http://fortune.com/2015/04/15/roundu...hard-to-prove/
"IARC, made the call after nearly a year of reviewing all three types of studies (human, animal and DNA). An independent group of scientists evaluated glyphosate’s toxic potential and came to the conclusion that it’s “probably” carcinogenic. That conclusion is still a step below a firm cancer-causing determination, “because of limited evidence in humans and sufficient evidence in animals,” said Kate Guyton, a toxicology expert at IARC."
The article explains the difficulty of obtaining human data that meets the "gold standard" of research - you can't do a controlled experiment on humans to see whether something is carcinogenic or not. The animal research is sufficient to conclude that glyphosate causes cancer in animals, but the data for humans is limited for the stated reason.
In a sense, the 5000 litigants are a pool of human data which has yet to be reviewed by the courts. I don't know the details but I would guess that non-Hodgkins lymphoma and a demonstrated significant exposure to Roundup are features of each case. I wouldn't necessarily expect that all cases will be successful, but at the end of the day these cases will stand as the first numerical evidence of the carcinogenicity of Roundup in humans.
Data for exposure through the food chain is even more difficult to conceive, since the degree of an individual's exposure to this and other chemicals is undocumented, thus removing the chance to readily identify a "control" group which was not exposed. The risks are unclear, but that doesn't make me comfortable about children eating it in their cereal, when we do know that it causes cancer in animals.
