In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Dr. Ray Dorsey, a neurologist who co-authored the book, “Ending Parkinson’s Disease: A Prescription for Action.” Dorsey explains why Parkinson’s is a man-made disease and how eliminating harmful chemicals in food, water, and air could help get rid of it.
Chemicals in food, water, and air are risk factors contributing to the rise of Parkinson’s disease. It’s the fastest-growing brain disease in the world, creating urgency to address not just treatment for Parkinson’s but also its causes.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Hi, Ken here. Before we get into today's episode, I just have to express my deepest concern and condolences to everyone in Southern California who's dealing with these devastating wildfires. The losses are terrible. My heart is heavy thinking of everyone affected, including lots of close friends down there.
Here at EWG, we're committed to providing you with information to try and help keep you and your family safe, even under extreme conditions like these. I want to remind everyone in the LA area, stay indoors right now when possible, when the smoke is so intense, keep your windows and doors closed, set your AC to recirculate if you can.
To keep indoor air as clean as possible. Clean surfaces with a damp mop or cloth and use an air purifier. If you've been out and about, you might want to take your shoes off before you come into the house. And for now, also obviously avoid intense physical activity outside. Wait for the all clear before drinking tap water.
Keep your pets inside. And if you do need to go outside, Try and cover your nose and your mouth with a tight fitting N95 mask. We're posting more poor air quality guides to help you through this period on our Instagram page at Environmental Working Group. But mostly, we're thinking about you and rooting for you, LA.
You're going to come back, but we know how hard this time is. We're right there with you.
Welcome everyone to Ken Cook is Having Another Episode. Turns out I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. This one's brought on by a gentleman I've come to know over the past year, Dr. Ray Dorsey. Ray Dorsey is a professor of neurology and a director of the Center for Human Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Ray is investigating new treatments for movement disorders and is working on ways to improve the way care is delivered for individuals with Parkinson's disease and other neurological disorders. Ray and I participated in an amazing symposium in D. C. Where we heard from leading scientists, advocates, medical professionals, and EPA officials about how much we know and how concerned we should be about the toxic chemicals we're exposed to in our everyday lives and the potential impact on our brains.
And Ray was the convener of that conference. There are some real health outcomes we should be concerned about, from exposure to toxic chemicals in air, water, and food. And the growth of these negative outcomes, well, as I always say, we're not evolving to have these medical issues. It's something to do with what's going on in the environment.
Ray, it's a pleasure to have you on. I've learned so much from spending time with you, reading your research papers, and of course, from your book. Ending Parkinson's Disease, A Prescription for Action, which you co-authored with Dr. Todd Scherer, Dr. Michael Okun, and Dr. Bastian Blum. I want everyone at home to read this book.
Ray, tell us a little bit about your path that led you to be at the forefront of neurological issues like Parkinson's. Parkinson's disease and the connection to the environment and toxic chemicals.
Ray: First of all, it's a delight and an honor to be with you. I can, I'm a huge fan of the Environmental Working Group and all the work that you're doing to improve our environment.
And I think to improve our health, including our brain health, I'm an academic. So I had the gift of a sabbatical about six or seven years ago, in which my colleagues and I wrote this book, ending Parkinson's disease. And I started by reading all the, a lot of the papers by my colleague, Dr. Caroline Tanner, who is a Parkinson's specialist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
And she has politely and quietly, for the last 40 years, been telling us about the numerous environmental risk factors, chemicals in our food, water, and air that are contributing to Parkinson's disease. And as I took the sabbatical and read her work, I came away increasingly convinced that she was right.
And that Parkinson's disease is not a natural consequence of aging. It is a man made condition. A man made disease. If we got rid of the chemicals in our food, water, and air, we get rid of Parkinson's disease. For 99.9 percent of human history, Parkinson's disease either did not exist. Its first major description wasn't until 1817 by Dr. James Parkinson, a 61 year old British surgeon who basically writes a case series of six individuals with a condition that he said had not been classified in the medical literature. He said, this is something that's not in the textbooks. He says, tremors long since been described. You can see Shakespeare describing people with tremor from 300 years earlier.
