Posted by bikenaga 12/15/2025
Each pesticide individually is safe but nobody knows what happens when you mix fifty chemicals and put them in the ground water.
On a positive note you have to die from something and ignorance is bliss.
“Even secondary exposure can be dangerous. One case published in the Rhode Island Medical Journal described an instance where a 50-year-old man accidentally ingested paraquat, and the nurse treating him was burned by his urine that splashed onto her forearms. Within a day, her skin blistered and sloughed off.
- [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/)
Should we ban anhydrous ammonia, chlorine, or gasoline? They are nasty and dangerous too. The article is purely scare-mongering to make it seem true while obviously pushing an agenda. This is not science. See my reply at the same level after I did a review.
I can’t believe I’m typing this question
Seventy countries kind of suggested to me that something is up with this chemical.
I'm pretty freaking far from a conspiracy theorist, but I've lived through:
* Tobacco companies claiming it was safe.
* Alcohol companies claiming it was safe.
* Food companies claiming trans fats were safe.
* Oil companies claiming leaded gasoline was safe.
* Mining companies claiming asbestos was safe.
...and a gazillion similar episodes.
At this point, it seems absolutely insane to trust any large industry's claims that their products are safe.
My gut intuition just didn't like the framing. Now that I have read through it thoroughly, my answer is this: It's untrustworthy because it is obviously extremely selective with what it includes, omits relevant base rates, uses graphical examples out of context, and has an obvious bias and agenda. That is just one of tens of examples in the article.
Your tobacco reference can be condensed into: "Large firms are known to lie and cover up things." I agree 100%. They plainly outright lied directly AND lied by covering up. But the reaction to that is not to lie better. And by better, I mean lying by omission, juxtaposition, and framing. These are still methods of lying, just that they are harder for people to detect.
I only care about evidence that proves that it causes Parkinson’s, with basic scientific rigor. I’ll eat my hat if any of the cited studies did basic attempt at falsification.
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.
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.
The correlation seems to point to usage ground water that is contaminated with pesticides. So people living close to the golf courses have higher Parkinson risk. Probably golfers and employees less so.
What else uses massive amounts of pesticides and herbicides and is consumed by people every day?
Now they get to find out.