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U.S. workers say banned weed killer in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's
- dekhn 3y agoThe title was rewritten, but now it's ambiguous. Try: "U.S. workers say weed killer banned in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's" same words clearer meaning
- drewcoo 3y agoOr maybe put "Paraquat" in the title instead of talking circles around it.
- rob74 3y agoPara... what?
- jaredhallen 3y agoBut then you don't get to editorialize before people start to read the article.
- langsoul-com 3y agoIt's not really editorialising that's the only weed killer the article talks about.
- dappermanneke 3y agoand yet hn is going on rants about all weedkillers and all chemicals in the comments. the limits of expertise
- dcormier 3y agoI'd never heard of it before clicking through.
- rsynnott 3y agoHuh. Didn’t realise this was still legal anywhere.
- botanical 3y agoI have to ask, how on earth is it ambiguous? The word "banned" has been swapped around. Same difference.
- dekhn 3y ago"U.S. workers say banned weed killer in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's" could be interpreted in several ways: that the weed killer is banned in 50 countries, or as "Banned weed killer giving US workers parkinson in 50 countries". By moving banned, it makes it clear the weed killer is banned in 50 countries, not that it's killing people in 50 countries.
- BillyTheMage 3y ago[flagged]
- wohoodsod 3y agoMy favorite story about this was when a plastics company's representative was secretly filmed saying: "Those must be some stupid geese who eat plastic"
- linusg789 3y agohttps://ghostarchive.org/archive/RcYtd https://ghostarchive.org/archive/RcYtd
- slimsag 3y agoI find it interesting that companies are allowed to make statements like this: > “Despite decades of investigation and myriad epidemiological and laboratory studies, no scientist or doctor — whether or not affiliated with Syngenta — has ever concluded in a peer-reviewed scientific analysis that paraquat causes Parkinson’s,” the company’s chief communications officer, Saswato Das, wrote in an email. This has many qualifiers, it must be: * 'Concluded', so an 'extremely strong link between' would not be sufficient for them * 'causes Parkinson's' -> so if it 'triggers' Parkinson's, or is 'strongly linked to' the onset of Parkinson's, that wouldn't be sufficient Effectively they're saying unless you can show me video evidence of this bullet killing not just one person, but multiple people and can prove that the bullet is what did it.. then we don't believe it. That doesn't surprise me at all, money is money. But why are companies /allowed/ to make such deceptively worded statements like this? If it later turns out someone /can/ prove this, will they pay for such deceptive statements, let alone return the lives of those they have taken? Doubtful
- webnrrd2k 3y agoAlso, paraquat may actually be a safe chemical. However, there may be unsafe additives in the pesticide, as applied, that are causing serious problems.
- consumer451 3y agoYou raise an excellent point. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1764160/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1764160/ It’s utter insanity: > EPA says too many pesticide formulas exist to check all for the safety of ingredients that could harm humans, plants and wildlife https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/epa-cfs-toxic-inactive-ingredients-pesticides https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/epa-cfs-...
- rightbyte 3y agoCorporate communication by this point is some sort of injoke. You are a loser if you don't "get it". It is bad since I think I notice how the phycopatic behaviour smears of to people.
- asylteltine 3y agoLook up Kepone. It’s awful. Stories like Kepone happen way too often and won’t stop until the people who signed off on it are in jail for life.
- elijahparker 3y agoMap of paraquat usage in the US: https://blogs.sas.com/content/graphicallyspeaking/2021/05/07/creating-a-paraquat-weed-killer-map/ https://blogs.sas.com/content/graphicallyspeaking/2021/05/07...
- MichaelRo 3y agoWell my father was an agricultural engineer at a state farm, obviously handling herbicides and pesticides. I remember him telling me that herbicide is harmless: "you can drink a spoon of it and you'd be fine, unlike pesticide". Well... he got Parkinson's. He also told us: "sugar is harmless". My parents would prepare house made syrup with a lot of sugar and he liked drinking it with soda. Quite a lot of it. Eventually when he started feeling not so good, he'd fight off the feeling by downing some additional glasses or sugary drink. Well ... he got diabetes. Eventually it was Parkinson's what finished him. In a way it's effect is similar to Stephen Hawking's disease, loss of motor function, only much slowly, albeit inevitably. Problem is you lose not just voluntary but also vegetative muscle function, including gut movements. Which is what eventually kills you: even though you can't swallow food anymore (not that you're feeling hungry, you feel sick and miserable) and it's fed to you by a tube, there's no point when your gut can't move it out of your body eventually. Nasty way to die.
- nicetryguy 3y agostay hydrated!
- anigbrowl 3y agoThat sounds like a lot to go through, for both him and you. Sorry to hear of it.
- PakG1 3y agoIt's interesting what people would say about the safety of industrial chemicals. My dad worked as an aircraft maintenance engineer for an airliner, working on the big passenger aircraft. When he was being trained in the 70s/80s, they used 111-trichloroethane for a lot of stuff. They were told that the stuff was so safe that you could drink it. Later, he got kidney cancer. He sued and got only partial compensation because the court concluded that there was only a 50% chance that his cancer was from the 111-trichloroethane. Of course, today, we as a society still don't know if it causes cancer, but we think it might. https://wwwn.cdc.gov/tsp/ToxFAQs/ToxFAQsDetails.aspx?faqid=431&toxid=76 https://wwwn.cdc.gov/tsp/ToxFAQs/ToxFAQsDetails.aspx?faqid=4... Still, whether or not it does, it's wild that people would say things like that back then. Hey all, use this stuff, but you probably wouldn't want to drink it while you have lunch, right? Because we don't know what it really does to the body, so let's play it safe and use proper safety procedures, OK? Nope, it's, "this stuff is harmless, you could drink it and you'll be fine."
