Sunday, August 12th, 2018
Stephan: Here is some lovely good news. May there be a thousand more like it.
Credit: Sustainablepulse.com
A California jury on Friday found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit filed by a man who alleged the company’s glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, caused him cancer and ordered the company to pay $289 million in damages.
The case of school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson was the first lawsuit alleging glyphosate causes cancer to go to trial. Monsanto, a unit of Bayer AG following a $62.5 billion acquisition by the German conglomerate, faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the United States.
The jury at San Francisco’s Superior Court of California deliberated for three days before finding that Monsanto had failed to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risks posed by its weed killers.
It awarded $39 million in compensatory and $250 million in punitive damages.
Monsanto denies that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, causes cancer and says decades of scientific studies have shown the chemical to be safe for human use.
Johnson’s case, filed in 2016, was fast-tracked for trial due to the severity of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that he alleges was caused by Roundup and Ranger Pro, another […]
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Sunday, August 12th, 2018
Jessica Glenza, - Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The horror of this opioid addiction seems never to end, and it touches even the youngest and most innocent of us. What makes it so particularly vile is that everyone knew what was going on and it was all legal. This was a manufactured drug crisis done with deliberation and guile in order for everyone but the users to make a profit. It is an absolutely disgusting story of America's illness profit system. I was so appalled at what happened that I spent a month researching it and wrote it up:
America’s Deadly Opioid Epidemic From Which Everyone But the Users Profits 
On average, infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome stay in the hospital for 17 days.
Credit: Alamy Stock
The number of US women who gave birth addicted to opioids has quadrupled in the last 15 years, increasing the number of infants who face a long, painful withdrawal at birth, according to new government data.
However, as with many health problems in America, there is vast regional variation. While the rate of women who gave birth addicted to opioids in Hawaii matched the national average, the rate increased 53-fold in West Virginia.
“These findings illustrate the devastating impact of the opioid epidemic on families across the US, including on the very youngest,” said Dr Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Untreated opioid use disorder during pregnancy can lead to heartbreaking results. Each case represents a mother, a child and a family in need of continued treatment and support.”