But Parkinson's disease, this tremor, this stoop posture, this shuffling gait, this tendency to walk faster and faster and fall forward is new. He describes this new condition at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the capital of the Industrial Revolution in London. And I think this gives us really good clues to what the origins of this disease in fact are.
Ken: And so you read this scientist's work. Was there anything else that, that suddenly made you turn in that direction of something in your personal life, something that made you curious? What had you been researching up until that time as an academic?
Ray: So as an academic, I was doing what almost all American physicians do, and that's when you find someone with a disease. You immediately go from diagnosis to treatment.
And what Dr. Tanner had me going was from diagnosis to cause. So what is causing these diseases? And now I spend 5 to 10 minutes with every new patient I see with Parkinson's disease trying to figure out what caused it. And when you look at things from a different angle, you sometimes see things that you didn't notice previously.
And now within, you know, 5 to 10 minutes for the vast majority of my patients, I can figure out a major environmental risk exposure that's tied to Parkinson's pesticides that they were exposed to as a kid, growing up on a farm, growing up near crop dusters, growing up drinking well water, working with a degreasing chemical called trichloroethylene, serving in the military at contaminated bases, or occasionally, you know, living in a really heavily polluted area like 1800 London was.
And when you find it, you get, I get pissed off. Let's be honest because Parkinson's is a terrible disease. Michael J Fox says it sucks. An NBA basketball player, Brian Grant, who spoke at our symposium and was a three year old boy at Camp Lejeune says it sucks and it's a terrible disease. Some people say they don't even wish it on their enemies.
Suffering is made part of the human condition, but needless preventable suffering need not be. And so when I see someone's Parkinson's, I get upset because I think it's preventable. It's avoidable. And that if we summon the will and the energies, we can create a world that's largely free of Parkinson's disease, just like it was… for the vast majority of human history.
Ken: So just in a a, a few minutes, you can get a sense of their, you know, maybe exposure events or experiences that, that we know from the published literature now are, are strongly linked to the onset of, of Parkinson's. And are they all, does it also make Parkinson's worse or more severe, the nature of the exposure, or do we know that yet?
Ray: We don't know. And, and, you know, it's really hard. To retrospectively say that that's the definitive cause that you grew up on a farm that was getting sprayed by pesticides and who knows what you were getting sprayed with when you were three years old or five years old. It's hard to say, but you find these environmental exposures and then you look at the literature, you know, Dr. Tanner has shown that farmers working with paraquat have a 150 percent increased risk of Parkinson's, not 10 percent more, not 20, not 50, 150 percent more. You feed paraquat to laboratory animals. They develop the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, including a tremor that you look at their brains. They've had the loss of dopamine producing nerve cells, which are lost in Parkinson's disease.
And then you look at, in the case of Paraquat, based on reporting from the Guardian and Kerry Gilliam, you look at what the chemical company's own researchers did, and they exposed three different mammalian species, rats, rabbits and mice to paraquat in the 1960s, and they developed the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
Ken: And they kept it secret.
Ray: And they kept it secret. They didn't tell anybody. And they sought to discredit the work of scientists like Deborah Corey Schlecht at the University of Rochester, who showed 30 years after they did the experiments, she replicated their experiments 30 years after the fact. Now, of course, not knowing the early work that they, that their own company's researchers had done, and then they had the temerity to discredit to hire, according to the Guardian, a third party law firm to prevent her from serving on an EPA advisory panel.
And then today, they have the temerity to say that no researcher has concluded in a scientific based publication that Paraquat causes Parkinson's disease. After they spent the last 60 years, according to the Guardian, hiding the, the, their own research from the, from regulators and from the public.
Ken: And full disclosure, Kerry Gilliam is the managing editor of the New Lead, which is a project of EWG, an independent journalism project and her series two part, three part series, I guess, in the Guardian, called the Paraquat Papers, did disclose all of that.
Two things that popped up as you were speaking just now, Ray.
