Roundup products are seen for sale at a Home Depot store in San Rafael, California, on July, 9, 2018.JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
An Australian court dismissed a class action lawsuit that claimed German pharmaceutical and chemicals company Bayer's glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup could cause a type of blood cancer, which gave the firm a respite after facing similar cases in the United States.
Reuters reported that Australian Federal Court Justice Michael Lee ruled Thursday (July 25) that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Roundup could cause non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL).
According to Lee, the lawsuit does not have enough evidence, on the basis of a balance of probabilities, to prove the probability of the herbicide being cancerous.
On the other hand, Bayer insisted that Roundup is safe, saying that it "fully stands behind" its products, which it claimed was used globally for "almost 50 years."
The Australian class action lawsuit is just one of 40 cases filed outside the US, all of them in either Canada or Australia.
Meanwhile, the Australian public broadcaster ABC reported that Bayer claimed to have won 14 of its 20 Roundup court trials in the US, but at the expense of multiple profit losses totalling $4 billion between late 2023 and early 2024.
More than 50,000 outstanding claims against the company are yet to be resolved, with a request for an agreement to prevent further cases being denied by a US court.
Roundup was originally a product of Monsanto, and was continued when Bayer acquired the company for $63 billion in 2018.
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