Breaking news: Syngenta settling paraquat litigation

Learning from Bayer's mistakes...

Besieged by thousands of lawsuits alleging that its paraquat weedkiller causes Parkinson’s disease, Syngenta has entered into an agreement aimed at settling large swaths of those claims.

The company and lead counsel for thousands of plaintiffs have “entered into a signed Letter Agreement intended to resolve” the litigation, an April 14 court filing states.

“Public details of the settlement will be available for counsel and their clients once the process is finalized,” a team of plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a statement.

In a court hearing Tuesday, one of the lead plaintiff lawyers, Khaldoun Baghdadi, said the terms of the settlement should be completed within 30 days.

The move to settle comes amid mounting calls to ban paraquat from both state and federal lawmakers, and as growing numbers of Parkinson’s patients blame the company for not warning them of paraquat risks. Numerous scientific studies have linked Parkinson’s to exposure to paraquat, a weedkiller commonly used in agriculture, though Syngenta disputes any causal connection.

The agreement would not resolve all of the cases filed in the United States against Syngenta, but could resolve the majority of them.

As of mid-April, there were more than 5,800 active lawsuits pending in what is known as multidistrict litigation (MDL) being overseen by a federal court in Illinois. There were more than 450 other cases filed in California, and many more scattered in state courts around the country.

Syngenta’s effort to settle the litigation before any high-profile trials comes after Monsanto’s owner Bayer was rocked by similar litigation alleging its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer. After the company lost the first Roundup trial, its stock price plummeted, investors became enraged and Bayer has spent years and billions of dollars fighting to end the ongoing litigation.

Read more of the story at The New Lede.