One is, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what we understand now is the biology of Parkinson's and how exogenous, external chemicals, contaminants, pollutants can cause that. And then also, one of the things that really struck me, In your book and, and at the conference in your opening remarks was the burden of these diseases now on our population.
I really was completely unaware of how important these neurological conditions are to our, our over, overall health status here in the United States. It's pretty shocking.
Ray: It's not the United States. The leading source of disability in the world is not heart disease. It's not cancer. It's not COVID.
It's not infectious disease. It's brain disease. Brain diseases are the leading source of disability in the world. And the fastest or nearly fastest growing of those brain diseases is Parkinson's disease. 1. 2 million Americans have the disease. Nearly 12 million people around the world have the disease.
250 people were diagnosed with Parkinson's today. 100 Americans died from the disease today. And if you look at the biology of Parkinson's disease, its loss of these nerve cells in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, where these nerve cells that produce a chemical called dopamine are lost.
Ken: And where in the brain are they located?
Ray: So, like, if you imagine your spinal cord, and then it goes up and it connects to the brain, at the very top where they connect, there's an area called the midbrain, and that's the part of the brain that's affected.
And in 2003, a really smart German pathologist came out with a striking hypothesis. He said that Parkinson's, which Dr. Parkinson's thought was a brain disease, is not primarily a brain disease, that the origins of Parkinson's disease does not begin in the brain. But he says the earliest pathology is found in the smell center of the brain. It's been called olfactory bulb. Or in a nerve that innervates the gut called the vagus nerve.
Ken: Oh, saying more about that, 'cause I, I was also really, that was eye opening when I read those passages in your book.
Ray: Yes. And so Dr. Brock, he said, maybe Parkinson's disease is like polio. So if you think, you know, polio is due to a virus that inner enters our gut, and then sends up to the, to the nerve cells that control movement and causes paralysis.
He says maybe Parkinson's disease is due to neuro invasion of an infectious particle. He thought a virus unlikely to be a major cause of the disease. That then causes the pathology to spread from the lowest part of the of the brain. The, the part that innervates the, the vagus nerve and the pathology spreads upwards to the parts of the brain that eventually control movement and control thinking and, and even hallucinations.
And then in 2019, a really smart Danish scientist expanded the work of Dr. Brock by saying that there are two models of Parkinson's. There's a model where that begins first in the gut, or he calls it a body first form of Parkinson's disease in which the pathology begins. And the gut, and then, basically takes this superhighway called the vagus nerve that goes all the way from your intestines all the way up to the lower part of your brain and then spreads upwards.
Or there is a brain or nose first that begins a form of the disease in which the pathology begins in the smell center of the brain, which is just above your nose behind your eyes and then spreads backwards to the part of the brain that's responsible for controlling movement. And we've known for many years that the earliest features of Parkinson's aren't the classic tremor or slowness of movement.
Constipation, and or, loss of smell and these features precede happened before the tremor 10, 20, even sometimes more years than that.
Ken: Oh my goodness. And you would never, who would think that that was related to, or might, might be presaging Parkinson's. That's crazy.
Ray: Exactly. And now if you think about, well, if it's beginning in the nose or beginning in the gut, well then what's causing the big origins in the nose or the gut? And then, so, Dr. Borghammer and I, and colleagues, we wrote a paper arguing that toxicants that are ingested, say, pesticides in groundwater or Marines at Camp Lejeune drinking TCE, trichloroethylene in their drinking water, that would lead to perhaps a body or gut first form of the disease when toxicants interact with the gut, leading to this misfolded protein that then spreads.
Or, potentially even more powerfully, especially for Parkinson's disease, if you inhale chemicals, if you inhale paraquat, if you inhale trichloroethylene, if you inhale large amounts of air pollution, you get a nose or brain first model of the disease, pathology beginning there and then spreading back to the parts of the brain that produce the movements, the symptoms that are classically linked to the disease.
