Carrie Gellum is a veteran investigative journalist with more than 30 years of experience covering corporate news, including 17 years as senior correspondent with Reuters International News Service. She is the author of Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science, and The Monsanto Papers. And her book won the coveted Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, at which she s a member. Her second book, a narrative thriller titled The Plant Papers, was released in March 2021, and we had Carrie on to talk about that when she released it. She has contributed chapters for a textbook about environmental journalism, and a book about pesticides in Africa. She testified as an invited expert before the European Parliament about research, and was a featured speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France in 2019. She writes regularly for The Guardian and for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and others. She founded a non-profit environmental news outlet called the New Lead, a journalism initiative of the Environmental Working Group, a partnership with the EWWD-E, and is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and the Guardian. She's also a regular guest on the BBC Radio 4 Breakfast Show. She's a frequent contributor to NPR and the BBC World Service radio show Morning Drive, and she is a frequent guest on NPR's Morning Drive. She has been featured in the New York Magazine, NPR s Morning Drive and NPR s "Good Morning America." She also writes for the Los Angeles radio show, and hosts a podcast called Morning Drive with John Rocha. and the New England Journal. In this episode, she talks about Parkinson's Disease and Parkinson's disease, and her new book, "Parkinson's Disease." Paraquat: Parquat: The Pesticide Pills and Parkinson s Disease: What's the Real Story." and her book, The Weed Killer? is out now, "The Weed Killer: The Truth About It? and it's out in paperback. And she also has a new podcast on the road, "Paraquat and the Weed Killer"? And, of course, she's got you covered! . Thanks to Bobby Lord, Bobby Lord is a friend of the show, Bobby is a good friend of mine, and he's a great friend of ours, and I'm going to give you a shoutout in this episode.
00:00:01.000Today we have back one of our favorite regulars on the show, Carrie Gellum, a veteran investigative journalist with more than 30 years experience covering corporate news, including 17 years as senior correspondent with Reuters International News Service.
00:00:16.000She is the author of Whitewash, the Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science.
00:00:21.000She's going to talk today, by the way, about Paraquat and Parkinson's disease.
00:00:26.000And Her book won the coveted Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, at which she's a member.
00:00:34.000Her second book, a narrative legal thriller titled The Monsanto Papers, was released in March 2021, and we had Carrie on to talk about that when she released it.
00:00:46.000She has contributed chapters for a textbook about environmental journalism and a book about pesticides in Africa.
00:00:53.000She has testified also as an invited expert before the European Parliament about research and was a featured speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France, in 2019.
00:01:05.000She writes regularly for The Guardian and for The New York Times, The HuffPost, and others.
00:01:13.000Helped launch a non-profit environmental news outlet called the New Lead, L-E-D-E, as a journalism initiative of the Environmental Working Group.
00:01:22.000So welcome back to the podcast, Kerry.
00:01:35.000I mean, when I was growing up, Paraquat was their herbicide of choice that the United States government was spraying marijuana fields in Colombia and other countries as part of the drug eradication program.
00:01:48.000And so if you were smoking pot in the 1970s or 1980s, the chances were, and probably 1990s, that you were inhaling a lot of paraquat and people were concerned about that.
00:01:59.000But now paraquat is used much like glyphosate was used.
00:02:04.000It's an herbicide that farmers use to kill weeds in cornfields and others, and it's getting into our food.
00:03:03.000And so farmers understand that if they get, if something splashes up into their mouth, or I think the EPA estimates roughly just a teaspoon of paraquat, if it's swallowed, the person will likely die within a matter of days or two or three weeks.
00:03:19.000It's so deadly that it's been used by a number of people around the world as a tool for suicide.
00:03:26.000And that's been a very big concern by regulators and by the companies that sell it.
00:03:37.000The long-term chronic impacts have always been a subject of great debate over the many, many years that it's been on the market.
00:03:45.000Very early on, people started to become concerned that Paraquat over a long-term exposure could have impacts on the brain.
00:03:54.000And more study and more research linked it to Parkinson's disease specifically, because it's been shown in numerous research studies that paraquat can impact the dopamine producing neurons in the part of the brain where these are created to essentially help your brain tell your body what to do, right?
00:04:16.000To be able to walk and talk and have balance and that sort of thing.
00:04:20.000So when you impact these dopamine-producing cells in the brain, you get the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
00:04:27.000And this is something that has become more and more supported by scientific research.
00:04:33.000And Paraquat has actually been banned in a number of countries around the world.
00:04:38.000But it, of course, is still used here in the United States.
