Original story by EPA Press Office
On August 8th, 2019 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would no longer approve product labels claiming that glyphosate causes cancer. Glyphosate has recently been in the news due to recent lawsuits in California where juries have awarded multi-million dollar lawsuits to plaintiffs claiming that glyphosate resulted in them having non-hodgkins lymphoma. This is partly due to California’s Proposition 65 which has labeled the popular herbicide as a carcinogen, which is in direct opposition to other federal agency rulings, including the EPA’s, who states that it is not a carcinogen.
“It is irresponsible to require labels on products that are inaccurate when EPA knows the product does not pose a cancer risk. We will not allow California’s flawed program to dictate federal policy,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. “It is critical that federal regulatory agencies like EPA relay to consumers accurate, scientific based information about risks that pesticides may pose to them. EPA’s notification to glyphosate registrants is an important step to ensuring the information shared with the public on a federal pesticide label is correct and not misleading.”
For more information on this story, click Read More below or check out the Sept/Oct issue of Turf News, which should be hitting TPI member mailboxes early next month.
