You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.

We need some more nuance here.

Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.

In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.

So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.

It is a consequence of our current model of living, where the only thing that matters is proffit.

Checking in from cancer alley!

There are refineries within a stone's throw from my house. One of them sits on the highest point in our water table and the vacuum it creates has been destroying our famously soft water by creating underground fault lines which pollute the aquifer with leeched hard minerals.

But hey, oil.

I used to be a proponent of the industrial agriculture, because technological progress of all kinds (genetics, chemicals, mechanisation) are the reason why food is now abundant.

But the massive disinformation campaigns and targeted harassment of researchers, as well as the outright corruption of science is where they lost me. Surely you wouldn't do things like that if you had clear consciousness.

> One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].

It certainly looks bad but I'm not sure the logic really follows.

It's just modern PR. Companies used to just do that by having good relationships with journalist but now social media has taken a lot of that role away. It's a fairly natural transition for companies to make and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a lot of major corporations that don't do something similar.

And, also, it doesn't necessarily follow that they are either willingly lying or that their products are unsafe.

"Cancer Alley" is a good comparison because it shows how this plays out over decades

Seeing how much having an unlimited upside corrupts corporations seeded my first serious doubts about capitalism.

You're conflating different chemicals together.

Paraquat (what this article is about), isn't used by any people in the links you gave (golf courses, Dutch or Swiss farmers).

Excellent movie. Worth noting that it was written by Tony Gilroy, who created Andor and cowrote The Bourne Identity, so if you enjoyed those you're likely to enjoy this.

One of my favourite movies. Everyone in it is so good.

So assessments of safety of a chemical aren't hard science. They are statistical judgment calls (often based on things like giving a much, much higher dose to a rodent and looking for short-term effects).

And the reason that is is because there's no affordable, moral way to give 100,000 farmers [nor consumers] a small dose of a product for 20 years before declaring it safe. So the system guesses, and it guesses wrong, often erring against the side of caution in the US (it's actually quite shocking how many pesticides later get revoked after approval).

Europe takes a more "precautionary principle" approach. In those cases of ambiguity (which is most things approved and not), they err to the side of caution.

Notice how this claim here is again shifting the burden to the victims (their research doesn't meet standard X, allegedly). Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

[Edit] The below comment is inaccurate. The pesticide sprayed for gypsy moths was DDT. I am leaving this comment because it should be known that this was a thing even though it is now off topic.

P̵a̵r̵a̵q̵u̵a̵t̵ DDT is also linked to the polio pandemic. It was sprayed everywhere gypsy moths were found. Great success at killing moths. Also weakened human children to to where a common disease could get into spines and cause paralysis.

Researching this kind of stuff is not for the faint of heart. Its horrible all the way down. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

There's a synthetic opioid called MPPP, which, if inappropriately synthesized (IIRC, using too much heat in one step), yields MPTP, which is non-toxic in and of itself, but has the ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, where it is then metabolized into MPP+, which is potently neurotoxic to the dopaminergic neurons of the Substantia Nigra, reliably producing a Parkinsonism in those exposed to it (from wikipedia):

>The chloride salt of MPP+ found use in the 1970s as an herbicide under the common name cyperquat.[4][3] Though no longer in use as an herbicide, cyperquat's closely related structural analog paraquat still finds widespread usage, raising some safety concerns.

EDIT: the neurotoxicity of MPTP was discovered after a number of heroin addicts developed a sudden, irreversible Parkinsonism after injecting bad batches: https://archive.org/details/TheCaseoftheFrozenAddict

The doctor featured in that NOVA episdoe summarizes the history of MPTP and its relevance to Parkinson's research and epidemiology here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5345642/

> Over the last two centuries the pendulum of opinion has swung widely as to whether the cause of PD was due to genetics or environment causes [69]. While MPTP has not yet been found in the native environment, beginning in the 1980s the pendulum swung dramatically in the direction of the environmental hypothesis, spurred not only by the observation that a simple pyridine (MPTP) could induce so many of the features of PD, but also the striking similarity between its toxic metabolite, MPP+ and paraquat (differing only by one methyl group) [70], an herbicide that is used worldwide. Since that time, a large number of studies have shown pesticide exposure is a risk factor for PD [71]. Interesting, this risk is enhanced by the presence of certain genetic variants [72], consistent to the adage that “genetics load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger”.

> What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?

Almost everyone who banned it did so because of acute toxicity - it requires careful handling to use safely.

Unfortunately, it was commonly used to commit suicide in many countries. In other countries, it was deaths from accidental ingestion, lung damage from unsafe handling, etc.

I don't know of any country that banned it because of a purported link to Parkinson's.

