The chance this is a trustworthy source for me is close to 0. This just sound like fantastic pseudology:
“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.
I was able to find the references (including photos of the mentioned forearms) on PubMed and the RIMJ after a quick search. Paraquat is nasty stuff.
- [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/)
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
Yeah, I found it myself. And yes, it's nasty stuff. But in the context of the article, it’s pure nonsense.
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.
How did his urethra not burn off?
I can’t believe I’m typing this question
"Paraquat, a heavily regulated weed killer, is banned in more than 70 countries…"
Seventy countries kind of suggested to me that something is up with this chemical.
GMOs are harmless but also widely banned.
GMOs aren't toxic chemicals, two distinct things
I was on that train, too, but... harmless according to whom? The same ag lobbyists who claimed Roundup was harmless?
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.
Harmless compared to random genitic mutation which happens all the time and is never studied. only gmo is held to any standard at all, when other forms of genetic change are held to any standard we can ask if one is better - but for now even the most biased corporate study is better than the alternatives.
Why does that sound untrustworthy? Do you have any idea of what the tobacco industry hid about second hand smoke exposure? How is it somehow more plausible this nurse made up her condition than pesticide manufactures being honest about the impacts?
I don’t think the nurse is lying at all. The medical case is real. My point is that the article omitted the fact that the patient she treated had ingested a massive, lethal dose of concentrate (acute poisoning), and she was exposed to it when extracting it. The journalist used the symptoms of a suicide attempt to illustrate the risks of routine farming, which I think is misleading. It’s not about the nurse making it up... it’s about the article leaving out the context that matters most. Especially when pushing the argument that it causes Parkinson's.
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 mean you can click on the source right there, that is literally what happened: http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima.... The description maybe makes it sound a little more extreme than it actually was, but it's the correct terminology and an accurate description of events.
Is lying by omission and juxtaposition. It's manipulation. And it pisses me off to no end. I read the original source. It has NOTHING to do with Parkinson’s. It’s a suicidal dose ingested, and when extracted, it was still a dangerous chemical. If I drank a gallon of gasoline and you pumped it out of me, then it caught fire, it wouldn't explain anything except that gasoline is dangerous and burns. Nobody disputes that with regard to this chemical. So why slip it in like that? And the fact that people don't care just shows why they CAN “just slip it in there” in an article about Parkinson’s... nobody cares as long as it confirms their bias.
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 agree. If merely being splashed by his corrosive urine sloughed off her skin, I think he would not be alive to urinate.
It seems unlikely but possible that she was highly sensitive or allergic to the substance in a way that he wasn't
I just finished reading article and honestly, my BS detector is going off the charts.
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.