‘Parkinson’s Is a Man-Made Disease’
April 15th, 2025Via: Politico:
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.
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The regulatory tests also isolate individual chemicals, rarely examining how they interact in the real world. But a 2020 study in Japan showed how dangerous that assumption may be. When rodents were exposed to glyphosate and MPTP — the very compound that mimicked Parkinson’s in the California heroin cases — the combination caused dramatically more brain cell loss than either substance alone.
“That’s the nightmare scenario,” Bloem says. “And we’re not testing for it.”
Research Credit: DF
