Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 21, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

19:07

Parkinson’s Disease and Pesticides with Carey Gillam

Carey Gillam, investigative reporter, discusses the pesticide Paraquat and its connection to Parkinson's Disease in this episode with RFK Jr.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey, everybody.
	Today we have back one of our favorite regulars on the show, Carrie Gellum, a veteran investigative journalist with more than 30 years experience covering corporate news, including 17 years as senior correspondent with Reuters International News Service.
	She is the author of Whitewash, the Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science.
	She's going to talk today, by the way, about Paraquat and Parkinson's disease.
	And Her book won the coveted Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, at which she's a member.
	Her second book, a narrative legal thriller titled The Monsanto Papers, was released in March 2021, and we had Carrie on to talk about that when she released it.
	She has contributed chapters for a textbook about environmental journalism and a book about pesticides in Africa.
	She has testified also as an invited expert before the European Parliament about research and was a featured speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France, in 2019.
	She writes regularly for The Guardian and for The New York Times, The HuffPost, and others.
	Helped launch a non-profit environmental news outlet called the New Lead, L-E-D-E, as a journalism initiative of the Environmental Working Group.
	So welcome back to the podcast, Kerry.
	Thanks, Bobby.
	I always love talking with you.
	Thank you for having me.
	You're amazing, and we've been aligned for many, many years on many, many issues.
	Tell us about Paraquat.
	I mean, when I was growing up, Paraquat was their herbicide of choice that the United States government was spraying marijuana fields in Colombia and other countries as part of the drug eradication program.
	And so if you were smoking pot in the 1970s or 1980s, the chances were, and probably 1990s, that you were inhaling a lot of paraquat and people were concerned about that.
	But now paraquat is used much like glyphosate was used.
	It's an herbicide that farmers use to kill weeds in cornfields and others, and it's getting into our food.
	So will you talk about it?
	Yeah, paraquat is the EPA listed as a widely used pesticide.
	The EPA says that it's used on about 15 million acres annually in the United States.
	That's far shy of Monsanto's glyphosate, if your listeners are familiar with glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
	But paraquat is a much older herbicide.
	It was introduced in the 60s, roughly a decade before Monsanto introduced glyphosate.
	And it was pretty popular with farmers.
	It's really effective.
	It really wipes out weeds pretty efficiently.
	Unfortunately, it's also very highly toxic.
	And that is no secret from an acute standpoint.
	It's always been understood that this poison, this thing that kills weeds, can also kill people.
	Very easily.
	And so farmers understand that if they get, if something splashes up into their mouth, or I think the EPA estimates roughly just a teaspoon of paraquat, if it's swallowed, the person will likely die within a matter of days or two or three weeks.
	It's so deadly that it's been used by a number of people around the world as a tool for suicide.
	And that's been a very big concern by regulators and by the companies that sell it.
	So clearly, it's a toxic chemical.
	It's a toxic pesticide.
	The long-term chronic impacts have always been a subject of great debate over the many, many years that it's been on the market.
	Very early on, people started to become concerned that Paraquat over a long-term exposure could have impacts on the brain.
	And more study and more research linked it to Parkinson's disease specifically, because it's been shown in numerous research studies that paraquat can impact the dopamine producing neurons in the part of the brain where these are created to essentially help your brain tell your body what to do, right?
	To be able to walk and talk and have balance and that sort of thing.
	So when you impact these dopamine-producing cells in the brain, you get the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
	And this is something that has become more and more supported by scientific research.
	And Paraquat has actually been banned in a number of countries around the world.
	But it, of course, is still used here in the United States.
	It's banned in the EU since 2007, which is where its primary manufacturer, Syngenta, is based.
	So it hasn't kept Syngenta from making it and selling it to many, many countries, including the United States.
	And so the people who are listening to this show, a lot of them are concerned with toxics that they are consuming, but also I'd say even more so that they're trying to develop a food regimen where they're not giving this kind of chemical to their kids.
	And so what crops, has it been found in foods and what kind of food should people look out for and how do they avoid them?
	Yeah, I mean, paraquat is to a lesser degree a concern in food, though certainly it has been found.
	You do find it in food, you find it in water and that sort of thing, to a lesser degree than something like glyphosate, because paraquat is not typically sprayed directly over growing crops, because of course it will kill them.
	Now, glyphosate, as you know, at Roundup, Monsanto engineered crops to tolerate being sprayed with glyphosate.
	And so farmers who grow things like corn and soybeans and cotton and canola can go out and spray directly over their fields during the growing season.
	And they also use it for desiccation in wheat and oats.
	So glyphosate...
	So people don't understand what that means.
	Desiccation...
	Is the practice of spraying crops when they're just before harvest or even after harvest when they're laying in the field to keep them dry.
	And glyphosate is now used, I think most glyphosate now is used for desiccation.
