‘Parkinson’s is a man-made disease’ - Pesticides may be fueling a silent epidemic, warns Dutch neurologist Bas Bloem
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Syngenta has consistently denied any link between paraquat and Parkinson’s, pointing to regulatory reviews in the U.S., Australia and Japan that found no evidence of causality.
Well I don't know about the US or Japan, but I can trust my government to do the right thing.
The chief executive confirmed the science underpinning the regulator’s decision rests largely on an earlier report prepared for the APVMA in 2016, which also assessed mice studies linking paraquat to Parkinson’s disease.
That report acknowledged Dr Cory-Slechta and her co-authors’ findings from 2002 that paraquat caused hallmarks of Parkinson’s in mice that were injected with the chemical.
But the 2016 report’s authors ultimately dismissed those findings, on the basis that an unpublished paper, funded by Syngenta, could not reproduce them.
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I love this dedication, but as someone who works in hazardous materials and workplace safety, he sounds rather naive in some areas.
“I don’t know of a single farmer who’s doing things purposely wrong,” Bloem says. “They’re just following the rules. The problem is, the rules are wrong.”
I can only conclude he doesn't know many farmers. I don't visit farms very often, because there aren't a lot of safety or materials certificates farmers need to have, but I've still seen some shit you wouldn't believe
Mixing things in water by sticking your arms in to the shoulder and swirling them around, working in the dust without PPE when that dust contains known heavy metals from the streams they dredged themselves, working downwind of pesticide spray... And those aren't even uncommon.
I fully agree a lot of safety are stupid, either because they're too lax, or unworkably strict and unneeded, but there are FAR more issues that arise from people ignoring the rules that come out of the rules being too lenient. And when it IS the latter, it's mostly because we just don't know stuff.
When is the last time you followed the instructions on your cleaning spray to the letter? Or paint? Never? Yeah, exactly.
"Chemical companies need to show their chemicals are safe"
And how would that work? How can you show a chemical is safe, ever? How can you test for interactions you don't know about, or chronic effects that probably won't even show up in animals?
And even if you DID show it was safe under circumstances, how can you make sure people handling it will stick to those circumstances? This shit is hard, and people suck at risk assessment, so they'll fuck up even if they know better.
My grandad, who was a farmer, used to say that the sellers of Roundup (the weed killer from roundup.com) would drink it during sales pitches to prove it wasn’t toxic to humans. So it wasn’t just farmers making questionable decisions—some of the misinformation came from the sellers themselves.
These days, it's labeled as unsafe to use without gloves, and the high-concentration version sold to farmers isn't even available to the general public anymore, at least where I live.
It just gives some context on why certain practices exist—bad or misleading information played a big role in shaping them and it is or was not always just the farmers alone.
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In germany Parkinson is accepted as a so called "Berufskrankheit" (Job related illness) for farmers due to their increased contact to pesticides.
