Last week, the same six-person jury in San Francisco found that 70-year-old Edwin Hardeman's decades-long use of Roundup to kill weeds on his farm resulted in him getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a type of cancer that targets the body's white blood cells, Sputnik reported.
Hardeman sought more than $19 million as compensation for his hospital bills, pain and suffering associated with the illness, which is now in remission.
"We are disappointed with the jury's decision, but this verdict does not change the weight of over four decades of extensive science and the conclusions of regulators worldwide that support the safety of our glyphosate-based herbicides and that they are not carcinogenic," Bayer, which acquired Monsanto last year, said in a statement. The company says it will appeal the ruling.
Multiple national and international agencies have identified Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, as a probable cause of cancer in humans, including the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is an arm of the World Health Organization, and the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
"It speaks volumes that not one Monsanto employee, past or present, came live to trial to defend Roundup's safety or Monsanto's actions," Hardeman's lawyers, Aimee Wagstaff and Jennifer Moore, said in a statement to AP.
The San Francisco Bay Chronicle noted that Hardeman's case is one of three "bellwether" trials that will establish guidelines for the settlement of 760 other cases against Monsanto around the country that have been transferred to US District Judge Vince Chhabria's court in San Francisco, as well as another 10,000 pending cases elsewhere.
Last year, a different jury awarded a man $289 million for cancer caused by Roundup, the first such ruling ever made, although a judge later reduced that to $89 million.