Ken: Now I know people are going to ask this, so I'll just try and ask it, jump ahead. For the exposures that occur through ingestion and in the gut, iIs there some dimension of gut health that can help reduce the likelihood of what might start as constipation or other bowel problems, turning into Parkinson’s? Is there a way we can make our, our gut healthy enough to resist it? Kind of an immune type, at least metaphor?
Ray: Yeah. So a fantastic question. I can't give you a great answer, but I'll tell you what we do know. We know that the bacteria, the microbiome, the bacteria that line the gut are different in people with Parkinson's disease from those without the disease.
Ken: Now, I tend to think, does that come before or after the disease. Is that the question?
Ray: I tend to think that the differences are a consequence of the exposure to these toxicants as opposed to a cause in, in and of it itself. So we know that pesticides, for example, change the microbiome. So that would be my inclination, but I could be wrong.
And there are people who are far better versed on the topic than I am, that these changes that we see in the gut microbiome are the consequence of exposure to these toxicants. That said, they have done experiments in which they take the microbiome of humans and transferred it into mice who were genetically predisposed to the disease, but didn't have it.
And they developed the disease. So that's a big vote in favor of, you know, that the gut microbiome might be contributing to it. The challenge is that the relevant toxin exposures might have happened decades before, so they might have happened when you were a child, in some cases might have been found in utero.
We talked about Brian Grant, the former NBA basketball player who developed Parkinson's at age 36. He was at Camp Lejeune likely drinking TCE, trichloroethylene contaminated water when he was three years old. There the exposure might happen early. Now, all that said, I don't think all is lost. I don't think it's a fair accomplice that you develop it.
So the analogy I like to use is for smoking. You smoke cigarettes in your teens, 20s, and 30s, and you develop lung cancer in your 50s and 60s. But just because you smoked in your teens and 20s doesn't mean you're going to develop the disease. In fact, within, I think, hours after you smoked your last cigarette, your heart rate starts to come down.
Within months of stopping smoking your last cigarette, your shortness of breath decreases. Within years of stopping smoking cigarettes, your risk of heart disease goes down. And within decades of stopping smoking, your risk of lung cancer is halved or even more. Even if you've had these exposures, reducing your future, your present and future exposure could be even critically important for individuals with early exposure.
Ken: So it's just fascinating. And, and it makes me you know, sort of leap to the question. And I know you, you and I have talked about this. We're in a debate now with the EPA to try and get them to regulate, ideally ban, Paraquat. It's banned in many countries. This is a, you know, has been identified as a potent risk for triggering Parkinson's.
And so what's your theory? I don't think I've asked it this way before. Why do you think these federal agencies are so closed off, it seems, to be the same science that you just described in the open scientific literature, independent scientists not being paid by, to, you know, to criticize Paraquat, not being paid to defend Paraquat, just being, you know, in the business of academic research to try and understand it.
What do you think is going on that explains why the EPA, at least so far now, they, they haven't made a final decision. We're pushing on them to, to make a, a better decision. Why are they not paying more attention to this independent science and relying instead on industry science that, as you noted, has changed because the initial industry studies by the manufacturer, which they conducted and didn't disclose pretty damning evidence that their chemical paraquat is, is linked to the conditions in, in animals that are lab animals, very similar to Parkinson's in people.
Why isn't the federal establishment coming around to the…
Ray: That's a great question. I'll let the EPA answer that question from the EPA's perspective. But just a little background on Paraquat and then potential explanations. So Paraquat is considered the most toxic weed killer ever created, or one of them.
Created in the 1950s, it kills the weeds that Roundup doesn't. It's so toxic it's been used to commit homicide and suicide. It's associated with 150 percent increased risk of Parkinson's in humans. It reproduces the clinical, the symptoms and the pathological features of disease in multiple laboratory animal studies conducted by investigators across the world.
Over 50 countries, including China, have banned it, but the United States has not. So why hasn't the United States not done it? I think there's two things. One, there's been a lot of ignorance that's been fabricated, produced by the chemical industry, and this is what Kerry Gilliam's reporting done; deceit and denial merchants of doubt.
