Roundup Follicular Lymphoma Lawsuit Filed Over Exposure to Monsanto Weedkiller

According to allegations raised in a product liability lawsuit filed against Monsanto, a North Carolina man developed follicular lymphoma from Roundup, after using the popular weedkiller on his property over a period of nearly ten years.

The complaint (PDF) was filed by Randall Seidl in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on November 7, indicating that Monsanto knew or should have known that glyphosate contained in Roundup increases increases risk of cancer, yet failed to warn consumers.

Follicular lymphoma is a sub-type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and is among the types cancer that have been most commonly associated with exposure to Roundup and other glyphosate-based weedkillers. It accounts for about 20% of all non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma diagnoses, and is a slow growing tumor that, if left untreated, can transform and become far more aggressive.

Seidel used Roundup to control weeds on his property from 2005 through about 2014, claiming that exposure to the chemical led to his follicular lymphoma diagnosis in November 2014.

While the weedkiller has been promoted by Monsanto as harmless, and is commonly found in garden centers throughout the United States, growing research suggests that Roundup may be a human carcinogen.

In March 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) linked side effects of Roundup to an increased risk of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, classifying glyphosate as a likely cancer-causing agent.

“The harm caused by Defendant’s Roundup products far outweighed their benefit, rendering Defendant’s products dangerous to an extent beyond that which an ordinary consumer would contemplate,” Seidel indicates in the complaint. “Defendant’s Roundup products were and are more dangerous than alternative products and Defendant could have designed its Roundup products to make them less dangerous. Indeed, at the time that Defendant designed its Roundup products, the state of the industry’s scientific knowledge was such that a less risky design or formulation was attainable.”

The case will join a growing number of Roundup cancer lawsuits filed throughout the United States, typically involving individuals diagnosed with different types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, including follicular lymphoma, large diffuse B-cell lymphoma, T-cell lymphoma and others. Plaintiffs are often farmers, landscapers or other agricultural workers regularly exposed to large amounts of the weedkiller.

Given similar questions of fact and law raised in lawsuits filed through the federal court system, the Roundup cases have been centralized before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California, for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings.

Seidel’s complaint will be transferred into this federal multidistrict litigation (MDL), where it is expected that a small group of representative claims will be prepared for early trial dates to help gauge how juries may respond to certain evidence and testimony that is likely to be offered throughout the litigation.

While the outcomes of these early trial dates will not binding on other claims, they may help facilitate Roundup settlements with Monsanto without the need for hundreds of individual cases to go before juries nationwide.