Guest's Blog
The global spread of coronavirus/COVID-19 has sent researchers and scientists into overdrive to find both treatments and cures.
In the meantime, doctors and other practitioners are, to a large extent, improvising. They are employing best-care practices for the very sick in hospital and providing best-guess advice for those with mild symptoms who are self-isolating, and for those who have no symptoms and would like to keep it that way.
Some practitioners are taking a back-to-basics approach. They’re looking at remedies we already know about that have a low toxicity and some efficacy in other strains of influenza, to see if they might work with coronavirus.
Continuing to lack a resolution in the massive nationwide Roundup cancer litigation, a leading U.S. plaintiffs’ law firm is pressing ahead with preparations for a California trial involving a critically ill cancer patient and his wife who are suing the former Monsanto company claiming the man’s disease is due to years of his use of Roundup herbicide.
The Miller Firm, which has about 6,000 Roundup plaintiffs, is now preparing to go to trial against Monsanto’s German owner Bayer AG on May 5 in Marin County Superior Court in California. The case has been granted preference status – meaning a quick trial date – because plaintiff Victor Berliant is critically ill. A deposition of Berliant is being scheduled for next week.
The Independent Women’s Forum is a nonprofit organization that partners with Monsanto, defends toxic chemicals in food and consumer products, and argues against laws that would curb the power of corporations. Funded largely by right-wing foundations that push climate science denial, IWF began in 1991 as an effort to defend now Supreme Court Justice (and former Monsanto attorney) Clarence Thomas as he faced sexual harassment charges. In 2018, the group also defended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the face of sexual assault allegations, and described Kavanaugh as a “champion of women.“
A Roundup cancer trial in St. Louis, Missouri, will not open on Wednesday as expected, a court spokesman said Monday, fueling fresh speculation that a global settlement of tens of thousands of lawsuits brought by cancer victims against the former Monsanto Co. may be near.
Editor's note: Sherri Dugger, executive director of Women, Food and Agriculture Network and the Indiana Farmers Union, and co-chair of the national coalition of U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal, prepared these remarks for the Farmers, Soil & Climate 2020 Iowa presidential forum, held on Janury 25, 2020. Reprinted here with permission from the author.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Sherri Dugger. I co-own Dugger Family Farm in Morristown, Indiana, with my husband, Randy. I serve as the executive director for Women, Food and Agriculture Network and also for Indiana Farmers Union.
I want to start out by telling you a little about me. I like to tell people I was born to eat. As a newborn, I weighed in at a hefty 12.3 pounds. I’m certain that I tumbled into this world hungry. And, for as long as I can remember, I have always loved food. The only trouble is that I—like most Americans—never really thought much about what was on my plate. I never considered how the food was raised, what chemicals it might have in it, or the impact those chemicals would have on my body.
The highly anticipated opening of what would have been a fourth Roundup cancer trial was postponed indefinitely on Friday amid settlement negotiations between Monsanto owner Bayer AG and attorneys representing thousands of people who claim their cancers were caused by exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides.
St. Louis City Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan issued an order stating only “cause continued.” The order came after lead lawyers from the plaintiffs’ firms of New York-based Weitz & Luxenberg and The Miller Firm of Virginia left Hogan’s courtroom unexpectedly shortly before opening statements were due to begin at mid-morning Friday. Sources close to the legal teams initially said opening statements were pushed back until early afternoon to allow for time to see if the plaintiffs’ attorneys and lawyers for Bayer could finalize a resolution that would settle tens of thousands of lawsuits. But by early afternoon the proceedings were called off and it was widely speculated that a deal had been achieved.
It’s been nearly five years since international cancer scientists classified a popular weed-killing chemical as probably carcinogenic, news that triggered an explosion of lawsuits brought by cancer patients who blame the former chemical maker Monsanto Co. for their suffering.
Tens of thousands of U.S. plaintiffs – some lawyers involved in the litigation say over 100,000 – claim Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and other glyphosate-based weed killers caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, while Monsanto spent years hiding the risks from consumers.
The first three trials went badly for Monsanto and its German owner Bayer AG as outraged juries awarded over $2.3 billion in damages to four plaintiffs. Trial judges lowered the jury awards to a total of roughly $190 million, and all are under appeal.
In a hall filled to the rafters with agroecological and regenerative farmers, a man approaches the podium.
Most already know what he’s going to say, but they’ve come to listen anyway—only half believing that what they’ve seen and heard about his assault on farming and farmers could be accurate.
George Monbiot is a journalist and author specializing in environmental issues. His work is read all over the world. You could be forgiven for thinking that he might be on the side of agroecological farming. But increasingly he isn’t. And if there was ever any doubt of this, Monbiot’s performance at the UK’s prestigious Oxford Real Farming Conference, following the debut of his TV documentary, “Apocalypse Cow,” was enough to remove any last shred of that doubt.
Anticipation is building around the belief that there could soon be an announcement of at least a partial settlement of U.S. lawsuits pitting thousands of U.S. cancer patients against Monsanto Co. over allegations the company hid the health risks of its Roundup herbicides.
A highly anticipated Roundup cancer trial set to start later this month in the St. Louis area has been pulled from the docket, a court official said on Wednesday.
The trial, which was to pit a woman named Sharlean Gordon against Roundup maker Monsanto Co., was to start Jan. 27 in St. Louis County and was to be broadcast to the public. Notably, Gordon’s lawyers planned to put former Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant on the stand. St. Louis was the home of Monsanto’s corporate headquarters until the company was purchased by Bayer AG of Germany in June of 2018.
In taking the trial off the calendar, the judge in the case has ordered that a status conference be set for a month from now, said St. Louis County Court spokeswoman Christine Bertelson.
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