Why Parkinson’s Has Become an Epidemic — and How to Protect Yourself | Dr. Ray Dorsey

**Jesse Chappus** (0:00)
Coming up on today's show.

**Ray Dorsey** (0:02)
This problem is all around us, but almost no one's paying attention to it, and we're all paying a really, really high cost for this in terms of cancer and likely Parkinson's disease. Only about 13 percent of people with Parkinson's disease carry a genetic risk factor for the disease. That means 87 percent of Americans with Parkinson's have no known genetic cause or genetic risk factor for disease. The principal causes of many of these brain diseases are not inside of us, they're in our environment. When I was in medical school, my wife said we should buy organic, and I pooh-poohed all the ideas. And I used to think that the food we ate, the water we drank, and the air we breathed was safe. I no longer think that. Superfund sites came into public awareness in the 1970s. There's about 1200 of these sites throughout the country. There's 15 of them on a 7-mile stretch of the 101 freeway in Silicon Valley. Over half these sites contain way with trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene. 20 million Americans live within a mile at one of these sites. 70 million, I think, live within three miles. And in addition to these superfund sites, there are thousands, thousands of other contaminated sites. This information should be democratized. It should be freely accessible to anyone so we can slow the rate of progression of the disease for those who already have it and make sure that their children and grandchildren never get the disease themselves. Let our generation be the generation that brings the bell to the fall of Parkinson's disease.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:18)
What is Parkinson's disease? And why do people need to be aware?

**Ray Dorsey** (1:23)
Jesse, great to be with you. Parkinson's is one of the world's fastest growing brain diseases.
Classically, it's having two of the following four symptoms.
First is a tremor, usually at rest, usually in one hand, more in the other. The second is slowness and movement. The third is stiffness or rigidity, and the fourth is difficulties with walking or balance. If you have two of those four, we say that you have Parkinsonism. The most common cause of Parkinsonism is Parkinson disease. Dr. Parkinson described it in 1817 He described six people with the disease. Two hundred years later, six million people around the world had the disease. What we've talked about in the past, we'll hopefully talk about today, is how did we go from a disease that was rare, not describe the medical literature affecting six people on the streets of London to a disease that's now, you encounter on the streets, I'll see six people on the streets of New York walking home with the disease.

**Jesse Chappus** (2:25)
Any optimism about where the direction is going here?

**Ray Dorsey** (2:28)
We're going to bring about the fall of Parkinson's disease, because people like you are helping to get the word out. We're going to bring about the fall of Parkinson's, because Parkinson's is largely man-made. Chemicals in our food, water, and air are fueling the rise of these disease.
One of these chemicals is a pesticide called Paraquat. Yesterday, Vermont became the first state in the Union to, its legislature passed a ban on this weed killer that's associated with a 150% increased risk of Parkinson's among farmers, and associated with a doubling of the risk for people who simply live or work near where it's sprayed on fields of corn, cotton, soybeans, and vineyards around the country.
Vermont's the first state, hopefully it's governor will sign it, will be the first state to ban it. At 13 states in all red and blue, including states like Utah and Missouri have proposed bans on it. If we get rid of the underlying chemicals that are fueling the rise of Parkinson's disease, we create a world that's largely free of this terrible disease.

**Jesse Chappus** (3:34)
If you had to guess at this point, what kind of timeline are we hoping for?

**Ray Dorsey** (3:39)
I don't think we need to guess.
Michael and I wrote a book called The Parkinson's Plan, came out last August. In it, we call for three goals by 2035, 0, 10, 100 The zero goal is that the rise of Parkinson's disease adjusted for age is percent by 2035 A percent rise in the incidence of Parkinson's disease adjusted for age by 2035 and do the same thing for the rest of the world. So that when you have me on 10 years from now, we start talking about the fall of Parkinson's disease. Now, am I crazy? Quite possibly, but there's evidence. So countries in Western Europe have long since got rid of the weed killer paraquat.