproductive and rely on others.
It is fairly funny, I remember how Monsanto used to run paid comments over every big news subreddit you posted stuff about them, then the moment they got acquired suddenly those stopped and Monsanto is evil.
Not saying they aren't but I trust them more now under a German firm than when they were American.
I dont care, Bayer shall be sued as much as they can, as they were the engineers of the holocaust[1][2][3], but claiming that the US sues Bayer because they really care about corporations fucking up the health of their people, while 9/11 first responders with lung cancer etc. are thrown under the bus, and not because they exercise a trade war with the EU to this day is wrong imo.
Also totally a coincidence this started during the protectionist Trump adminstration, and a total coindicence that the EU under German leadership started pursuing US tech giants like Facebook, Google with the GDPR and so on at the same time.
EDIT: And jailed Volkswagen engineers due to diesel scandal even though their cars are labelled as trucks because they would never ever pass the emission tests that VW and others cheated.
Readit News
Larger businesses have already gone to great lengths to eliminate / curtail class actions.
I'd argue that this weakening is the root cause of a chunk of the aggregate problems I see discussed on HN.
It is in a company's interest to harm a great many people a little bit because the people often have to challenge the company as individuals rather than as a group. And the economics often make no sense in that way, so the company is functionally immune to the effects of its harm.
Further weakening the remaining viability of that case type stands to only encourage companies to commit more aggregate harms.
$7M in compensatory damages and $325M in punitive damages sounds like almost all the dollars in this are about justice, not dispute settlement.
On causation, as far as I can tell, the 2015 finding of epidemiological evidence for a 41% increase in non-hodgkins lymphoma (NHL) was rebutted by non-affiliated researchers, but paid experts are continuing to publish, and claim others have recently found a mechanism. But AFAIK there's no epidemiological or mechanistic proof, now or at the time they made warnings. (I would assume a failure to warn requires some proof they knew of the risk?)
In this case, 57 is barely on the young side of the affected population, but decades of exposure is hard to overlook.
Warnings are something of a fiction. Detailed legalese is regularly ignored, and if it's unclear any commercial gardener avoids glyphosate even today after all the scary news. But the hugely differential impact is a legitimate environmental justice concern, and the lawsuits might be the tip of the iceberg.
It would be best if Monsanto/Bayer negotiated a pool to pay affected people and more importantly to do outreach and monitoring for those who might be affected.
The incentives are all wrong here: huge 100X punitive damages based on failure to warn when there's no proven risk just make any rational decision-makers dig in if not suppress research. It'd be better for companies to pitch in for investigations and treatment over the lifecycle of the product, in exchange for protection from legal lotteries.
nothing against banning this and similar roundups on suspicions of them being bad (actually I'm quite in favor of that)
but whats happening there in this case(es) really doesn't look like a proper state of law acting but like some geo political nonsense
you fell for the spin dr work. roundup have tons of that, but it's not what 1) might cause cancer or 2) what is defended in their patents.
well, it might cause cancer too. but not what was always argued against roundup.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
It also recommends wearing all the standard protective equipment. Guess it's not safe to eat any Vitamin D, then, right?
Or maybe it's the dose that makes the poison. (Fun fact: Vitamin D is more acutely toxic than glyphosate.)
All the handling instructions for the them are nearly word-for-word identical. It seems to be a good idea to wear a hazmat suit when you're spraying a field with anything that's supposed to kill weeds.
[1] https://labelsds.com/images/user_uploads/Roundup%20Pro%20Con...
[2] https://labelsds.com/images/user_uploads/Atrazine%204L%20SDS...
For example, I'm using perfluorohexyloctane eye drops. Its MSDS says that it's a severe eye irritant and requires eye protection when working with it.
Again, for literal eye drops.
But there were good reasons for this:
1. Human error: If the last user didn't clean it properly, there could still be residue in the sprayer from a different (more dangerous) chemical. Or you may have accidentally added the wrong chemical.
2. Bad luck: You never know who's going to have an allergic reaction to something, like a dye or a surfactant in the product.
3. Liability: Future research may reveal risks that we do not currently know about (e.g., who knows, maybe people with prior exposure will turn out to be more likely to get long covid or some random thing like that). Requiring a suit for absolutely everything means your employer doesn't have to stress about future lawsuits over unknowns like these.
It is crazy to think they don't care about losing $332M. Of course they care! That's an enormous amount of money no matter how big you are.
It's enough money to pay for literally hundreds of engineers to work full-time for multiple years to solve the problem.
The point that you don't care about a $332M fine is the point you stop bothering to run the business at all.
Monsanto before it was brought by Bayer won all cases.
The moment they where bought by Bayer (i.e. no longer US owned) somehow they start losing cases and judges doing fun things like making ruling based on not peer reviewed not yet fully published studies....
Dead Comment
The evidence needs to be there before these lawsuits are allowed to proceed.
1. Glyphosate is one of the more heavily studied chemicals known to man.
2. The evidence for it causing cancer is poor. Studies routinely fail to find evidence for it.
3. The subset of studies that do find evidence for such a link, find it in occupational exposure, by people who have been working knee-deep in it for decades. [1]
Yes, people probably should look at you like you're crazy, because you're extrapolating from cherry-picked evidence that supports your priors.
[1] Whose exposure is dramatically higher than that of someone eating food grown with it.
People who claimed that UK government gave them AIDS, on purpose, were called crazy. 50 years later, it turns out they were right.
