This week, the Bayer pharmaceutical company agreed to pay about $10 billion to settle legal claims over the health effects of the herbicide Roundup. The budget will end over 95,000 lawsuits brought against Monsanto (which Bayer bought in 2018), while also allocating money to investigate whether Roundup causes cancer.
Specifically, $1.25 billion will go toward independent research into whether Roundup causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (and at what doses). The money is a step in the right direction, says Emanuela Taioli, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai who served on the 2016 EPA review board analyzing whether an essential Roundup ingredient caused cancer. Few studies exist to substantiate how the hotly debated product impacts the human body.
