Here we go again!
“Just one day after a federal jury decided that Monsanto must pay $80 million in damages to a Santa Rosa man, and less than a year after a state jury awarded $300 million in damages to a Vallejo groundskeeper in a similar case, opening statements were delivered Thursday in a new trial involving Monsanto in Alameda County Superior Court.”1
Alva and Alberta Pilliod, a Livermore couple in their 70s, used Monsanto’s Roundup on their three Northern California properties for more than 30 years (the couple’s lead attorney Brent Wisner told the jury a safe estimate would be that the Pilliods sprayed 1,500 gallons of Roundup over the course of 35 years) and now both have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. While their diagnoses came four years apart, in 2011 and 2015, they are both currently in remission. Oh and in case you were wondering, the likelihood of both of them being diagnosed with the same type of lymphoma (a diffuse large B-cell lymphoma) is 1 in 20,500.
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And just like the plaintiffs in the other two trials, the Pilliods used Roundup for weed control and didn’t know until 2017, thanks to a TV commercial, that Roundup might be a carcinogen.
“The new case is the first to go to trial in a grouping of 150 similar cases, and there are more than 760 lawsuits pending in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. According to the advocacy group U.S. Right to Know, there are more than 11,000 cases against Monsanto in the broader United States, alleging that Roundup exposure causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The burden will rest on Wisner and his team to prove that Roundup can cause cancer and that the weed killer was a contributing factor in the development of the Pilliods’ cancer.”1
As always, Monsanto denies that its product causes cancer. (Wonder how many trials will prove them wrong, and see them continue to claim their poison is safe?)
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The trial is expected to last about a month with witness testimony beginning on April 2nd.
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