00:04:41.000It's banned in the EU since 2007, which is where its primary manufacturer, Syngenta, is based.
00:04:49.000So it hasn't kept Syngenta from making it and selling it to many, many countries, including the United States.
00:04:55.000And so the people who are listening to this show, a lot of them are concerned with toxics that they are consuming, but also I'd say even more so that they're trying to develop a food regimen where they're not giving this kind of chemical to their kids.
00:05:12.000And so what crops, has it been found in foods and what kind of food should people look out for and how do they avoid them?
00:05:20.000Yeah, I mean, paraquat is to a lesser degree a concern in food, though certainly it has been found.
00:05:27.000You do find it in food, you find it in water and that sort of thing, to a lesser degree than something like glyphosate, because paraquat is not typically sprayed directly over growing crops, because of course it will kill them.
00:05:40.000Now, glyphosate, as you know, at Roundup, Monsanto engineered crops to tolerate being sprayed with glyphosate.
00:05:48.000And so farmers who grow things like corn and soybeans and cotton and canola can go out and spray directly over their fields during the growing season.
00:05:56.000And they also use it for desiccation in wheat and oats.
00:06:05.000Is the practice of spraying crops when they're just before harvest or even after harvest when they're laying in the field to keep them dry.
00:06:15.000And glyphosate is now used, I think most glyphosate now is used for desiccation.
00:06:20.000And the problem is that you're now spraying it directly on food.
00:06:24.000I think they started doing that around 2006, and glyphosate sales took off immensely after that.
00:06:32.000But we started finding large amounts of glyphosate in probably most of our food products after that.
00:06:40.000You know, the CDC, I wrote about this summer, the CDC data came out showing 80% of people that they tested in the U.S. had glyphosate in their urine.
00:06:49.000I mean, you know, it's, yes, it's very prevalent.
00:06:51.000But paraquat is a restricted-use pesticide, again, so it's not, you can't go out and buy it and spray it in your garden if you're a consumer.
00:06:59.000You have to be a farmer, a trained applicator, a professional applicator to use it.
00:07:04.000The EPA requires a skull and crossbones on it.
00:07:07.000But what I recently was able to report is based on just thousands of pages of internal documents that I received from Chevron and Syngenta.
00:07:20.000Chevron was an early distributor of Paraquat in the United States for about 20 years.
00:07:25.000And these two companies are being sued, much like people have sued Monsanto around the country, around the United States.
00:07:32.000You have thousands of people now with Parkinson's disease who have sued Syngenta and Chevron, saying, you know, you hid the information that showed that Paraquat causes Parkinson's.
00:07:44.000And the companies have maintained, of course, in their defense that they did not do that and that there is no evidence that it causes Parkinson's.
00:07:52.000But what I was able to report in The Guardian and in this news outlet, The New Lead, which I hope people will visit.
00:08:00.000We're tiny and small, but we're trying to do important work.
00:08:04.000What we were able to report is that since almost day one, The companies knew that this chemical was getting into the brain and that it could have chronic effects and that it could affect the central nervous system.
00:08:18.000And you see in the 1970s how the evidence is continuing to mount and how the companies are discussing internally, their scientists and others are discussing amongst themselves how worrisome it is that all of this evidence of an impact on the brain, a chronic long-term impact on the brain From Parkinson's, it's starting to get stronger and stronger.
00:08:41.000And it's jaw-dropping information because at the same time, the companies were saying publicly the opposite, that this chemical did not get into the brain.
00:08:52.000It did not cross the blood-brain barrier.
00:08:55.000That was something that they were very, very adamant about.
00:09:03.000I mean, again, it's thousands of pages.
00:09:06.000The story, the initial story that we published was exceedingly long, but there's just really abundant evidence that yes, it gets into the brain, that yes, it certainly affects the cells in a way that can cause Parkinson's disease.
00:09:21.000All of this that they were denying publicly, yet they were identifying it.
00:09:26.000And then it shows how the company officials start to craft plans to mislead the public and mislead regulators about this.
00:09:38.000You know, so for someone like you or someone like me, I guess we're accustomed to the playbook, right, that you see in the chemical industry, in oil and gas and tobacco.
00:09:47.000And this very much follows that playbook.
00:09:50.000But, you know, it's really yet just another example of how frail our regulatory system is and how it misses these real dangers to human health when they rely so heavily on companies to communicate the science to them.
00:10:06.000Yeah, you know, when we brought, as you know, when we brought together The Monsanto case is addressing the exposures to glyphosate.
00:10:14.000The injury glyphosate causes many, many injuries, including it's a probable endocrine disruptor that causes disruption to the microbiome.
