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   From: bs66@indymedia.org   
      
   Europe’s flawed oversight of pesticides may be fueling a silent epidemic,   
   warns Dutch neurologist Bas Bloem. His fight for reform pits him against   
   industry, regulators — and time.   
      
   In the summer of 1982, seven heroin users were admitted to a California   
   hospital paralyzed and mute. They were in their 20s, otherwise healthy —   
   until a synthetic drug they had manufactured in makeshift labs left them   
   frozen inside their own bodies. Doctors quickly discovered the cause:   
   MPTP, a neurotoxic contaminant that had destroyed a small but critical   
   part of the brain, the substantia nigra, which controls movement.   
      
   The patients had developed symptoms of late-stage Parkinson’s, almost   
   overnight.   
      
   The cases shocked neurologists. Until then, Parkinson’s was thought to be   
   a disease of aging, its origins slow and mysterious. But here was proof   
   that a single chemical could reproduce the same devastating outcome. And   
   more disturbing still: MPTP turned out to be chemically similar to   
   paraquat, a widely used weedkiller that, for decades, had been sprayed on   
   farms across the United States and Europe.   
      
   While medication helped some regain movement, the damage was permanent —   
   the seven patients never fully recovered.   
      
   For a young Dutch doctor named Bas Bloem, the story would become   
   formative. In 1989, shortly after finishing medical school, Bloem traveled   
   to the United States to work with William Langston, the neurologist who   
   had uncovered the MPTP-Parkinson’s link. What he saw there reshaped his   
   understanding of the disease — and its causes.   
      
   “It was like a lightning bolt,” Bloem tells me. “A single chemical had   
   replicated the entire disease. Parkinson’s wasn’t just bad luck. It could   
   be caused.”   
      
   The making of a man-made disease   
   Today, at 58, Bloem leads a globally recognized clinic and research team   
   from his base at the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, a   
   medieval Dutch city near the German border. It treats hundreds of patients   
   each year, while the team pioneers studies on early diagnosis and   
   prevention.   
      
   The hallway outside Bloem’s office was not hectic on my recent visit, but   
   populated — patients moving slowly, deliberately, some with walkers,   
   others with a caregiver’s arm under their own. One is hunched forward in a   
   rigid, deliberate shuffle; another pauses silently by the stairs, his face   
   slack, not absent — just suspended, as if every gesture had become too   
   costly.   
      
   On its busiest days, the clinic sees over 60 patients. “And more are   
   coming,” Bloem says.   
      
   Bloem’s presence is both charismatic and kinetic: tall — just over 2   
   meters, he says with a grin — with a habit of walking while talking, and a   
   white coat lined with color-coded pens. His long, silver-gray hair is   
   swept back, a few strands escaping as he paces the room. Patients paint   
   portraits of him, write poems about him. His team calls him “the physician   
   who never stops moving.”   
      
   Unlike many researchers of his stature, Bloem doesn’t stay behind the   
   scenes. He speaks at international conferences, consults with   
   policymakers, and states his case to the public as well as to the   
   scientific world.   
      
   His work spans both care and cause — from promoting movement and   
   personalized treatment to sounding the alarm about what might be   
   triggering the disease in the first place. Alongside his focus on exercise   
   and prevention, he’s become one of the most outspoken voices on the   
   environmental drivers of Parkinson’s — and what he sees as a growing   
   failure to confront their long-term impact on the human brain.   
      
   “Parkinson’s is a man-made disease,” he says. “And the tragedy is that   
   we’re not even trying to prevent it.”   
      
   When the English surgeon James Parkinson first described the “shaking   
   palsy” in 1817, it was considered a medical curiosity — a rare affliction   
   of aging men. Two centuries later, Parkinson’s disease has more than   
   doubled globally over the past 20 years, and is expected to double again   
   in the next 20. It is now one of the fastest-growing neurological   
   disorders in the world, outpacing stroke and multiple sclerosis. The   
   disease causes the progressive death of dopamine-producing neurons and   
   gradually robs people of movement, speech and, eventually, cognition.   
   There is no cure.   
      
   Age and genetic predisposition play a role. But Bloem and the wider   
   neurological community contend that those two factors alone cannot explain   
   the steep rise in cases. In a 2024 paper co-authored with U.S. neurologist   
   Ray Dorsey, Bloem wrote that Parkinson’s is “predominantly an   
   environmental disease” — a condition shaped less by genetics and more by   
   prolonged exposure to toxicants like air pollution, industrial solvents   
   and, above all, pesticides.   
      
      
   Most of the patients who pass through Bloem’s clinic aren’t farmers   
   themselves, but many live in rural areas where pesticide use is   
   widespread. Over time, he began to notice a pattern: Parkinson’s seemed to   
   crop up more often in regions dominated by intensive agriculture.   
      
   “Parkinson’s was a very rare disease until the early 20th century,” Bloem   
   says. “Then with the agricultural revolution, chemical revolution, and the   
   explosion of pesticide use, rates started to climb.”   
      
   Europe, to its credit, has acted on some of the science. Paraquat — the   
   herbicide chemically similar to MPTP — was finally banned in 2007,   
   although only after Sweden took the European Commission to court for   
   ignoring the evidence of its neurotoxicity. Other pesticides with known   
   links to Parkinson’s, such as rotenone and maneb, are no longer approved.   
      
   But that’s not the case elsewhere. Paraquat is still manufactured in the   
   United Kingdom and China, sprayed across farms in the United States, New   
   Zealand and Australia, and exported to parts of Africa and Latin America —   
   regions where Parkinson’s rates are now rising sharply.   
      
   Once the second-most widely sold herbicide in the world — after glyphosate   
   — paraquat helped drive major profits for its maker, Swiss-based and   
   Chinese-owned company Syngenta. But its commercial peak has long passed,   
   and the chemical now accounts for only a small fraction of the company’s   
   overall business. In the U.S., Syngenta faces thousands of lawsuits from   
   people who say the chemical gave them Parkinson’s. Similar cases are   
   moving ahead in Canada.   
      
   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.   
      
      
   The company told POLITICO that comparisons to MPTP have been repeatedly   
   challenged, citing a 2024 Australian review which concluded that paraquat   
   does not act through the same neurotoxic mechanism. There is strong   
   evidence, the company said in a written response running to more than   
   three pages, that paraquat does not cause neurotoxic effects via the   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)