There's even a word for it. My friend, an English professor here in Rochester, introduced me to this word. He said, “Ray, this is agnotology.” And I'm like, “Amit, what is agnotology?” And he goes, “well, Ray, science is the production of knowledge. Agnotology is the deliberate production of ignorance.” So they have engaged in keeping us ignorant and by us, I mean, not just academics and even my colleagues, they were concerned that people like me might reach the conclusion that Paraquat was a quote ‘causal factor in Parkinson's disease.’
They kept the regulators, they kept the policy makers, they kept politicians. They kept the public, in the dark, and they, they're winning. This isn't the first time this has happened. It happened with tobacco and lung cancer when the tobacco executives went and swore to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth in the 1990s in Congress and did exactly the opposite and continued to hide it and continue to say, we need more evidence.
It's not been proven. It's not, it's not certain. You know, I was taught when I went to medical school, one of the first medical schools in the country, that it was almost impossible to get someone in with pain to get addicted to opioids. And, you know, that's not true, and we see it with social media companies who were, again, being called to run a Congress and, again, are concealing the risks of it as reported in the wall street journal.
So we should say, hey, if this is happening to Paraquat and Parkinson's disease, so what other chemicals is this happening with respect to Parkinson's disease, and to whether chemicals is this applying to brain diseases and medical conditions more generally? And then I think the second half of the answer is that politicians, by their nature, are reactive.
They respond to the voices of their constituents and the Parkinson's community and, quite frankly, academic scientists. Unlike EWG have not made their voices heard, and if 1. 2 million Americans make their voices heard now or on election day and say, you know, we want to ban these chemicals that are leading to Parkinson's, these and adults leading to intellectual disabilities.
Numerous studies have linked pesticides to intellectual disabilities and loss of IQ points among children. This is leading to numerous studies that have found that pesticides and just the mere playing of soccer is associated with an increased risk. I think between head trauma and exposure to pesticides, air pollution is strongly linked to Alzheimer's disease.
If we as a community, if we as a society say in, you know, 3 weeks, whatever it is, that we want clean water, we want clean food, and we want clean air, and we want to live lives free of these terrible diseases, then politicians will respond. And that's really the challenge to all you people listening is what you and the Environmental Working Group have been doing for decades. It's just time that the rest of us caught up.
Ken: We're certainly going to keep up the drumbeat, because we do want people to wake up. How do you think about the challenge of getting physicians to speak out as you have done? You're unusual in that regard. I have many, many champions in the, in fact, they've been on the show, a number of them like Phil Landergan, uh, like Philippe Grandjean.
Ray: Phil Land's paper to me, right on the top of my reading pile, is Phil Land's paper.
Ken: Yeah. I, I mean, you know, to step into the public square as it were and dust it up with these powerful industries, try and try and convince regulators to look at evidence that the industry is diminishing or criticizing.
What made you step out into the public square and do that, Ray? And what would you, what would you say to, obviously it's, it's up to them, but what, what, what breadcrumbs would you drop to get your fellow Academicians and medical practitioners, you see patients, right? What would you say to them in this area to move forward or get them interested in stepping up?
Ray: There's a great book called ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ written by Thomas Kuhn in 1966. So Thomas Kuhn was a physicist who became more interested in the science of the history of science instead of physics itself. Harvard denies him tenure, he goes to UC Berkeley, out your way, and he writes the most influential book in the history of science, at least in the 20th century, likely, maybe Rachel Carson would, wins, but, in which he introduced this term of paradigm, and the idea of this paradigm shift as derived from Thomas Kuhn's work.
And he said scientists like to solve puzzles, And by definition, puzzles have answers in order to have answers. You need to have really cool tools, good tools to assess it. Medicine in 2024 lives in the age of genetics because we have extraordinary tools because it led us to identify the underlying genetic causes of diseases.
And so we go around looking for the genetic causes of diseases, but almost by definition, rare diseases can have common genetic causes, but common diseases can only have rare genetic causes. You couldn't have most people with congestive heart failure, most people with breast cancer, most people with lung cancer being due to genetic causes, because we would have gotten rid of that over the two to three hundred thousand years.
