Roundup Lost Her Lawsuit, but We Still Don’t Know If It Causes Cancer
This week, jurors found that the man’s use of Roundup to control weeds in his yard was “a significant factor” in cancer, which he developed many years later. But lawsuits are not scientific research, and scientists still disagree over whether glyphosate should be considered a carcinogen.
As we said earlier , the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer looked at the evidence and decided to add glyphosate to the list of things that “probably” cause cancer. Other things on this list include red meat, hot coffee, and human papillomavirus.
But other organizations have done their own analysis and come to different conclusions. The US Environmental Protection Agency, Health Canada and the European Food Safety Agency have concluded that glyphosate does not cause cancer. Isolated studies of glyphosate have produced mixed results for most cancers , with a small number of studies suggesting that it does cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The latest study found that among agricultural workers who worked with the highest amounts of glyphosate, the risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was 2.8 percent, compared with 2 percent in the general population. (One of the authors of this study has a blog post explaining this work .) This is a small change in risk, and probably does not apply to the average consumer who only encounters glyphosate in the backyard or as traces of glyphosate in foods. nutrition. But scientists do believe that there was a detectable connection at all. For an up-to-date summary of the scientific evidence for glyphosate, I recommend this explanation by Tom Philpott of Mother Jones .
Meanwhile, Bayer (which owns Roundup and bought the company formerly known as Monsanto) released a statement that there is ample evidence that glyphosate is safe and does not cause cancer. Which is admittedly true.
In truth, court cases are not scientific research. The jury in a recent trial did not have time to wait for new results or scientific knowledge to answer a question with which scientists have not yet come to agreement. In fact, litigation means it will be easier to file claims in the future. Glyphosate is probably still safe at the levels most of us are exposed to … but more scientific evidence is needed to be sure.