Missouri House backs legal shield for weedkiller maker facing thousands of cancer-related lawsuits

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The manufacturer of a popular weedkiller won support Wednesday from the Missouri House for a proposal that could shield it from costly lawsuits alleging it failed to warn customers its product could cause cancer.

The House vote marked an important but incremental victory for chemical giant Bayer, which acquired an avalanche of legal claims involving the weedkiller Roundup when it bought the product’s original St. Louis-area-based producer, Monsanto.

The legislation now heads to the Missouri Senate with several weeks remaining in the annual legislative session. Bayer pursued similar legislation this year in Idaho and Iowa, where it has mining and manufacturing facilities, but it fell short in both states.

Bayer disputes claims that Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate, causes a cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But it has set aside $16 billion and already paid about $10 billion of that amount to resolve some of the tens of thousands of legal claims against it.

Though some studies associate glyphosate with cancer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said it is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans when used as directed.

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