A U.S. judge on Tuesday said he would reduce a US$80 million damage award against Bayer AG to US$50 million or less in the case of a man who blamed his cancer on glyphosate-based weed killer Roundup. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco said the jury's US$75 million punitive damages award to plaintiff Edwin Hardeman in March could not stand.
A US jury has found that one of the world's most widely-used weed-killers was a “substantial factor” in causing a man's cancer. Pharmaceutical group Bayer had strongly rejected claims that its glyphosate-based Roundup product was carcinogenic. But the jury in San Francisco ruled unanimously that it contributed to causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in California resident Edwin Hardeman.