- Dylan16807 3y agoOkay, so the increase in risk means something in the realm of half a percent chance? I wish they would use the real numbers too; the baseline is really unclear.
- Slowlydying 3y agoWikipedia to the rescue: Other NIEHS research found that people who occupationally used two pesticides, rotenone or paraquat, developed Parkinson’s disease 2.5 times more often than nonusers.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThat does not answer the question
- paulryanrogers 3y agoNot directly yet one can say it increases workers' risks by 250%. So if the baseline rate is 1% then they're facing a 2.5% risk, and non-workers who may ingest the stuff indirectly likely somewhere between the baseline and elevated rate. Having witnessed Parkinson's in my family, I'd say that's bad enough to warrant a ban. Especially if there are lower risk alternatives.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThe baseline rate is a lot lower than 1% though. The lower the absolute rate is, the less it warrants a ban. I'm not sure where I'd draw the line in particular, but also we need to consider how much can be prevented with mild use of safety equipment.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoFair point. Perhaps OSHA could step in and EPA or FDA could ensure it's not being used in essessive amounts with random sampling.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoThis thread is full of comments that tl;dr to "oh, they also told us x was safe, but eventually it was not". The thing is, I'm sure half of those stories came with studies stating how safe all that was. And hacker news like debates where well meaning smart folks defended that point of view because the data was there. Now I'm much more tolerant to all the tinfoil hats, anti-whatever and crackpots out there. Because even when their arguments make no sense, I get where they come from. The history of mankind is riddled with those situations.
- benboughton1 3y agoWe use paraquat quite a bit in a way that we never actually exposed to the chemical. I imagine our procedures are quite different to how it was handled even 10 or 20 years ago.
- SeanLuke 3y agoCan we fix the title? It is not the original headline, and it implies that the weed killer is giving US workers in 50 countries Parkinson's. Corrected: U.S. workers say weed killer banned in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's.
- botanical 3y agoI have to ask here too. It definitely doesn't imply "US workers from 50 countries". Your change swaps "banned" around. Same difference.
- SeanLuke 3y agoI didn't say "from 50 countries". I think that generally the accepted parse is the greedy one where modifiers are as close to their objects as possible. So "Banned weed killer" gets compressed to an object X. That leaves us with "US Workers say X in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's". How would you interpret that?
- toasted-subs 3y agoBack to the future
- lm2s 3y agoThis one hits close to home. I had a very close family member die because of a Parkinson-like decease not long ago. He had the misfortune of inhaling quite a bit of herbicide after dropping a bag in an enclosed space and ~10 years later he got the decease. Since there was no history of Parkinson or Parkinson-like deceases in the family history, the doctors conclusion was that it must have been a toxic induced decease (not sure how to pronoun this exactly) and the large amount of herbicide inhale in that day was probably the cause.
- bschne 3y agoReading about this — I'm sorry to hear about your loss! — makes me wish we understood the dynamics of things like this much better than we do. Some stuff seems pretty clearly "not good", but sometimes it's really hard to reason about what is bad as long as you're exposed and leaves relatively little lasting damage, or what can have bad effects with highly delayed onset, and how the mechanism of "setting in motion the delayed-onset damage" works, exactly — is it the substance that stays in your body and continues to do damage, does it throw some process off-balance that then continues to harm you even after the substance is gone, etc. If anyone has any pointers to sources that cover our understanding of this better, I'd be very interested to read more about it.
- guerrilla 3y agodisease*
- InCityDreams 3y agoBut my goodness, "decease" seems more appropriate.
- dappermanneke 3y agoyour close family member would need to be exposed to tubs of paraquat for at the very least months at a time for this to be even remotely probable. unless he had to go to hospital due to acute exposure and paraquat toxicity that day, and even then
- mandmandam 3y ago> Paraquat is manufactured by Syngenta, a Swiss-based company owned by the Chinese government. The chemical is banned in at least 58 countries — including China and Switzerland — due to its toxicity Haha wow. That's capitalism baby.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- iandanforth 3y agoCan we correct the title to the correct short form: "U.S. workers say weed killer banned in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's"?
- quaintdev 3y agoOr Weed killer which is banned in 50 countries is giving us Parkinson's: US workers
- craneabove 3y agoIt’s interesting to note that there is claimed “Parkinson Disease belt”: “Our study indicates that there is a ‘Parkinson disease belt’ with high prevalence and incidence of Parkinson disease involving the Midwest and Northeast regions. This nonrandom disease distribution argues strongly for an environmental influence on the pathogenesis of Parkinson disease.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865395/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865395/
- TexanFeller 3y agoFarmers seem to disproportionately suffer from things like Parkinson's. I learned this after one of my farmer relatives had Parkinson's. Another had lung problems and died younger. A lot of farm chemicals are toxic with known and unknown effects and farmers can't help but breathe some of it or get it on their skin when they're spraying in large volumes from a tractor.