So, I think, one, we're stuck in medicine in a paradigm that is wrong for looking at really common, uh, diseases. And you can see that, you know, the number of publications on the genetics of Parkinson's disease, for example, is six times as much as the environment, even though Dr. Tanner told us 25 years ago from twin studies that Parkinson's disease is primarily due to environmental causes.
The second is that we're being duped. Lots of my colleagues are being duped and we don't even know we're being duped. I was duped when I was a medical student being taught about opioids. We've been duped about lung, smoking and lung cancer. We've been duped about asbestos. We've been duped around lead paint.
[00:26:12] Ken: You know, there's a reason that there's a little boy that advertises lead paint.
[00:26:14] Ray: You know, because companies knew about the risks and, and according to, I think, deceit and denial, this thing. So we've been duped and we don't even know what the causes are. And then third, I think American medicine has some wonderful traits to it.
We're really good at coming up with treatments for disease, but we, too often, reactionarily go from disease to treatment without thinking about disease to cause. And if you don't think about disease, cause disease, cause disease, cause all you're going to do is keep treating disease, it's like being a mechanic and fixing everyone's flat tire.
And until someone says, ‘well, why are people coming in with flat tires? Where are the potholes on the road that need to be filled?’ And right now we are really good mechanics, but we're really not doing a great job in terms of finding the origin. So those are 3 big reasons, and I'll give you a fourth.
You know, I'm not an epidemiologist. I didn't go into this, you know, thing. I'm going to go find the root causes. Only the gift of a sabbatical and the great work of Dr. Tanner led me down this road. And once you see the truth, it's really hard to unsee it. But the chemical companies come after you. I've had people knock on my door and have my teenage son answer the door to have a subpoena, issue me a subpoena.
Mindful that I am not a party to any of these lawsuits. I'm not an expert for any of the law firms. In fact, I've turned them down on multiple occasions, and this has happened to other colleagues of mine. And so these companies and these so-called, you know, prestigious law firms are getting away with intimidation and they love, love, love to attack women.
They mentioned my colleague, Dr. Debbie Koroslekta, you know, Rachel Carson, you know, was vilified to do it and they love to attack people from underrepresented groups. I think our profession is really being duped. We're asleep on this, and we're asleep at a really, really, really, really high cost.
You know, I take it like you, I said that brain diseases are the world's leading source of disability and Parkinson's is the world's fastest growing brain disease. I said, well, who's responsible for figuring this out? And I, you get to know an uncomfortable answer, I think it's me and my colleagues, right?
It's, you know, my colleagues handled COVID 19. My colleagues have done an amazing job with HIV after a slow start. Why aren't my colleagues in neurology, why aren't we taking greater ownership and responsibility for this? Because some people want to be cured of Parkinson's, but what people really want is not to get the disease in the first place.
And we need to be thinking about this for Parkinson's, we need to be thinking about this for Alzheimer's disease, you know, 1 in 8 women get breast cancer, 1 in 8 men get prostate cancer, there are reasons people get diseases, these are not accidents, these are not natural consequences of aging, you don't put a mouse in the lab and they spontaneously develop Parkinson's disease as they age, they don't develop Alzheimer's disease as they age.
You need to either manipulate their genes or expose them to toxins for them to get these diseases
Ken: Well, we do know that HIV and COVID didn't have professional lobbyists and lawyers working on their behalf, so there's one indication there, Ray. Thanks so much for, for going over that. I think the, the paradigm shift and I'd love to hear if you, if you think this is right, but I think the paradigm shift at this point, maybe that the leadership here is not in the policy realm, but with the medical community and, and scientists and, and, and everyday consumers, everyday individuals.
And that, that shift is, maybe, maybe it makes most sense to just start avoiding these exposures, if you can. We can't wait for the government to take action, much as we press forward to get the government to do the right thing. We can't expect the companies to come forward and tell us what they knew and when they knew it, unless they're sued.
