“$2b” is what the jury says they should get. Whether they will actually receive anywhere near that amount is anyone’s guess, because (a) the judge gets to decide about the actual award, (b) the lawyers will probably take a healthy bite out of it, and (c) by the time this has been appealed etc., they may have shuffled off this mortal coil, anyhow (after all they’re old people, and even if their cancer seems to have gone away they probably have all sorts of other ailments).
Also, there may be loads of similar cases on the docket but Bayer has only so many dollars to pay in compensation before they go bankrupt, so any people looking forward to $$$ for their purportedly glyposate-caused cancer had better hope they’re near the top of the list.
Who knows? It’s just that, as far as we can tell, glyphosate doesn’t tend to give people non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and there are loads of other risk factors, so pinning it exclusively on the glyphosate is a bit of a stretch.
Okay geniuses, how to explain two married people coming down with the same rare cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma?
Wikipedia says 2.1% of Americans will be affected at some point in their lives, with the most common window for diagnosis between 65 and 75.
So, for any pair of people: 0.021x0.021 = .000441 likelihood that they will both have non-Hodgkins lymphomia, or .04% likelihood. There are 61.24 million married couples in the US, so: .000441 x 61,230,000 = 27,000 couples in the US can be expected to have had both members be affected by non-Hodgkins lymphoma at some point, probably when they are elderly.
I mean, sure, “rare”. For any given couple, it is very unlikely. But there are lot of people around.
Vaccines are something of a special case in the USA because claims of vaccine damage are regularly compensated fairly lavishly through a special “vaccine court”. The rationale behind this is that since society likes people to get vaccinated (or to get their kids vaccinated) in the interest of public health, it should also be on society to deal with the (very rare) complications.
Note though that the “vaccine court” makes no serious attempt to establish actual causality; even a fairly tenuous connection between a vaccine shot and a later illness has a good chance to win compensation. Anti-vaxers often construe this as a tacit admission by the pro-vaccination crowd that vaccines are in fact dangerous and that loads and loads of cases are being quietly paid off, but as usual it is very difficult to prove conclusively that some kid’s illness was not caused by the MMR shot they had three days before, and not a lot easier to show that in fact it was, so the court tends to err in favour of the damaged party often out of expediency, not because it is likely that whatever happened was clearly due to the vaccine.
I am curious why you ended your post with that comment? What substance did you think that bring to the discussion? I ask because:
-yes there is growing evidence that consumption of red meat and even more definitively processed meat increases risk of colorectal cancer.
And:
-yes hair salon workers are often exposed to toxic chemicals including synthetic hair dyes, some of which are showing some carcinogenicity. Along with ag workers, a community I have worked with and in quite a lot, there are other occupations that can put people at higher risk of occupational exposure but are under-recognized as hazardous, such as hair salon workers as mentioned, nail salon workers as well, artists depending on the medium they use and how seriously they address ventilation, etc.
So again I am curious why you included that? What is likely of course is the obvious - that you thought of it as a clever way to be dismissive of the IARC and WHO as a whole by pointing out some other “silly” things they have concluded. But there is nothing clever in that at all. I have mainly been commenting on the smugness and dismissiveness of several people’s comments and how that attitude is problematic in all contexts but especially so in the context of discussing science, as it is antithetical to an open-minded scientific approach. So I suppose I could thank you for proving my point, but more so it is just sad how often I see that kind of arrogance and hubris “in the name of science”. It’s why my real science heroes are the ones who exhibited a sincere humility in the face of their own ignorance and through that advanced our knowledge and understanding. Darwin is a wonderful example of that.
What you wrote before that last comment was all far more reasonable and rational – you should have stopped there. That said, there are counter-arguments to each of your points. But once I read the last line I decided it is obviously not worth the bother.
Converse of illogical being logical, so thank you!
But more seriously, I agree with you not to stretch that analogy too far - but my main point still stands that the science on tobacco and cancer is now very solid, but was not always and certainly was not when people first began feeling the need to litigate to seek justice. It was still disputed; for instance many MDs (who in my experience like to think of themselves as evidence-based but only the better ones truly are) still considered it to be untrue.
In my opinion, a $2b judgment should probably be delivered when the science is actually solid, not in anticipation or presumption that the evidence will be solid at some later point.