The other thing you should know is that they use it to help the plants grow, but they use larger amounts to kill the plants at the same time so they can uniformly harvest. So we eat more of this crap than you'd expect, because they are using it beyond expected ways

in most civilised countries: chemicals added to food are banned until proven safe

... then you have the USA

Chevron clasically has ignored health and safety requirements to the point where there was once the “Chevron Doctrine” which deferred legal interpretations to specialized regulatory agencies which established clearer guidance against murky legislative directives. The Doctrine was recently overturned by the ostensibly rogue SCOTUS as highlighted by the harvard business review: https://hbr.org/2024/09/the-end-of-the-chevron-doctrine-is-b...

>What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?

political pressure. Same reason lots of stuff is banned in the EU even when it's safer than other things that aren't banned.

"poetic justice" is the same mentality as people writing articles glorifying rich Chinese criminals for using South America's drug trade for money laundering because something something Opium War.

In either case, it's not the same. The United States benefits greatly in the short term from larger agricultural output, and herbicide manufacturing centers still create significant health risks for their local communities wherever they are located. So, whether you're the buyer or the seller, you're losing.

<indiscriminate spraying from the air>

As a city dweller, I used to use Roundup along my fence line. Then I read an article in a newspaper about spraying chemicals when there is a breeze. So I read the label on the Roundup bottle and it said absolutely do not spray in any windy conditions. Next I polled my coworkers about this and they all said they just stay upwind!

The bottle label also said Roundup is active for up to 30 days, then I thought about my dogs. I no longer use any chemical for lawn care.

As to the plight of the farmers: I wonder if most of them bothered to used proper personal protection gear when spraying? Even if they had enclosed cabs, the chemical would still coat the tractor and tank surfaces which can be rubbed against at any time.

The weird thing about this sort of stuff is I believe genetics play a role. My father in law has worked in ag his whole life. Specifically spraying fertilizer and pesticides. He is obese and has a terrible diet. One would think he is riddle with cancer and died at 50. He retired at 67 and is overall somewhat healthy for someone who is 300 lbs. Life is weird.

IIRC the issue with AO was the dioxins present as a side-product of the synthesis, not the herbicide itself. Dioxins are nasty.

First acknowledge AO death was in 2015, they gaslighted entire generations. Had Nixon not sent his campaign manager to Vietnam in 1969, and promised the VietCong a better deal later when he was president, we wouldn't have spent those five unneeded years there and wouldn't have used AO.

Sorry for your loss - it's a terrible disease.

My mother is also data point - grew up on a farm where her father used it. She was diagnosed with Parkinson's 2018.

https://kagi.com/search?q=Pesticide

> Pesticides are substances that are used to control pests. They include herbicides, insecticides, nematicides, fungicides, and many others (see table). The most common of these are herbicides, which account for approximately 50% of all pesticide use globally.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide

You're trying to be pedantic, but you're actually wrong. If you think about it, from the perspective of anyone trying to raise crops, weeds are pests. (They are pests to lots of non-farmers, too.)

Similarly...

> A pest is any organism harmful to humans or human concerns. The term is particularly used for creatures that damage crops, livestock, and forestry or cause a nuisance to people, especially in their homes.

> Plants may be considered pests, for example, if they are invasive species or weeds.

I am dubious of all the claims that say something designed to kill organic life is safe because it just means "safe at X dose". Like there isn't a pesticide made where I could drink a tablespoon of it and be fine. It just doesn't present noticeable effects at tiny doses so it is labeled safe.

Like if I drank a 1/4 shot of Vodka every morning I wouldn't notice it at all, but I imagine it would have some impacts on my health over the long run.

Not to mention we might have 30+ chemicals/medications/additives/whatever all being consumed constantly at "safe levels" with no research into how they interact or accumulate.

    > "Pesticides are, generally, safe to humans."

It's a chasm-leap to say that pesticides are generally safe to humans.

> Pesticides are, generally, safe to humans

Out of curiosity, why?

or ublock origin `www.mlive.com##+js(rc, article__paragraph--blur)`

They did that in 2007. Some countries banned it as early as 1983. Remind me, what year is it now?

For anyone stopping by looking for more info, it’s Camp Lejeune not Legume.

Minor correction: it's Camp Lejeune. I just had to chime in because Camp Legume is both very funny and kind of an appropriate typo for the topic.

I was able to find the references (including photos of the mentioned forearms) on PubMed and the RIMJ after a quick search. Paraquat is nasty stuff.

- [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33769492/

- [1] http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima... (via https://rimedicalsociety.org/rhode-island-medical-journal/)

- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat

"Paraquat, a heavily regulated weed killer, is banned in more than 70 countries…"

Seventy countries kind of suggested to me that something is up with this chemical.

Why does that sound untrustworthy? Do you have any idea of what the tobacco industry hid about second hand smoke exposure? How is it somehow more plausible this nurse made up her condition than pesticide manufactures being honest about the impacts?

I mean you can click on the source right there, that is literally what happened: http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima.... The description maybe makes it sound a little more extreme than it actually was, but it's the correct terminology and an accurate description of events.

I agree. If merely being splashed by his corrosive urine sloughed off her skin, I think he would not be alive to urinate.