	And the problem is that you're now spraying it directly on food.
	I think they started doing that around 2006, and glyphosate sales took off immensely after that.
	But we started finding large amounts of glyphosate in probably most of our food products after that.
	Right, right.
	Food, water.
	You know, the CDC, I wrote about this summer, the CDC data came out showing 80% of people that they tested in the U.S. had glyphosate in their urine.
	I mean, you know, it's, yes, it's very prevalent.
	But paraquat is a restricted-use pesticide, again, so it's not, you can't go out and buy it and spray it in your garden if you're a consumer.
	You have to be a farmer, a trained applicator, a professional applicator to use it.
	The EPA requires a skull and crossbones on it.
	But what I recently was able to report is based on just thousands of pages of internal documents that I received from Chevron and Syngenta.
	Chevron was an early distributor of Paraquat in the United States for about 20 years.
	And these two companies are being sued, much like people have sued Monsanto around the country, around the United States.
	You have thousands of people now with Parkinson's disease who have sued Syngenta and Chevron, saying, you know, you hid the information that showed that Paraquat causes Parkinson's.
	And the companies have maintained, of course, in their defense that they did not do that and that there is no evidence that it causes Parkinson's.
	But what I was able to report in The Guardian and in this news outlet, The New Lead, which I hope people will visit.
	We're tiny and small, but we're trying to do important work.
	What we were able to report is that since almost day one, The companies knew that this chemical was getting into the brain and that it could have chronic effects and that it could affect the central nervous system.
	And you see in the 1970s how the evidence is continuing to mount and how the companies are discussing internally, their scientists and others are discussing amongst themselves how worrisome it is that all of this evidence of an impact on the brain, a chronic long-term impact on the brain From Parkinson's, it's starting to get stronger and stronger.
	And it's jaw-dropping information because at the same time, the companies were saying publicly the opposite, that this chemical did not get into the brain.
	It did not cross the blood-brain barrier.
	That was something that they were very, very adamant about.
	At a time when they knew that it did.
	And you see a lot of this develop.
	I mean, again, it's thousands of pages.
	The story, the initial story that we published was exceedingly long, but there's just really abundant evidence that yes, it gets into the brain, that yes, it certainly affects the cells in a way that can cause Parkinson's disease.
	All of this that they were denying publicly, yet they were identifying it.
	Internally.
	And then it shows how the company officials start to craft plans to mislead the public and mislead regulators about this.
	You know, so for someone like you or someone like me, I guess we're accustomed to the playbook, right, that you see in the chemical industry, in oil and gas and tobacco.
	And this very much follows that playbook.
	But, you know, it's really yet just another example of how frail our regulatory system is and how it misses these real dangers to human health when they rely so heavily on companies to communicate the science to them.
	Yeah, you know, when we brought, as you know, when we brought together The Monsanto case is addressing the exposures to glyphosate.
	The injury glyphosate causes many, many injuries, including it's a probable endocrine disruptor that causes disruption to the microbiome.
	The issue that we address, because the science was strongest, was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
	But the people who we were representing were mainly home gardeners.
	And the reason for that was that home gardeners were particularly careful about what kind of pesticides they applied because their children were playing in the yard, etc., and they didn't want to poison themselves.
	glyphosate.
	And Lanzanto made all these claims that glyphosate was safer than the aspirin, that you could drink it from the bottle and all this crazy stuff.
	And they believed it.
	And it was the only pesticide they used for most of them.
	So it was very easy to isolate.
	We didn't represent many farm workers because farm workers are handling a lot of different pesticides.
	And it's hard to isolate out all the co-variables.
	So tell us, who is at risk for poisoning by And what are the vectors?
	Is it farmers?
	Who's getting Parkinson's disease?
	Yeah, certainly.
	And you're right.
	Consumers are not as much at risk here.
	And it is farmers.
	It's professional applicators, people who are using Paraquat in a professional capacity.
	And Paraquat use has expanded over the last 20 years or so.
	Increased pretty dramatically and part of the reason for that is because glyphosate has become less effective in killing weeds and so farmers have had to use paraquat again or use more paraquat to control weeds on their property.
	And what you see is that as paraquat use has risen, the data on Parkinson's disease and the incidence of Parkinson's has also risen pretty dramatically.
	And my data here, prevalence of Parkinson's has more than doubled from 1990 to 2015.
	It's expected to continue to expand rapidly.
	We have roughly 60,000 Americans every year that are diagnosed with Parkinson's.
	It's ranked among the top 15 causes of death now in the United States, according to CDC. And the death rate from Parkinson's has climbed more than 60% over the past two decades.
	And as I said, this tracks similarly with the very rapid expansion over that timeframe of the use of Paraquat.
	Now, paraquat is not considered the only cause of Parkinson's.
	There are toxins in air pollution that you inhale that get into your brain.
