Pesticides and herbicides are regularly used by many people every day in Tennessee and elsewhere in this country. People use these products and believe that while they are lethal to weeds or bugs that, used properly, they do not pose a threat to humans. A case recently brought against Monsanto, the makers of RoundUp, refuted that assumption. The company denies that its herbicide is a dangerous product.
A gentleman in another state contracted non-Hodgkins lymphoma and believes it was from use of Monsanto’s product RoundUp. He had used it several times a year during his career as a groundskeeper for an area school district in another state. In this case, the gentleman did not have to prove that the product caused his cancer but that it was ‘a substantial contributing factor.’ In other words, that had it not been for the product, the gentleman would most likely not have developed cancer.
There are thousands of other similar cases waiting to be tried, but this one was expedited as the gentleman is believed to be near death. In this case, the gentleman was awarded $289 million in damages by the jury. The case against Monsanto is not a class action suit but a federal multi-district litigation, or MDL. In a class action suit there is typically one trial. In an MDL, each plaintiff is entitled to his or her own trial.
While cancer is not always the death sentence that it was in the past in Tennessee, it is still a shocking and scary diagnosis. While no one can definitively say what causes a specific cancer in a specific individual, it may be possible to determine that there were contributing factors possibly caused by a dangerous product. A conversation with an experienced medical malpractice attorney may help provide answers to a person who may suspect that there were extenuating circumstances that may have contributed to one’s condition.