Researchers believe a factor is a chemical used in drycleaning and household products such as shoe polishes and carpet cleaners
Asked about the future of Parkinson’s disease in the US, Dr Ray Dorsey says, “We’re on the tip of a very, very large iceberg.”
Dorsey, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center and author of Ending Parkinson’s Disease, believes a Parkinson’s epidemic is on the horizon. Parkinson’s is already the fastest-growing neurological disorder in the world; in the US, the number of people with Parkinson’s has increased 35% the last 10 years, says Dorsey, and “We think over the next 25 years it will double again.”
Most cases of Parkinson’s disease are considered idiopathic – they lack a clear cause. Yet researchers increasingly believe that one factor is environmental exposure to trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical compound used in industrial degreasing, dry-cleaning and household products such as some shoe polishes and carpet cleaners.
TCE is a carcinogen linked to renal cell carcinoma, cancers of the cervix, liver, biliary passages, lymphatic system and male breast tissue, and fetal cardiac defects, among other effects. Its known relationship to Parkinson’s may often be overlooked due to the fact that exposure to TCE can predate the disease’s onset by decades. While some people exposed may sicken quickly, others may unknowingly work or live on contaminated sites for most of their lives before developing symptoms of Parkinson’s. Those near National Priorities List Superfund sites (sites known to be contaminated with hazardous substances such as TCE) are at especially high risk of exposure. Santa Clara county, California, for example, is home not only to Silicon Valley, but 23 superfund sites – the highest concentration in the country. Google Quad Campus sits atop one such site; for several months in 2012 and 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found employees of the company were inhaling unsafe levels of TCE in the form of toxic vapor rising up from the ground beneath their offices.
While some countries heavily regulate TCE (its use is banned in the EU without special authorization) the EPA estimates that 250m lb of the chemical are still used annually in the US, and that in 2017, more than 2m lb of it was released into the environment from industrial sites, contaminating air, soil and water. TCE is currently estimated to be present in about 30% of US groundwater (the non-profit Environmental Working Group created its own map of TCE-contaminated water sites nationwide), though researcher Briana de Miranda, a toxicologist who studies TCE at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, says: “We are under-sampling how many people are exposed to TCE. It’s probably a lot more than we guess.”
Under EPA regulations, it’s considered “safe” for TCE to be present in drinking water at a maximum concentration of five parts per billion. In severe cases of contamination, such as that which occurred at Camp Lejeune, a North Carolina marine corps, between the 1950s and late 1980s, people are believed to have been exposed to up to 3,400 times the level of contaminants permitted by safety standards. A memorial site known as “Babyland” honors the children of military personnel who died after they or their pregnant mothers were exposed to TCE-tainted water while living on the base. …
Government criticised over bill that will in effect withdraw country from Istanbul convention
Women’s rights activists and opposition MPs have accused the Polish government of abandoning victims of domestic violence as a bill that would in effect take the country out of a key international convention on violence against women moved through parliament.
A vote last week on its first reading prompted demonstrations around Warsaw, including at the parliament, constitutional court and education ministry. Activists fear that victims of domestic violence will be left with no support or protection.
The vote to send it for examination by parliamentary committees took place only days after Turkey, the first state to ratify the Istanbul convention, withdrew from it by presidential decree. No date for a second reading in Poland has yet been set.
“Withdrawal from the Istanbul convention would signal to the international community that Poland is moving away from the west, from democracy and human rights, and is instead going in the direction of Turkey and dictatorship,” said the opposition MP Barbara Nowacka, the leader of the centre-left Polish Initiative party.
The Istanbul convention aims to prevent domestic violence and other forms of violence against women. The legally binding treaty was signed by 34 European countries and came into effect in 2014.
Rightwing politicians in Poland and activists from Ordo Iuris, the ultraconservative legal group behind the bill, have argued that the convention promotes “gender ideology”. Proponents of the bill – named “Yes to family, no to gender” – want the Polish government to write its own anti-violence legislation that will “secure the rights of families”.
Marta Lempart, the leader of the National Women’s Strike, the organisation behind Poland’s large pro-choice demonstrations and last week’s protests, accused the government of wanting “to legalise domestic violence”.
She said a 2019 bill that would have decriminalised first instances of domestic violence was rejected by parliament, but she feared that without the protection of the convention, similar legislation would be allowed to pass in the future.
“The government has already cut funding to organisations which support victims of domestic violence. They want to disassemble the whole system of support,” she said.
The bill was introduced to parliament only months after the Polish government approved a near-total abortion ban.
“Poland’s conservative and authoritarian government opposes female emancipation and seeks to preserve a certain status quo,” said Wanda Nowicka, an MP from the leftwing Spring party.
Recent polls suggest such social conservatism does not have overwhelming support, with 70% of Poles backing the widespread protests against the abortion ban and a majority wanting same-sex relationships to have legal recognition. …
“When our ideas on any subject, material, intellectual, or social, undergo a thorough change in consequence of new observations, I call that movement of the mind a revolution. If the ideas are simply extended or modified, there is only progress. Thus the system of Ptolemy was a step in astronomical progress, that of Copernicus was a revolution.”
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (via philosophybits)
