Pesticides Increase Genetic Risk for Parkinson's

Yay, pesticides! Emphasis mine:

... The disease affects approximately 1 percent of all people over the age of 65. Rates of Parkinson’s disease appear higher among farmers and rural residents, leading to speculation that pesticides might play a role in development of the disease.

In laboratory mice, two pesticides that affect dopamine levels – paraquat and maneb – have been shown to cause Parkinson’s-like symptoms (Barlowa et al. 2004). The effect is strongest when animals are exposed to these two compounds in combination (Thiruchelvam et al. 2002).

Recent studies now indicate that exposure to these two pesticides may also increase risk of Parkinson’s in humans. Exposure to one compound alone does not appear to confer increased risk. It appears that the combination of the two compounds is necessary (Costello et al. 2009). ...

Genetic susceptibility does play a role, but only in people exposed to these pesticides, particularly in combination. Lovely.

Have you ever read the labels on your prescriptions where they talk about drug interactions? Or known anyone taking one of those medications that you can't take with grapefruit? Grapefruit is even a pretty healthy thing to add to your diet, but it causes people to accumulate dangerously high doses of some medications instead of excreting them at the normal rate.

It's a well known phenomenon in pharmacology that even if one drug is helpful for a given patient, and another drug is helpful for that same patient, the two in combination might make that patient unwell. And we're talking about medicines, here.

Pesticides are designed to be toxic to animals and fungi that we actually share a lot of common genetic heritage with. They are poisonous on purpose.

Yet we're supposed to trust that they won't hurt us. We're supposed to believe safety claims made on the basis of limited exposures to one chemical without due consideration of other exposures or environmental factors.

We don't put up with that sort of sloppy risk analysis of the medicines that are designed with the intent of making us well, they have to be tested in combination with other drugs they're likely to be combined with. Why should we put up with it in chemicals designed to kill insects that end up in our food and water supply?