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Five Things to Know About Pesticides, Cancer and a Pending Supreme Court Ruling
Capitol News Illinois reported:
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule next month on whether lawsuits can be brought against pesticide and herbicide makers over claims their products have caused cancer. The court heard arguments in the case in April, and the justices appeared split.
With a ruling weeks away, here are five things to know about the topic of pesticide use and cancer.
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- Geographic correlation between heavy pesticide use and high cancer rates
Numerous studies and an analysis of federal data have shown a potential correlation between pesticide use and cancer. Out of the 500 U.S. counties with the highest pesticide use per square mile (largely concentrated in corn, soybean and fruit-producing states like Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, California and Florida), 60% have cancer rates higher than the national average of 460 cases per 100,000 people. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society suggests the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may rival that of smoking.
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- Thousands of lawsuits have been won against agrichemical companies
State courts have also found that correlation credible, as Bayer, the maker of the herbicide Roundup, has lost thousands of cases and agreed to pay more than $12 billion in settlements, including individual jury verdicts such as an initial $2 billion award in California and a recent $1.25 million verdict in Missouri. According to the company, more than 65,000 lawsuits have been filed by farmers, gardeners and other users alleging the chemical caused their cancer.
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- Companies push for ‘liability shields‘
In response to these lawsuits, agrichemical companies have aggressively lobbied for state-level bans on this type of litigation. Often referred to as “liability shield” laws, they would essentially say that because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has not warned of a link to cancer, state-level claims would be void. Georgia and North Dakota are the only two states that have passed these liability shield laws.
Australia’s $1.4 Billion PFAS Lawsuit Could Be a Global Model
Chemical & Engineering News reported:
The Australian government’s A$2 billion ($1.4 billion) lawsuit, announced May 28, against chemical manufacturer 3M for alleged environmental damages from firefighting foam containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) could lay the groundwork for other countries struggling with billion-dollar remediation projects, analysts say.
“A federal state holding a multinational company accountable for national-scale environmental pollution is bold,” says Hélène Duguy, an environmental lawyer at ClientEarth who specializes in chemical pollution.
While the lawsuit is focused only on PFAS contamination at Australian defense sites, Duguy says it could be a model to consolidate local claims of PFAS contamination while recovering costs associated with remediation. The results of the lawsuit could encourage other governments to “take the burden off the shoulders of municipalities and residents who do this on their own.” Minnesota-based 3M has settled several lawsuits in the US and other countries in recent years for PFAS pollution, most notably in drinking water.
National PFAS Experts Gather in Tucson to Address Forever Chemicals
The country’s leading experts on PFAS are gathering in Tucson for the first time ever.
The compounds, also known as forever chemicals, have contaminated Tucson’s water supply for four decades. “It’s a really big deal to be able to bring the voices that we hear, the stories we hear locally, to a national audience, to talk about what’s happening in the rest of America,” said Paloma Beamer, National PFAS Conference co-chair and the Associate Dean for Community Engagement in the College of Public Health at the University of Arizona.
This is the first time the conference has been held in the southwest and one of the few times in a community directly affected by PFAS contamination. Conference leaders say that it’s important for attending researchers to hear and learn from those at the forefront of this issue. The forever chemicals, found in things like common household cleaners and fire retardants, have contaminated Tucson’s water supply for decades.
One of the biggest sources of PFAS contamination is the foam used to fight aircraft fires at airports and military bases, including Davis-Monthan, across the country for decades.
Beamer says 100% of Arizonans have some level of PFAS in their blood, higher than the national average of 98%. She said it’s critical to learn how harmful PFAS chemicals can be and how to reduce exposure to them. “So, they’re all around us; they’re everywhere. We’re trying to understand how to reduce exposure and what level of exposure is hazardous,” Beamer said.
New Mexico County Adopts Yearlong Data Center Moratorium
The Socorro County Board of Commissioners unanimously adopted a yearlong moratorium on data centers and related infrastructure projects Tuesday evening after residents for months opposed a Canadian tech CEO’s proposal to build a data center and solar array on 10,000 acres of nearby land.
In addition to prohibiting data center developments on unincorporated county land for a year, the moratorium began the process of forming an advisory committee of experts and residents to study and recommend regulations around such developments. Currently, Socorro County lacks zoning regulations as its population of farmers and ranchers have historically rejected the notion of the government telling them what to do on their land.