"The blood was imported from the US after a UK shortage, where people such as prisoners could donate in return for cash. The minutes ..shows that officials knew that haemophiliacs were being given dangerous blood from the US that was making them ill with hepatitis... No one raised the alarm to stop the spread of the blood and instead, officials hoped the imported goods would not get a "bad name".
There was a major effort to supress this information. People has to extrapolate based on limited data.
These situations are not rare - when the workers in Teflon factories were having birth defects and cancers, and started questioning that maybe it's related to their job, they were called crazy too.
In my family we extrapolated based on limited data, twice, and doctors were looking at us like we were crazy, and it turned out we were right. If we didn't press the issue, two family members would have been dead.
So now I am jaded and I have limited faith in Medical establishment and institutions doing their homework.
The specific papers (worst effects of a great deal of exposure) oft cited are:
Myers, J.P.; Antoniou, M.N.; Blumberg, B.; Carroll, L.; Colborn, T.; Everett, L.G.; Hansen, M.; Landrigan, P.J.; Lanphear, B.P.; Mesnage, R.; et al. Concerns over use of glyphosate-based herbicides and risks associated with exposures: a consensus statement. Environ. Health 2016, 15, 19.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26883814/
Leon, M.E.; Schinasi, L.H.; Lebailly, P.; Beane Freeman, L.E.; Nordby, K.-C.; Ferro, G.; Monnereau, A.; Brouwer, M.; Tual, S.; Baldi, I.; et al. Pesticide use and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoid malignancies in agricultural cohorts from France, Norway and the USA: A pooled analysis from the AGRICOH consortium. Int. J. Epidemiol. 2019, 48, 1519–1535.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30880337/
Zhang, L.; Rana, I.; Shaffer, R.M.; Taioli, E.; Sheppard, L. Exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma: A meta-analysis and supporting evidence. Mutat. Res. Rev. Mutat. Res. 2019, 781, 186–206.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31342895/
I'm in a grain growing district and glyphosate isn't being applied to grain ready to eat | harvest here, just sprayed pre harvest to kill weeds and mid season to suppress weeds coming up in competition.
If people are concerned they could source from international suppliers that demand no glyphosate contracts such as https://www.grainmillers.com/grower-specifications/
For an industry review of the possiblities of avoiding
Farming without Glyphosate? https://www.ahri.uwa.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/plant...
is a decent balanced paper - it points out the vast number of studies show no real cause for concern while also giving the papers that show issues for farmers and the possible future for glyphosate free farming.
Rather than saying it doesn't affect this group but does affect another group it would be more appropriate to establish the level of consumption/exposure that is likely to cause a statistical increase in the likelihood of developing cancer.
I'm not really concerned about its dietary effects since there's no evidence there, but as an amateur entomologist the effects of Roundup on butterfly populations have been devastating - in the past milkweed was pretty hard to completely weed out by hand, but modern farming can clear hundreds of acres of every trace of milkweed with Roundup/glyphosate.
We have a very important microbiota that are bacteria themselves. The antibiotics on meat and environment can break havoc there, specially for people that work or live near those environments and can breathe or drink the pesticides.
I haven't seen the data or reporting on glyphosate residues. Without clear, unbiased proof of safety following the precautionary principle, there is no assurances that this shit is safe to eat.
Also, yes, industrial meat ag is bad for creating new pandemics between human workers<->livestock animals packed together in CAFOs<->wildlife, antibiotic resistance (antibiotics injected to make animals grow faster), and climate change. Sometimes animal rights people tout animal cruelty, but few people are convinced because the cognitive dissonance "forcefield" is too strong to accept this idea. Adapting a quote by Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their tastebuds and drone-delivered fast food depends on their not understanding it." Probably a whole other area for discussion. :]
In the absence of compelling precautionary evidence and systematic safety processes, it's clear that the faithful adherents of organic production are more likely to be safer than industrial megafarming done with the same blind faith in the miracles of chemical wizardry that brought us such hits as organophosphates, chlorpyrifos, DDT, and the over 85k compounds that are de facto unregulated because they are allowed until specific injury is proven after the damage is done ("whack-a-mole"-style), rather than first proven safe.
But the "organic" label doesn't check whether the farmers were "faithful adherents of organic production", only that they fulfilled the organic checklist. They can use as much chemical fertilizer and pesticides as they want, so long they're on the approved list. In the same vain farming and "industrial megafarming" isn't mutually exclusive.
We call them assholes. Or fucking assholes, depending on the degree.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905251 ( 18 days ago )
Here's where I might lose you. In our country, illness is a way to make money [3]. If you're really sick and trying to stay alive, you'll spend everything you've got. So the quickest way to turn people's savings into profit while also reducing the population of non-productive people is for them to fall ill, pay as much as they can to survive and then ultimately die an early death, which triggers a death tax event [4].
1. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
2. https://www.eatthis.com/toxic-food-ingredients-linked-to-can...
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2023/01/13/unitedhe...
4. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-taxes.asp
Similarly to how so many people that died from covid tended toward very low vitamin D levels [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...]
Most "medical" research tends to never focus on actual nutrition. Probably because that would reduce profits for those with vested interest from selling treatments.
https://swingtradebot.com/stocks-tagged-as/12320-hospice
What a coincidence!
Not saying they aren't but I trust them more now under a German firm than when they were American.
Source?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowitz_concentration_camp
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben_Trial
EDIT: And jailed Volkswagen engineers due to diesel scandal even though their cars are labelled as trucks because they would never ever pass the emission tests that VW and others cheated.
If you think this started in 2016, you have a short memory.