Using pesticides doesn’t only have an impact on your environmental wellness; it might also threaten your mental wellbeing. This is according to a new study from researchers at UCLA, who have found that a common combination of farm chemicals used to protect potato, dry bean, and tomato crops from bugs, weeds, and other pests seems to have the unappetising side effect of triggering Parkinson’s disease.
The study, which was published this month in the American Journal of Epidemiology, gives support to previous theories that pesticide exposure can lead to the degenerative disorder, causing such debilitating symptoms as impaired motor skill, speech, and other functions. According lead study author Sadie Costello, former doctoral student at UCLA who is now at the University of California, Berkeley, ‘We were able to show in humans what animal data had previously suggested. Animal experiments are done in highly controlled environments in which exposure can be measured . . . the chance of actually seeing an effect in humans is not very high unless there is, in fact, quite a large effect.’
Suspicion was first raised that pesticides can trigger Parkinson’s disease when high rates of the disorder were reported in farmers and rural populations. Therefore, the researchers embarked on a study of 368 long-time residents of California’s Central Valley who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, as well as another 341 residents as a control group. Some of the participants enrolled on the study inhabited areas within 500 metres of fields that had sprayed with the fungicide maneb and the herbicide paraquat between 1974 and 1999, and it was this subgroup that had a 75% higher risk of developing Parkinson’s than those who lived further away.
Moreover, if the subjects had been diagnosed with the disease before they were 60 years old, this earlier exposure increased their risk for the disease as much as four- to six-fold, and even exposure to just one type of pesticide increased their risk more than two-fold. Study senior author Beate Ritz, professor of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health, commented, ‘The results confirmed two previous observations from animal studies. One, that exposure to multiple chemicals may increase the effect of each chemical. That’s important, since humans are often exposed to more than one pesticide in the environment. And second, that the timing of exposure is also important.’
Even if you don’t live near a farm, the results of the study still affect you. In America, the Centres for Disease Control have found that some pesticide chemicals are present in the blood or urine of nearly every citizen. You’re at risk of exposure from the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat and – worst of all – the wellness experts don’t even know which chemicals are the most threatening. Warren Porter, PhD, professor and former chair of zoology, and professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains, ‘We really don’t know what the “worst” [pesticides] are because the criteria for evaluating them have been so weak, and the government has largely looked the other way until very recently.’
So what can you do to rid your home of toxic chemicals? Vote with your bank balance! Porter suggests, ‘Ordinary people can have an immense impact by changing their buying patterns. Buy organic, buy a good water filter, ask restaurants to offer organic items on the menu, get your hospital to go green, and patronise golf courses that have organic practices. Economics is immensely powerful and a change of only 0.5% market share has profound effects on a corporation.’
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