And that information comes out in discovery in the course of litigation. So we're really, we're really seeing, I think, a shift where scientists around the world are saying, look, our, our approach to this is flawed. We have, I, I'm not a big fan of the phrase precautionary principle because I think it's the other side.
The industry has demonized it very effectively, but there is a case to be made. It seems to me, for thoughtful avoidance of exposure, that it might be considered precautionary, but to me, it's, it's also a form of common sense, which I think precaution is, and in this case, if you can avoid some of these exposures, it makes sense to do so.
Ray: Yeah, so I think there are lots of things we can do as individuals. I think there are things we can do as communities, and I think there are things we can do as societies to prevent us from getting these brain diseases. So individuals can buy organic, can even wash, you know, they can follow the Dirty Dozen.
They can wash all their fruits and vegetables with water and a pesticide. Wash, they can avoid head trauma. They can put a carbon filter on their water. They can avoid living near contaminated sites. These trichloroethylene contaminated sites or test their indoor air much like they test for radon.
You can roll up your windows when you're going through traffic. You can recirculate the air. You can do all of these things, and if you're really knowledgeable and you have means, like you and me, we can do a lot of these things, so much so that I'm pretty confident I'm not going to get Parkinson's disease, God willing, because I think I'm taking all the actions and, you know, my environment in the past is such that I got fortunate.
I didn't grow up on a farm or drinking well water. We're lucky. But in the end, our environment isn't a reflection of individual decisions, it's a reflection of societal decisions. In China, they know about the toxic affairs of air pollution, and the high end schools are now building domes over their soccer fields so that their kids can play soccer outside.
That is not a sustainable path. So what are things that we can do in our communities? I think one of the great things we can do in our communities, we've talked about this before, is get rid of pesticides in our schools. I mean, there is no reason that we need to have pesticides on the playgrounds. Johnny and Susie and Joe and Mary would just be happy playing on a field that's got some weeds on it as opposed to one that doesn't have weeds on it.
There's no reason playgrounds need to have these chemicals on it. We know that certain pesticides are associated with loss of IQ points. Why are we exposing our children to chemicals that are known to be nerve toxins? I mean, that's the way they work. If we get rid of these chemicals, not only do we prevent many diseases, but we might postpone them so much that we never actually go on to develop these diseases, especially neurodegenerative diseases in the first place.
So I think we can get rid of pesticides in our schools and, you know, schools are basically under local control and it's really, really, really hard for a principal to say no to a hundred first grade parents who say, I don't want our kids getting exposed to pesticides, and this has happened in California.
They had the Healthy Starts program, I think, in California, that essentially bans pesticides, and if they do use pesticides, they have to send a letter to the parents indicating what pesticides that they are using on school grounds. If they can do that in California, why can't we do this in our own community?
Why can't we do this across the nation? And then finally, we need societal decisions and we need to make our voices heard. The people who change diseases are generally not scientists, you know, Jonas Salk only created his polio vaccine because 16 years earlier, a bunch of ordinary Americans got tired of shutting down churches, schools and community centers every summer and formed a march of dimes and raised the money necessary for Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin to develop vaccines for polio in 1954, not all that long ago. And today we live in a world that's virtually devoid of polio.
It was HIV activists like the late Larry Kramer And activists like ACT UP in New York City and similar ones in San Francisco who changed the paradigm of HIV when there was no federal funding. There was, you know, rampant discrimination.
There was rampant blaming of victims for their own diseases. And they changed the course of it and 1987 was ACT UP by 1995. Eight years later, we had protease inhibitors. Which allowed people like Magic Johnson to live normal lives with a near normal life expectancy and then, you know, mothers against drunk driving changed the course of drinking and driving, which is now socially unacceptable.
And because of Candace Lightner and women like her, 10,000 fewer children and adults die in car accidents every year. 10, 000 fewer families, schools, communities are not torn apart. Because of the work of Candace Leitner and communities, why aren't we doing the same thing for intellectual disabilities? Why are 1 in 36 children getting autism?
