Bayer Stock Sinks 12% After Court Rules Weed Killer It Bought from Monsanto Caused Cancer

Why Bayer, primarily a pharmaceutical company, bought Monsanto, an agrochemical company known for making Roundup and Agent Orange, is beyond my imagination. Agent Orange produced dreadful famine in Viet Nam and many horrible diseases in the people and in the soldiers who encountered it. 

Bayer's website makes this astonishing claim:

We exist to help people thrive - Advancing health and nutrition is what we do best and care about most.

© Global Look Press / Sven Hoppe

Bayer shares plunged more than 12 percent after a second US jury ruled that glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer causes cancer. It was a huge blow to the German pharmaceutical giant which bought US agrochemical firm Monsanto.

The stock drop during Wednesday morning trading on the Frankfurt exchange wiped out almost $8 billion from Bayer's market value.

The unanimous decision by a jury in San Francisco federal court followed another ruling made in August in California. Back then, the biotechnology corporation was ordered to pay $289 million in compensatory and punitive damages over the case of a school groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, whose cancer was allegedly caused due to years of using glyphosate-based Roundup.

The latest verdict was not a finding of Bayer’s liability for the cancer of plaintiff Edwin Hardeman. The trial is expected to proceed to the next phase, beginning on Wednesday, with the jury to determine the liability and damages in the case.

Bayer, which specializes in producing pharmaceuticals, consumer healthcare products, agricultural chemicals and biotechnology products, inherited the legal battles with its $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto, the US' leading producer of genetically engineered crops. Bayer may potentially face thousands of similar lawsuits in the US alone.

However, the German company has denied claims that glyphosate or Roundup causes cancer and said it was disappointed with the jury’s decision.

“We are confident the evidence in phase two will show that Monsanto’s conduct has been appropriate and the company should not be liable for Mr. Hardeman’s cancer,” Bayer said in a statement.

Good luck with that! I think you paid a fortune for a big liability.

Canada Sees No Cancer Risk from Monsanto’s Roundup Weed Killer

Nothing I could say here that would not put me at risk of being sued

Oh, Canada

© Reuters / Benoit Tessier

Canadian farmers will continue using glyphosate after Health Canada concluded that the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer poses no human risks.

The federal agency dismissed eight notices of objection and assertions made in the so-called Monsanto Papers in 2017.

“After a thorough scientific review, we have concluded that the concerns raised by the objectors could not be scientifically supported when considering the entire body of relevant data. The objections raised did not create doubt or concern regarding the scientific basis for the 2017 re-evaluation decision for glyphosate,” Health Canada said in a press release.

The 2017 re-evaluation determined that glyphosate is not genotoxic and is unlikely to pose a human cancer risk. It also determined that dietary exposure associated with the use of glyphosate is not expected to pose a risk of concern to human health. When used according to revised label directions, glyphosate products are not expected to pose risks of concern to the environment, according to the study.

Health Canada said it has selected a group of 20 of its own scientists who were not involved in the 2017 decision to evaluate the eight objections and the concerns raised publicly around glyphosate. The agency said its scientists “left no stone unturned in conducting” the review.

The agency noted that it “had access to numerous individual studies and raw scientific data during its assessment of glyphosate, including additional cancer and genotoxicity studies.” It added that it will “continue to monitor for new information related to glyphosate, including regulatory actions from other governments, and will take appropriate action if risks of concern to human health or the environment are identified.”

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, which is the most popular weed killer in the US. German chemicals and pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, which bought Monsanto last year, disclosed earlier that lawsuits from 9,300 plaintiffs were pending at the end of October. The lawsuits alleged that the company’s recently acquired weed-killing product caused cancer.

The surge in lawsuits followed the $289-million California court verdict when Monsanto was ordered to pay damages to a man who alleged its glyphosate-based weed killers, including Roundup, caused his cancer.

Bayer rejected all the accusations, claiming there are hundreds of scientific studies and regulatory authorities that show glyphosate, the compound contained in the weed killers, is safe to use.

And how many of those studies were funded by Monsanto? I'm guessing, all of them!

Monsanto Sued Again by Brazilian Soybean Farmers over GMO Seed

Monsanto - Agricultural Mafia?

Workers harvest soy in a farm in Brazil © Paulo Whitaker / Reuters

Growers in Brazil’s largest soybean producing state Mato Grosso have asked a court to cancel Monsanto’s Intacta GMO seed patent. They claim irregularities, including the company’s alleged failure to prove it brings de facto technological innovation.

The Mato Grosso branch of Aprosoja, the association representing the growers, has filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Brasilia. The growers claim Monsanto’s Intacta RR2 PRO patent “does not fully reveal the invention so as to allow, at the end of the exclusivity period, for any person to freely have access to it.”

That requirement “avoids that a company controls a technology for an undetermined period of time,” Aprosoja said, adding Intacta’s patent protection extends through October 2022.

