Cancers Plateaued as Roundup Use Grew, Jury Hears
Courthouse News Service | Maria Dinzeo
Monsanto wrapped its defense with testimony from Dr. Alexandra Levine, an oncologist with the City of Hope cancer center. Levine said decades of spraying Roundup did not contribute to Alva Pilliod’s illness.
“Based upon the entirety of the data, I feel Roundup did not have anything to do with his development of non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” she told jurors, adding, “His abnormal immune system would have truly allowed this to occur.”
Levine refuted her City of Hope colleague, pathologist Dr. Dennis Weisenburger, who testified earlier in the trial that decades of frequent Roundup use caused both Alva and his wife Alberta to develop cancer within four years of each other.
Levine, who is touted as an “acclaimed expert” on lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and AIDS by City of Hope, said in her 50-year career as a doctor she’s never seen anyone so immunosuppressed as Alva Pilliod.
Pilliod, who developed diffuse Large B Cell lymphoma in 2011, also suffers from recurrent brain infections, or encephalitis, brought on by the human papillomavirus. He’s also developed a complicated seizure disorder and meningitis, for which he spent four weeks in a coma, and has had skin cancer 22 times.
While none of these diseases are causes of lymphoma, Levine said they are signs he suffers from an unusually weakened immune system that allows malignant cancer cells to thrive.