00:10:24.000The issue that we address, because the science was strongest, was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
00:10:30.000But the people who we were representing were mainly home gardeners.
00:10:35.000And the reason for that was that home gardeners were particularly careful about what kind of pesticides they applied because their children were playing in the yard, etc., and they didn't want to poison themselves.
00:10:49.000And Lanzanto made all these claims that glyphosate was safer than the aspirin, that you could drink it from the bottle and all this crazy stuff.
00:11:33.000It's professional applicators, people who are using Paraquat in a professional capacity.
00:11:39.000And Paraquat use has expanded over the last 20 years or so.
00:11:45.000Increased pretty dramatically and part of the reason for that is because glyphosate has become less effective in killing weeds and so farmers have had to use paraquat again or use more paraquat to control weeds on their property.
00:12:01.000And what you see is that as paraquat use has risen, the data on Parkinson's disease and the incidence of Parkinson's has also risen pretty dramatically.
00:12:11.000And my data here, prevalence of Parkinson's has more than doubled from 1990 to 2015.
00:12:17.000It's expected to continue to expand rapidly.
00:12:20.000We have roughly 60,000 Americans every year that are diagnosed with Parkinson's.
00:12:25.000It's ranked among the top 15 causes of death now in the United States, according to CDC. And the death rate from Parkinson's has climbed more than 60% over the past two decades.
00:12:36.000And as I said, this tracks similarly with the very rapid expansion over that timeframe of the use of Paraquat.
00:12:45.000Now, paraquat is not considered the only cause of Parkinson's.
00:12:49.000There are toxins in air pollution that you inhale that get into your brain.
00:12:53.000There's a lot of research that shows that some of these toxins that we're inhaling in the air on a regular basis, and that would be everybody, not just farmers, You know, can cause Parkinson's disease, these changes in the brain, in the cells of the brain.
00:13:07.000And then there is very, to a much smaller degree, the science shows a genetic element that contributes to the incidence of this disease.
00:13:16.000But it's a horrible disease if your listeners aren't familiar with it.
00:13:20.000You know, we did profile In a separate story, some of the Parkinson's victims, some of the people who were suing.
00:13:28.000They describe being robbed of just getting dressed, walking across a room, being able to go out and being able to speak, being able to really enjoy and engage with family and loved ones.
00:13:41.000And it's a terrible and tragic disease, like so many of them are, of course.
00:13:46.000But to see this company talking about, in 1975, 1975, if I can find this.
00:13:53.000You have one company toxicologist writing to another internally.
00:14:46.000And that's what the Monsanto paper showed, is that all of this science that exonerated it was ginned up by corrupted regulators and You see, as I said, similar tactics here, similar plans.
00:15:03.000You see them put up a website that puts out information that is contradictory to what they're saying internally to each other.
00:15:12.000You see them talk about, we need to enlist academics around the world.
00:15:17.000We can provide some funding for them and we can collaborate with them and they can carry out our positive message about that our product doesn't cause Parkinson's disease.
00:15:26.000In one really interesting little cache of documents, You see, they're very worried because the EPA is putting together a group of expert scientists for an advisory panel.
00:15:38.000And one of the scientists that they're looking at is Dr.
00:15:42.000Deborah Corey-Slecta, who is a very elite researcher and who had been looking at Parkinson's and Paraquat.
00:15:49.000And they say it will be a disaster for them if Cori Selecta is named as an advisor to the EPA on the scientific panel.
00:15:59.000And so they go and they put in place a plan then to communicate to the EPA that she should not be named as an advisor, but they do it secretly because they don't want anybody to know that they're behind it.
00:17:15.000Now Chevron stopped selling Paraquat a year later in 1986, but Syngenta kept right on to this day.
00:17:23.000The only other thing I would say is at the new lead, I've posted, much like I posted the Monsanto papers, I've posted the Paraquat papers so people can download them.
00:17:33.000Terry, how can our listeners support your new journalistic project and how can they find out more about Paraquat if they're interested?
00:17:52.000We need all the help we can get to keep doing investigations like this.
00:17:55.000And I want to say we did put all of the documents that I was able to see and to read to reveal here.
00:18:03.000Up on the Paraquat Papers, we call it the Media Library site, so people can go there, you can download the documents, you can read them for yourselves, journalists, consumers, lawmakers, anybody who's interested can make use of these documents as well.
00:18:19.000Thank you for your scholarship, for your courage, your integrity, and for being on the front lines of this battlefield for so long, protecting children's health, public health, and fighting the chemical industry bad guys.