The important thing to remember about the IARC is that they’re not in the business of assessing risk. They’re trying to identify substances that are hazardous in certain circumstances, but whether a hazardous substance actually presents a risk to people is another question entirely, which the IARC doesn’t touch. There are other agencies that deal with that.
The red-meat issue, for example, is a case in point. The IARC figured out that red meat carries a cancer hazard presumably by reading papers by researchers who fed loads of red meat to laboratory rats. So indeed, if you eat kilograms of red meat every day, that may increase your risk of developing colorectal cancer. However, most people do not in fact eat that much red meat, and colorectal cancer is not exactly common to begin with. Even if eating lots of red meat “doubled” one’s risk of getting cancer, that may mean that 80 out of 100,000 people fall ill per year instead of 40, which would be somewhat concerning but not a cause for panic. People may decide for themselves that eating a nice steak every so often is worth the cancer risk, and many people do. Nobody seriously calls for the abolition of red meat because of the cancer risk (militant vegetarians usually cite different reasons), and so far people don’t seem to sue beef farmers because they got colorectal cancer purportedly from eating steaks.
Similarly, there may be a cancer hazard associated with glyphosate (even though the science seems to tend against the idea), but we have lots and lots of people to feed, and glyphosate is one of the better pesticides that we have right now. In fact there is no obvious replacement that is as non-dangerous to people and the environment, that has received the same level of scrutiny, and that is as cheaply and widely available. So the benefits from using it might in fact outweigh the associated risks. We should obviously do what we can to mitigate the risks that dealing with glyphosate presents especially to agricultural workers who handle the stuff on a daily basis, but ludicrous jury awards from lawsuits where there is little probability that glyphosate is actually to blame for someone’s illness aren’t helping.
It is your right to consider that to be the case of course. I hope that you and others are informed about the law and how law suits work. The vast majority of this “award” is explicitly punitive based on Monsanto’s negligence and misdeeds, as the jury found them. It is not intended as compensation for damages. So again feel free to disagree with it but hopefully that is an informed, educated opinion not only about what the jury was presented with but also what the verdict actually means and does not mean.
I also hope you are taking into account that regulation and statute is the realm of opinion and subjective - hopefully based on science, though we all know it is often only partially or not at all the case. What is an acceptable risk:benefit ratio is a judgment call. For example, here in the USA there is zero tolerance under the Delaney clause of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act for any food additive that exhibits carcinogenicity; i.e. the FDA has a zero tolerance policy (in theory and by law anyway) for carcinogenic food additives. At the same time, agricultural chemicals are regulated by an entirely different set of laws and overseen by a different agency (EPA, not FDA) despite the fact that ag chemical residues end up on and in food - the degree varying greatly depending on the chemical, crop, harvest, handling, application timing and if or to what degree the reg’s and best practices for that chemical are being followed (enforcement is godawful poor in this last area). When it comes to pesticides, some degree of carcinogenicity is considered acceptable in a risk:benefit ratio, whereas when it comes to food additives it is not. Some of us consider this illogical, and lawsuits over this exact point led to the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act under the Clinton Administration to circumvent the effective banning of carcinogenic pesticides as an outcome of federal law suits.
There are many of us who consider this to be an irrational regulatory structure, to say the least. And yeah, that is an opinion - like yours.
And speaking of opinions of what is “ludicrous”, the idea that we need the herbicide glyphosate to “feed the world” is, in my humble opinion, ludicrous. It is propaganda. You have every right to swallow it. You would be very hard pressed though, to make a case for that based on facts. I agree by the way that there are quite a few other ag chemicals that are far more concerning in terms of toxicity - and not limited to carcinogens of course but also neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors. But that is beside the point.
Yes thank you for that. I so much agree with you, in fact. But only in the context of all things being equal. But we don’t live in that world - we live in a world in which scientific research in the public interest is severely underfunded and dwarfed by private, profit-driven research, and journals and a scientific community too often infiltrated by conflict of interest and at the very least soft corruption, all of which makes it much harder for those many many good scientists out there to get the funding and support they need to pursue their hypotheses. We also could (and imo should) implement a Precautionary Principle approach, in which a novel substance would have to have demonstrated safety before being allowed onto the market, which is distinct from our current regulatory structure, in which toxicity must be demonstrated in order to keep something off the market. Some parts of the world are beginning to adopt this approach.
So we’re left with this horribly imperfect system. Law suits always represent a failure of some kind. Maybe we can agree on that at least!
