America has chosen PD for Profit
My publishing schedule is generally twice a week. Which limits the amount of stuff landing in your inbox. I try to be merciful. If you are like me, your inbox is now a part time job to manage. Good Substack authors are multiplying like rabbits.
The side effect of this schedule is that I have several “draft” letters that are in a publishing queue. Today’s post was written in February but got set aside as the MAGA Mafia Administration began its attack on sanity and decency.
This essay (no paywall) by Nicholas Kristoff resurrected the following post.
(Thanks Bob H, for the heads up.)
Recently, my wife and I were discussing Parkinson’s Disease. Why are there so many people we know who are suffering from this? Then this article from Civil Eats popped up in my news feed.
“Over 1 million people suffer from Parkinson’s disease in the U.S., and each year, 90,000 new cases are diagnosed. Parkinson’s disease can develop when the nerve cells that produce the chemical dopamine die; dopamine controls critical body functions such as memory, mood, and movement.”
My wife and I echoed each other: “There is something in the water.” Of course, it is more than that.
70 countries ban the use of the pesticide Paraquat. The US does not. Civil Eats explains:
”In recent years, it’s become clear that Parkinson’s is largely caused by interactions between genetics and environmental factors, including exposure to metals, solvents, or pesticides. According to a recent study that offered free genetic testing for Parkinson’s disease to more than 10,000 participants with the disease, only 13 percent were predisposed genetically.
Said another way, 87 percent of the Parkinson’s cases analyzed had no known genetic risk factor. As a result, researchers are investigating how genes and environmental exposures interact to create hot spots of Parkinson’s disease.”
California’s Central Valley, which produces one-quarter of the nation’s food, is one such hotspot. “I call California’s Central Valley my personal lab,” says study co-author Beate Ritz, a Parkinson’s disease researcher at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a retained expert consultant in lawsuits against Syngenta. “The levels of Parkinson’s disease there are outrageous.”
Read more here about Parkinson’s Disease. With the information we have, why do we let industries dominate our health policies? Why do we let large corporations and the oligarchs give us such suffering?
I suspect that everyone reading this knows somebody who is suffering from or is deceased as a result of PD. One million of us have it. And millions more of us are impacted by it as we care for and watch our family members and friends suffer.
The field of medicine is scrambling to find cures and better ways to prevent PD. What if we did what other countries have done? Why don’t we stop American Big Ag from spraying this crap…this toxin…on the fields where we get our food?!
Answer: the “Profit Loop”
“Studies from researchers around the world link paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s disease in humans and laboratory animals,” says Ray Dorsey, a professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and co-author of the 2020 book Ending Parkinson’s Disease: A Prescription for Action.
The financial benefits of reducing pesticide-related Parkinson’s disease are striking. Global sales of paraquat are $400 million each year, yet the economic burden of Parkinson’s disease, in terms of health care costs, is $52 billion a year, according to Dorsey. “Even if paraquat was responsible for just 1 percent of Parkinson’s disease cases, the economic value of preventing its use is $500 million per year,” says Dorsey.
That is the “Profit Loop”. Big companies make billions selling chemicals that make us sick. Then big companies make money trying to find treatments for PREVENTABLE illnesses. That’s some sick irony. Selfish cruelty by design.
It all reminds me of the scam of tobacco companies making enormous profits selling poison – simultaneously providing the pharmaceutical establishment with patients to “cure”. Profits on top of profits. The people be damned.
Here is Kristoff’s last paragraph. I think he is too kind:
”Environmental health is hard. It requires juggling trade-offs and making complex choices with insufficient knowledge. Yet because of profit incentives, we work much harder at spewing toxins into our ecosystem than at shielding ourselves from them. Unfortunately, the United States government — more so than other governments — is more inclined to keep chemical companies safe than to protect our families.”
Or put this way:
Very rich people are making themselves richer by poisoning us. And then making themselves richer by “treating” the results of the poisoning. And then, just to make it more cruel, they deny the poorest of us that treatment. Thank you stockholders and oligarch CEOs of major companies in America. The business model of creating disease to be treated is diabolical genius. American Exceptionalism on Full Display.
So yeah. There must be something in the water. Something that clouds our thinking and keeps us too docile, clueless or otherwise distracted to see the brutal awful truth and act on it.
https://civileats.com/2025/02/12/is-there-enough-evidence-of-health-risks-for-the-epa-to-ban-paraquat/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=USDA%20Funding%20Freeze%20Threatens%20Farmers%20%20Financial%20Stability&utm_campaign=Weekly%20Newsletter%2020250212
https://www.apdaparkinson.org/article/parkinsons-disease-registries/#:~:text=How%20many%20people%20have%20Parkinson’s%20disease%3F,and%20will%20continue%20to%20increase.
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/147/8/2668/7716154?login=false
https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/study-finds-link-between-parkinsons-disease-and-pesticide-use-in-the-great-plains-region/
https://www.parkinson.org/about-us/news/economic-burden-of-parkinsons-disease-study
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