Bayer faces a second trial on the alleged cancer risk Roundup

(Reuters) – Bayer AG faces second US jury over allegations that its famous Roundup, a glyphosate herbicide, causes cancer six months after the price of its action was shaken by a verdict $ 289 million in a California court.

A lawsuit filed by Edwin Hardeman, a California resident, against the company was due to start Monday in federal court rather than state court. The trial is also a test case for a larger litigation. More than 760 of the 9,300 Roundup cases across the country are gathered in the San Francisco Federal Court, which ruled on the Hardeman case.

Bayer denies any claims that Roundup or glyphosate could cause cancer, claiming that decades of independent research had shown that the most widely used weed killer in the world was safe for human use and noting that the regulation had has been approved by regulators around the world.

According to a January decision by US District Judge Vince Chhabria, who presides over the federal litigation, the Hardeman jury will not hear all of the evidence presented at the California trial. last year.

Chhabria called the evidence presented by the plaintiffs that the company allegedly attempted to influence the regulators and manipulate public opinion "as a distraction" of science in these cases. He added that such evidence should only be presented to the jury in a second phase of the trial that would only be held if they determined that Roundup had caused Hardeman's cancer.

In August, a California state court jury found that evidence of corporate misconduct found Roundup to be the cause of another man's non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Monsanto's Bayer service did not warn consumers of the risks of weed killer cancer. The $ 289 million damages award from this jury was later reduced to $ 78 million.

The Bayer share price fell 10% as a result of the verdict and remained volatile.

Hardeman began using the Roundup brand herbicide with glyphosate in the 1980s to control poisoned oak and weeds on his property and sprayed "large amounts" of the chemical for many years, according to court documents. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, in February 2015 and filed a lawsuit a year later.

But Hardeman has a history of hepatitis C, a risk factor for developing lymphoma. Bayer also stated that the majority of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma incidents were idiopathic or had no known cause.

The plaintiffs criticized Chhabria's order dividing the lawsuit and narrowing the evidence as "unfair", claiming that their scientific evidence that glyphosate was at the origin of cancer was inextricably linked to the alleged unlawful conduct of Monsanto.