I just finished reading article and honestly, my BS detector is going off the charts.

I’m not saying pesticides are health tonics, but this piece feels like pure litigation PR rather than an actual investigation. It prioritizes storytelling over science and engages in what I can only describe as lying by omission. Here are the main issues I found:

The nurse whose skin peeled off just from touching a patient’s urine? The article frames this to make you think, "Wow, this stuff is so toxic that if a farmer uses it, his body becomes a weapon." I looked into the medical case this is likely based on. That patient didn't just "farm" with Paraquat; he ingested a lethal, concentrated dose (usually a suicide attempt). By leaving out that the patient drank a cup of poison, the author conflates Acute Poisoning (death in days, acid urine) with Chronic Exposure (trace amounts over years). If the farmer in the main story had enough Paraquat in his system to burn a nurse’s skin, he wouldn’t be alive to give an interview about Parkinson’s. He’d be dead from multi-organ failure. Omitting this context is manipulative fear-mongering.

Then there is the math: Parkinson’s affects about 1% of the elderly population. There are 2 million farms in the US. Even if Paraquat was essentially harmless water, you would still have tens of thousands of farmers with Parkinson’s purely by chance. The article ignores this base rate to imply that every diagnosis is a result of the chemical. It treats a probabilistic risk as a deterministic cause.

It also ignores confounders (like the "Rural Cluster" Problem). Farming is a "chemical soup" lifestyle. You have well water (a known PD risk), head trauma risks, and exposure to dozens of other chemicals like Rotenone or Maneb. The article presents a direct line: Paraquat -> PD. But scientifically, isolating one chemical from 30 years of rural living is a nightmare. The article doesn't even attempt to falsify the hypothesis or look at other factors; it just assumes the lawsuit's narrative is the scientific truth.

The article also fails basic science standards. It is storytelling, not science. A real scientific inquiry follows Popperian standards—you make a conjecture and then try to disprove it. This article does the opposite: it acts like a defense attorney. It stacks up emotional anecdotes and selective correlations to confirm its bias and ignores the replication crisis in epidemiology where results often don't stick.

This isn't journalism and it’s not science; it’s advocacy via outrage. It uses the real tragedy of these farmers to push a specific narrative, relying on readers not knowing the difference between drinking poison and spraying crops. If you’ve ever wondered why science doesn’t make more progress, and we have the replication crisis, look no further.

I know a guy who had a weird habit of using his mouth to clean his golf ball. He eventually got oral cancer.

Except the data doesnt back up that assertion. Golf course employees and golfers have no higher rates of than the public at large. So what gives?

If the very people who spend most of their waking lives on the grounds and among those fertilizers and pesticides do not have any great instance, maybe just maybe its something else. Like the gallons of unregulated chemicals that are in those tract houses that were all built around the same time...

one example is the drywall was used extensively in the 90's. Its makeup banned in the country of origin, China but its product was used all throughout the US for decades.

Herbicides are a pesticide [1]. (Alongside insecticides, fungicides and fumigants, among others.)

[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2017-01/documents/pe...

I know I'm going to regret this but...beef tallow? What?

Why can't all of these things be problematic? Why the binary thinking?

If you actually read the article, it indicated epidemiological studies showing that people living or working near farmland where paraquat is used have a higher incidence of Parkinson's.

Additionally, the article cites a leading neuroscientist in Parkinson's research who says that pesticides are one of the "biggest threats" linked to Parkinson's

Lastly, I personally discount your sort of arguments because it is the same kind we've witnessed the tobacco industry, the sugar industry, and the gasoline industry use regarding the science showing harmful effects of their products.

Scientists hate him! Discover how this HNer invalidated all studies with one single weird trick.

Skepticism is healthy. You've found that the numbers don't make sense at face value. The problem is that you stopped there, you haven't even made any attempt at reconciling them with the original claim.

What if the US number of 1 in 400 figure is that high precisely because it includes people exposed to pesticide? In other words, maybe the number would be 1 in 500 if it weren't for Paraquat? You'd have to look at concentration maps or at the very least check what's the diagnosis rates in other countries before you can truly dismiss the claim, imho.

The article already talks to the numbers they mean and what scale they believe it to be:

> More than 6,400 lawsuits against Syngenta and Chevron that allege a link between paraquat and Parkinson’s are pending in the U.S. District Court of Southern Illinois. Another 1,300 cases have been brought in Pennsylvania, 450 in California and more are scattered throughout state courts.

> “I do think it’s important to be clear that number is probably not even close to representative of how many people have been impacted by this,” said Christian Simmons, a legal expert for Drugwatch.

If only we had tools like science and statistics... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

The article mentions epidemiological studies showing that people living or working near farmland where paraquat is used have a higher incidence of Parkinson's.

Don't be so quick to dismiss it, there could be a link.

Paraquat was used in horrendous amounts mid century. It may be a dose dependant outcome.