It can't be just that we're getting better diagnosis. That must be going up. Why are we having children with lower IQs than we've had in the past? Why is their brain cancer increasing? Why is ALS increasing? Why is Parkinson's disease increasing? Why are 6 million Americans having Alzheimer's disease?
Why are 1, 000 Americans being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease today? And if you think about it, if you look back, just on a history lesson, Parkinson's disease, the first major description of Parkinson's disease was not till 1817. The first major description of ALS was not till 1869. The first major description of Alzheimer's disease was not till 1906.
The first major description of something called progressive supranuclear palsy affecting Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton's not till 1966. The first description of dementia with Lewy body disorders which affected the late Robin Williams was not until 1976. These are all new diseases, these are all reflections, I think, largely of our environment.
If we change our environment, if we clean up our food, water, and air, we get rid of the vast majority of individuals affected, the vast majority of cases of these conditions.
Ken: I could not have said it better. That's exactly the hymnal that we preach from at EWG. So what's next in this, in the work you're doing now, Ray?
I know there's an organization or a group you're putting together that I'm advising as best I can tell. Are you ready to say something about that or is it premature?
Ray: What we need is a center for the brain and the environment that is focused on identifying and eliminating the environmental causes of brain diseases, everything from autism to Alzheimer's disease. We are a wealthy nation. Life expectancy today in the United States is lower than when I was in medical school, and we're spending 50 percent more on health care today than when I was in medical school. Clearly, the status quo is not working. We need to change the paradigm.
We need to come up with a new way of approaching diseases, one that's focused not on trying to cure preventable diseases, but on preventing preventable diseases. And with your help and you know, your listeners help if they want to reach me, they can do so at infoatending pd.org. We can create a center focused on the brain, the environment that seeks to recreate a world without Parkinson's disease, without ALS, without Alzheimer's disease, or the vast majority of these diseases, and we can do that through investigation, through innovation, and through education.
You know, I'm a neurologist, and what greater gift could a neurologist give to future generations than a world where the disease that he's investigating and caring for doesn't exist? And I think that's entirely possible. And I think it's actually our responsibility to do so. And we need people like Ken Cook and your listeners to make their voices heard.
So we've changed the course of disease, not just for our generation, but for all generations to come.
Ken: Well, I'm all about that new project. We'll put a note below for people to follow up and support that work. Ray Dorsey, you're an inspiration. You're one of the vanguard young leaders in public health concerned about the environment.
I am thrilled to be in the foxhole with you, buddy, and let's see what happens after EPA makes a final decision on Paraquat. We might have to have you back on.
Ray: And let's change it. I mean, let's change the paradigm for a lot of these things. If we get rid of these bad chemicals, we can prevent cancer. The world is, you know, great possibilities can be had.
If people can't afford a copy of our book, we're happy to send them one. They can just email me at infoatendingpd.org. Just give me your mailing address. We'll send you a free copy. And if people have ideas or thoughts or experiences related to Parkinson's or other brain diseases, we're all ears… infoatending pd.org.
Ken: Thank you for your great work, and I, you know, needless to say, there are actual human beings that are your patients or you've influenced with your work, whose brain is in a slightly better environment for your work, and we want to make it dramatically better for, for all of us.
Ray: Thanks very much, Ken.
Ken: Dr. Ray Dorsey. Thank you for joining us on the show today. And I also want to thank all of you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links, for a deeper dive into today's topic, make sure to follow our show on Instagram at Ken Cook's podcast (@kencookspodcast).
And if you're interested in learning more about EWG, head on over to EWG.org or check out EWG's Instagram account, at Environmental Working Group (@environmentalworkinggroup).
Now, if you like this episode, send it to a friend who you think might like it too. Environmentalism is all about meeting people where they're at, and if you're listening to this, you probably know someone who might be interested in today's episode, They just don't know it yet. My ask is that you send it to that person. Or to as many people as you see fit.
Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music. Thank you. Moby is by Moby, and thanks again for listening.
