Roundup Lost a Lawsuit, But We Still Don’t Know if It Causes Cancer
Lifehacker | Beth Skwarecki
This week a jury found that a man’s use of Roundup on weeds in his yard was a “substantial factor” in causing the cancer that he developed years later. But court cases are not scientific studies, and scientists are still divided on whether glyphosate should really be considered a carcinogen.
As we’ve covered before, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer studied the evidence and decided to add glyphosate to the list of things that “probably” cause cancer. Other things on that list include red meat, hot coffee, and the human papillomavirus.
But other organizations did their own analyses and came to different conclusions. The US Environmental Protection Agency, Health Canada, and the European Food Safety Authority all concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer. Individual studies on glyphosate have given mixed results for most cancers, with a handful of studies leaning toward the possibility that it really does cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.