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   routes most relevant to human exposure — ingestion, skin contact or   
   inhalation.   
      
   “Paraquat is safe when used as directed,” Syngenta said.   
      
   Still, for Bloem, even Europe’s bans are no cause for comfort.   
      
   “The chemicals we banned? Those were the obvious ones,” Bloem says. “What   
   we’re using now might be just as dangerous. We simply haven’t been asking   
   the right questions.”   
      
   A chemical Europe can’t quit   
   Among the chemicals still in use, none has drawn more scrutiny — or   
   survived more court battles — than glyphosate.   
      
   It’s the most widely used herbicide on the planet. You can find traces of   
   it in farmland, forests, rivers, raindrops and even in tree canopies deep   
   inside Europe’s nature reserves. It’s in household dust, animal feed,   
   supermarket produce. In one U.S. study, it showed up in 80 percent of   
   urine samples taken from the general public.   
      
   For years, glyphosate, sold under the Roundup brand, has been at the   
   center of an international legal and regulatory storm. In the United   
   States, Bayer — which acquired Monsanto, Roundup’s original maker — has   
   paid out more than $10 billion to settle lawsuits linking glyphosate to   
   non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.   
      
   Glyphosate is now off-patent and manufactured by numerous companies   
   worldwide. But Bayer remains its top seller — achieving an estimated €2.6   
   billion in glyphosate-related sales in 2024, even as market competition   
   and legal pressures cut into profits.   
      
   In Europe, lobbyists for the agricultural and chemical sectors have fought   
   hard to preserve its use, warning that banning glyphosate would devastate   
   farming productivity. National authorities remain split. France has tried   
   to phase it out. Germany has promised a full ban — but never delivered.   
      
   In 2023 — despite mounting concerns, gaps in safety data and political   
   pressure — the European Union reauthorized it for another 10 years.   
      
   While most of the debate around glyphosate has centered on cancer, some   
   studies have found possible links to reproductive harm, developmental   
   disorders, endocrine disruption and even childhood cancers.   
      
   Glyphosate has never been definitively linked to Parkinson’s. Bayer told   
   POLITICO in a written response that no regulatory review has ever   
   concluded any of its products are associated with the disease, and pointed   
   to the U.S.-based Agricultural Health Study, which followed nearly 40,000   
   pesticide applicators and found no statistically significant association   
   between glyphosate and the disease. Bayer said glyphosate is one of the   
   most extensively studied herbicides in the world, with no regulator   
   identifying it as neurotoxic or carcinogenic.   
      
   But Bloem argues that the absence of a proven link says more about how we   
   regulate risk than how safe the chemical actually is.   
      
   Unlike paraquat, which causes immediate oxidative stress and has been   
   associated with Parkinson’s in both lab and epidemiological studies,   
   glyphosate’s potential harms are more indirect — operating through   
   inflammation, microbiome disruption or mitochondrial dysfunction, all   
   mechanisms known to contribute to the death of dopamine-producing neurons.   
   But this makes them harder to detect in traditional toxicology tests, and   
   easier to dismiss.   
      
   “The problem isn’t that we know nothing,” Bloem says. “It’s that we’re not   
   measuring the kind of damage Parkinson’s causes.”   
      
   Responding, Bayer pointed to paraquat as one of only two agricultural   
   chemicals that studies have linked directly to the development of   
   Parkinson’s disease — even as Syngenta, its manufacturer, maintains there   
   is no proven connection.   
      
   The EU’s current pesticide evaluation framework, like that of many other   
   regulatory systems, focuses primarily on acute toxicity — short-term signs   
   of poisoning like seizures, sudden organ damage or death. Manufacturers   
   submit safety data, much of it based on animal studies looking for visible   
   behavioral changes. But unlike for the heroin users in California, who   
   were exposed to an unusually potent toxin, Parkinson’s doesn’t announce   
   itself with dramatic symptoms in the short term. It creeps in as neurons   
   die off, often over decades.   
      
   “We wait for a mouse to walk funny,” Bloem says. “But in Parkinson’s, the   
   damage is already done by the time symptoms appear.”   
      
   The regulatory tests also isolate individual chemicals, rarely examining   
   how they interact in the real world. But a 2020 study in Japan showed how   
   dangerous that assumption may be. When rodents were exposed to glyphosate   
   and MPTP — the very compound that mimicked Parkinson’s in the California   
   heroin cases — the combination caused dramatically more brain cell loss   
   than either substance alone.   
      
   “That’s the nightmare scenario,” Bloem says. “And we’re not testing for   
   it.”   
      
      
   Even when data does exist, it doesn’t always reach regulators. Internal   
   company documents released in court suggest Syngenta knew for decades that   
   paraquat could harm the brain — a charge the company denies, insisting   
   there is no proven link.   
      
   More recently, Bayer and Syngenta have faced criticism for failing to   
   share brain toxicity studies with EU authorities in the past — data they   
   had disclosed to U.S. regulators. In one case, Syngenta failed to disclose   
   studies on the pesticide abamectin. The Commission and the EU’s food and   
   chemical agencies have called this a clear breach. Bloem sees a deeper   
   issue. “Why should we assume these companies are the best stewards of   
   public health?” he asked. “They’re making billions off these chemicals.”   
      
   Syngenta said that none of the withheld studies related to Parkinson’s   
   disease and that it has since submitted all required studies under EU   
   transparency rules. The company added that it is “fully aligned with the   
   new requirements for disclosure of safety data.”   
      
   Some governments are already responding to the links between Parkinson’s   
   and farming. France, Italy and Germany now officially recognize   
   Parkinson’s as a possible occupational disease linked to pesticide   
   exposure — a step that entitles some affected farmworkers to compensation.   
   But even that recognition, Bloem argues, hasn’t forced the broader system   
   to catch up.   
      
   Where science stops, politics begins   
   Bloem’s mistrust leads straight to the institutions meant to protect   
   public health — and to people like Bernhard Url, the man who has spent the   
   past decade running one of the most important among them.   
      
   Url is the outgoing executive director of the European Food Safety   
   Authority, or EFSA — the EU’s scientific watchdog on food and chemical   
   risks, based in Parma, Italy. The agency has come under scrutiny in the   
   past over its reliance on company-submitted studies. Url doesn’t deny that   
   structure, but says the process is now more transparent and scientifically   
   rigorous.   
      
   I met Url while he was on a visit to Brussels, during his final months as   
   EFSA’s executive director. Austrian by nationality and a veterinarian by   
   training, he speaks precisely, choosing his words with care. If Bloem is   
   kinetic and outwardly urgent, Url is more reserved — a scientist still   
   operating within the machinery Bloem wants to reform.   
      
   Still, Url didn’t dispute the core of the critique. “There are areas we   
   don’t yet take into consideration,” he told me, pointing to emerging   
   science around microbiome disruption, chemical synergy and chronic low-   
   dose exposure. He didn’t name Parkinson’s, but the implications were   
   clear. “We’re playing catch-up,” he admitted.   
      
   Part of the problem, he suggested, is structural. The agency relies on a   
      
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