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 U.S. District Judge Vince Chaabria in San Francisco in an order said
the case of California resident Edwin Hardeman will be the first out
of more than 620 cases pending in the federal litigation to go to a
jury.
Hardeman's case will mark the second trial in the U.S. litigation
over glyphosate, after a California state court jury in August
awarded $289 million to a school groundskeeper, finding Monsanto
liable for the man's cancer.
Damages were later reduced to $78 million, and Bayer, which denies
the allegations, said it would appeal the decision.
Its share price, however, has dropped more than 30 percent since the
Aug. 10 jury verdict and the company faces some 9,300 U.S.
glyphosate lawsuits.
Bayer, which acquired Monsanto earlier this year for $63 billion,
says its glyphosate-based products do not cause cancer, pointing to
decades of scientific studies and regulatory approvals that have
shown the chemical to be safe for human use.
Hardeman's case was picked as a so-called bellwether, or test trial,
frequently used in U.S. product liability mass litigation to help
both sides gauge the range of damages and define settlement options.
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Hardeman began using the Roundup brand herbicide with glyphosate in
the 1980s to control poison oak and weeds on his property and
sprayed "large volumes" of the chemical for many years on a regular
basis, according to court documents. He was diagnosed with
non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system, in February 2015
and filed his lawsuit a year later.
Glyphosate jury trials will ramp up next year. The company is
scheduled to face jurors in another California state court trial in
March, after a judge last week granted a couple's request for an
expedited trial.
Another trial in St. Louis, Missouri, state court is expected to
start later in 2019.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September 2017 concluded
a decades-long assessment of glyphosate risks and found the chemical
not likely carcinogenic to humans. But the World Health
Organization's cancer arm in 2015 classified glyphosate as "probably
carcinogenic to humans."
(Reporting by Tina Bellon; Editing by Tom Brown)
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