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XPost: sac.politics, talk.politics.misc
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

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