Last week, New Mexico Tech President Michael Jackson announced the project, which was proposed in potential partnership with the school, was halted for the time being, largely because the university does not own enough contiguous land to host it. He left the door open to future pitches from Green Data CEO Jason Bak, though.
Residents in the area, which is just more than an hour south of Albuquerque, first learned of the proposed data center development in March when Bak presented plans to work alongside university officials to build the world’s largest “renewable-led” data center at a public Socorro Electric Cooperative Board of Trustees meeting.
After Virginia Approved a Gas-Powered Data Center Without Public Input, Residents Turned to a Local Environmental Group for Answers
PowerPoint presentations about dense research papers don’t typically draw a crowd.
On April 9 at a church in Sterling, Virginia, residents turned up to listen to Michael Cork, a Harvard researcher, break down his findings on the health impacts of a nearby data center with rapt attention. The presentation was hosted by the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), a conservation and environmental advocacy group, which commissioned Cork to conduct the study after they said the community was “blindsided” by the development of the Vantage VA2 data center.
Residents were told years ago that Vantage, a data center developer, was building a data center next door at 22435 Glenn Drive, but, according to residents, the company never told them that the site would become the state’s first to use onsite natural gas turbines to power itself, independent from the power grid.
Residents said they only found out after it began running in March of 2025, when they woke up to a high-pitched whirring noise that echoed throughout the neighborhood at all hours of the day, prompting constant headaches and sleepless nights. According to the PEC, neither the company nor the state regulators that quietly approved the project had formally examined what running a small gas plant merely feet away from a residential neighborhood would do to the health of the community living there. With no insight coming from the company or their government, neighbors looked to the PEC for answers.
Why an Activist From Texas Crossed the World to Confront Asia’s Biggest Petrochemical Company
In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home. A retired shrimper with a high school education, she agreed to come here without thinking too much, as usual. That’s how she does things.
That’s why she’d spent all of March camped outside a chemical plant on a hunger strike near her tiny Gulf Coast town in Texas, and why now she was on a dock in Taiwan listening to a gray-haired oysterman speak in Mandarin.
Wilson liked the man, named Lin Chun Lan. She smiled as she discovered how much they had in common. As fisherfolk they shared a reverence for the bounty of the ocean and a stubborn refusal to abandon its pursuit. That’s what drove them both to fight the same multi-billion-dollar company, Formosa Plastics Corp. Both persisted for decades. Both earned the ire of local power structures.
The Quiet Push to Shield Pesticide Makers From Lawsuits
In April 2026, California farmer Terri McCall stood on the steps of the Supreme Court at a rally protesting pesticide use, telling the story of how her husband and dog both died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease she believes was caused by pesticides. Her husband, Jack, had used Roundup for more than three decades on their 20-acre ranch before dying of cancer in 2016.
Over 57,000 pesticide products are currently registered for use in the United States, ranging from powerful chemicals used in conventional agriculture, to common insect repellents approved for use on children. Scientific evidence is accumulating that some of them are linked to illnesses ranging from cancer to Parkinson’s disease.
But beginning in 2024, a powerful coalition of chemical manufacturers and industry groups launched a coordinated national effort to pass “immunity laws,” bills designed to shield companies from potential legal claims tied to harms from their pesticide products. Over the past three years alone, industry lobbyists attempted to pass pesticide immunity legislation in 15 different states.
Pollinators in Peril: Scientists Reveal the Hidden Human Health Costs of the World’s Disappearing Bees
There are few ways in and out of Nepal’s Jumla district. The Karnali highway, considered one of the world’s most dangerous roads, provides the only land link, splicing through the Himalayas to connect Jumla’s terraced valleys to the rest of the country. As such, the 120,000 people that live there are almost entirely self-sufficient, with most of them eating and selling what they grow.
It’s a tenuous existence, plagued by food insecurity and malnutrition. In recent years, local beekeepers have bemoaned languishing hives and dwindling honey production, observing that roughly half of their bees seem to have vanished over the past decade. These concerns, however, ignore an even more insidious impact. “They saw these bees as valuable for honey, but they didn’t really realise that they were also essential for supporting the production of their crops,” says Thomas Timberlake, an ecologist at the University of York.
In a study published last month in the journal Nature, Timberlake and his colleagues set out to quantify just how important the area’s pollinators were to the health of those living in 10 remote Jumla villages.
