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A jury has ordered Bayer to pay $332 million dollars in damages to a man who says the company’s Roundup product caused his cancer, multiple reports cite.
According to ABC News, Carlsbad, Calif. native Dennis Baker, 57, was diagnosed with a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2020 and is currently in remission.
On Tuesday, the San Diego Superior Court jury determined that the weed killer product’s active ingredient, glyphosate, was related to the cancer.
“His doctors have told him it’s going to come back and we’re just waiting to see if that happens,” the former land surveyor’s lawyer Adam Peavy told the outlet’s local affiliate, KNSD-TV.
A spokesperson for Bayer told Reuters that the verdict includes compensatory damages of $7 million and the other $325 million in punitive damages.
The rep added that out of four legal claims, the jury favored Bayer on two of them, stating that they had not been found negligent and the product was not defectively designed. The jury did determine, however, that Bayer had failed to warn of the risks of using the product.
In 2020 alone, the company has settled up to $10.9 billion in Roundup-related claims and still has nearly 40,000 more to go.
Bloomberg notes that Bayer has reserved 16 billion in total to allocate to Roundup litigation costs.
PEOPLE reached out to Adam Peavy and Bayer, but they did not immediately respond for comment.
According to NIH, “glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world,” and “can constitute a major environmental and health problem.”
Glyphosate can “induce several neurotoxic effects” and “exposure to this pesticide during the early stages of life can seriously affect normal cell development,” the site reads.
“Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer that starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes, which are part of the body’s immune system,” the American Cancer Society explains.
In 2018, Dewayne Johnson, a former groundskeeper in California, was awarded $289 million in damages after a jury ruled Bayer’s product was the reason he developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer said in 2015 that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