	There's a lot of research that shows that some of these toxins that we're inhaling in the air on a regular basis, and that would be everybody, not just farmers, You know, can cause Parkinson's disease, these changes in the brain, in the cells of the brain.
	And then there is very, to a much smaller degree, the science shows a genetic element that contributes to the incidence of this disease.
	But it's a horrible disease if your listeners aren't familiar with it.
	You know, we did profile In a separate story, some of the Parkinson's victims, some of the people who were suing.
	And it is.
	It just robs them.
	They describe being robbed of just getting dressed, walking across a room, being able to go out and being able to speak, being able to really enjoy and engage with family and loved ones.
	And it's a terrible and tragic disease, like so many of them are, of course.
	But to see this company talking about, in 1975, 1975, if I can find this.
	You have one company toxicologist writing to another internally.
	1975.
	And he says, we discussed last week the point you raised about possible chronic effects, which you see causing legal problems.
	I think some plan could be made, etc., etc.
	This goes on and on.
	By 1985...
	It wasn't a plan to warn people or to stop using it.
	No, that was not the plan.
	The plan was how to conduct a study that would counter all of the information that was coming out.
	They hire a class of scientists, we call them biostitutes, who will...
	Gin up or ghostwrite the studies and then get paid legitimate scientists to sign them and give the imprimatur of legitimacy.
	And that's what we had to fight.
	And that's what the Monsanto paper showed, is that all of this science that exonerated it was ginned up by corrupted regulators and You see, as I said, similar tactics here, similar plans.
	You see them put up a website that puts out information that is contradictory to what they're saying internally to each other.
	You see them talk about, we need to enlist academics around the world.
	You know, we can...
	We can provide some funding for them and we can collaborate with them and they can carry out our positive message about that our product doesn't cause Parkinson's disease.
	In one really interesting little cache of documents, You see, they're very worried because the EPA is putting together a group of expert scientists for an advisory panel.
	And one of the scientists that they're looking at is Dr.
	Deborah Corey-Slecta, who is a very elite researcher and who had been looking at Parkinson's and Paraquat.
	And they say it will be a disaster for them if Cori Selecta is named as an advisor to the EPA on the scientific panel.
	And so they go and they put in place a plan then to communicate to the EPA that she should not be named as an advisor, but they do it secretly because they don't want anybody to know that they're behind it.
	And they talk about that internally.
	We don't want anyone to know that we're doing this.
	And so they...
	Come up with all these things to say about her that are negative, that discredit her work, and this sort of thing.
	And they run it through a third party to secretly try to influence the EPA. It's that sort of thing.
	And I wanted to share this memo, which resonated with me.
	This is from 1985.
	Again, a very long time ago.
	A top Chevron official writing to another top, like the top.
	Gwen follows the retired chairman who's writing to the current chairman, and he's likening Paraquat to asbestos.
	And he's highlighting the especially severe financial risks involved in selling a product which contributes to a chronic disease.
	Parkinson's can go on for decades, he says.
	And then he writes, I cannot think of anything more horrible for us to bequeath to our successors than an asbestos problem.
	And he's referring to Paraquat because he had been comparing the two.
	That was 1985.
	Now Chevron stopped selling Paraquat a year later in 1986, but Syngenta kept right on to this day.
	The only other thing I would say is at the new lead, I've posted, much like I posted the Monsanto papers, I've posted the Paraquat papers so people can download them.
	Terry, how can our listeners support your new journalistic project and how can they find out more about Paraquat if they're interested?
	Oh, sure.
	Thank you.
	Thanks for asking, Bobbi.
	The new LEAD, all spelled out, and LEAD is L-E-D-E dot org.
	Please go there.
	Donate if you can.
	We're little.
	We're startup.
	We need all the help we can get to keep doing investigations like this.
	And I want to say we did put all of the documents that I was able to see and to read to reveal here.
	Up on the Paraquat Papers, we call it the Media Library site, so people can go there, you can download the documents, you can read them for yourselves, journalists, consumers, lawmakers, anybody who's interested can make use of these documents as well.
	So, thank you.
	Thank you, Kerry Gillum.
	Thank you for your scholarship, for your courage, your integrity, and for being on the front lines of this battlefield for so long, protecting children's health, public health, and fighting the chemical industry bad guys.
	It's good to talk to you, Bobby.
	Thanks.
	Well, it's always good to see you.
	And thank you.
	And I love your work, Bobby.
	You know, I listen to this podcast religiously.
	Oh, really?
	Oh, yeah.
	You can't get new episodes fast enough for me.
	I'm always like, where's the next one?
	Where's the next one?
	You made my day.
	You made my day, Gary.
	That latest one, was it the CIA guy?
	What was his name?
	What's his name?
	Yeah, Gary Cowell.
	Oh, man.
	I mean, such good stuff.
	So, thanks.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	Okay, talk to you later.

▲