It cited data from consultancy Agroconsult, saying that about 53 percent of Brazil’s soy area was planted with Intacta technology in the 2016/17 crop cycle. Around 40 percent of the crop is grown with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seed technology (Intacta’s predecessor), and only seven percent is non-GM.

Brazilian farmers have been continually urging the replacement of genetically modified soybeans with non-GM seeds. Recently they asked Monsanto and other producers of pest-resistant corn seeds to reimburse them for money spent on additional pesticides when the bugs killed the crops instead of dying.

Several years ago five million Brazilian soybean farmers sued Monsanto, claiming the genetic-engineering company was collecting royalties on crops it unfairly claims as its own. In 2012, the Brazilian court ruled in favor of the Brazilian farmers, saying Monsanto owes them at least $2 billion since 2004.

After the legal disputes, Monsanto stopped collecting royalties linked to its first-generation Roundup Ready technology, and some farmers agreed to get a discount rate to use Intacta seeds.

Biotech crops are genetically engineered to resist pests or disease, tolerate drought or withstand the spraying of weedkillers like glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

In the US, the herbicide has been considered safe since 2013, when Monsanto received approval from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for increased tolerance levels for glyphosate. 

EPA needs to be gutted and run by people not in the industries it pretends to regulate.

However recently, the World Health Organization ruled it’s a carcinogen which along with other Monsanto chemicals could cause Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and cancer.

Possible Game-Changer for Autistic Kids May Never Happen

‘Game-changer for autism’: 100-year-old drug reverses symptoms, study finds

The drug Suramin could be used to alleviate the symptoms of autism © Veri Sanovri / Global Look Press

A drug discovered more than 100 years ago may hold the key to combating autism symptoms, according to a study.

Researcher Dr Robert Naviaux of the San Diego School of Medicine gave suramin, a drug first developed in 1916, to 10 autistic boys between the ages of five and 14, and noted transformative results.

"After the single dose, it was almost like a roadblock had been released," he said. “If the future studies show that there’s continued health benefits, this could be a game-changer for families with autism.”

The study, which has been published in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, saw five of the participants receive suramin, while the remainder were given placebos. Included in the group were four non-verbal children – two six year olds and two 14 year olds. 

“The six year old and the 14 year old who received suramin said the first sentences of their lives about one week after the single suramin infusion,” Naviaux told the UC San Diego Health website. “This did not happen in any of the children given the placebo.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 1 in 68 children are affected by autism – which is more than four times more common among boys. The causes of autism, however, are not yet fully understood.

Research has shown that cells harden their membranes in response to attacks from viruses or pollutants. The reaction, known as ‘cellular danger response’ (CDR), is a common defense mechanism that allows cells to wait for danger to pass. Autism is thought to develop during early childhood when cells can become ‘stuck’ in this mode.

Dr Naviaux believes that suramin can ‘un-stick’ the cells by inhibiting the signal they release when they sense danger, which can help normalize the response.

One parent, whose son had not spoken a full sentence in more than a decade, said: “Within an hour after the infusion, he started to make more eye contact with the doctor and nurses in the room. There was a new calmness at times, but also more emotion at other times.” 

“He started to show an interest in playing hide-and-seek with his 16-year-old brother. He started practicing making new sounds around the house. He started seeking out his dad more.”

Suramin was originally developed as a cure for sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease spread by the tsetse fly in sub-Saharan Africa.

First tested on mice in 2013, this is the first time suramin has been administered to children.

For Naviaux, the challenge now is to widen his research to a bigger sample testing size. “This work is new and this type of clinical trial is expensive,” he said. “We did not have enough funding to do a larger study. And even with the funding we were able to raise, we had to go $500,000 in debt to complete the trial.”

Time for a change

The problem here is obvious. 100 year old drugs cannot be patented and therefore can be made very inexpensively. The profits for big pharma will not likely ever exceed the extraordinary costs of trials. This is the the huge elephant in the small room of health care. 

The way the system works is that there are no advances in medication that don't cost exorbitant amounts of money. Cheap and easy solutions to many diseases go by the boards because no-one is willing to fund the trials needed for their acceptance.

Governments, all of which are fighting rapidly increasing costs of drugs and health care, have to make some hard decisions. They either have to find new and cheaper and quicker ways to do clinical trials, or they have to fund those trials for medications that will reduce costs for both drugs and healthcare if those trials are successful.

Governments can benefit from funding such trials as this by lowering the costs of drugs which will make them more affordable for patients meaning more patients who need the drugs will get the drugs and consequently be in better health and require less in terms of medical care and, in many cases, social care. Improvement in quality of life can be immeasurable. 

It seems like a no-brainer to me. But I think the trick would be to create a resource pool funded by most countries in the world, perhaps through the WHO. It would not be onerous if many countries contributed and it would be far more beneficial than some international programs currently running.

Of course, big pharma would be mad as hell, but I'm OK with that!