I meant to put this in heath and fitness, can be moved, sorry, though it does impinge in the current tariffs situation with Trump wanting to remove pesky barriers involving agricultural production standards. This article caught my attention as the mere mention of Paraquat immediatey brings the smell to my mind. We had some in our garage, my dad an engineer was very careful using it, however the neighbour across the road wasn't and used it often, he got Parknsons, twenty years of progression. And you know what? Their dog developed Parkinsons or what appears to be so. It's was very sad seeing the long haired terrier deteriorate into a mass of shakes and tremors. ‘Parkinson’s is a man-made disease’ Europe’s flawed oversight of pesticides may be fueling a silent epidemic, warns Dutch neurologist Bas Bloem. His fight for reform pits him against industry, regulators — and time. 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. continues.. https://www.politico.eu/article/bas-bloem-parkinsons-pesticides-mptp-glyphosate-paraquat/
I guess why this is really politics as well as health is that in 2021 the US reapproved Paraquat. Citing insufficient evidence it is connected to Parkinsons but there was a LOT of disagreement. It REMAINS banned across Europe since 2007. This is why there are agricultural trade barriers. European governments have to pay for the consequences through their health systems and are more conservative.