Dr. Beate Ritz

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43 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

Dr. Beate Ritz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · Use of herbicide linked to Parkinson's is on the rise in the US · 20 May 2026 podcast

Yes, I'm a little biased here because I studied paraquat exposure in humans for so long.

But I really do think we recently came out with the definitive study in California of more than 800 patients and as many control subjects where we had really good exposure assessment through the pesticide use report system in California.

And we showed in many ways, with many analyses, that Paraquat exposure at the workplace and homes was related to Parkinson's very strongly.

Well, that would really also depend on what exposure scale you're using.

But, you know, if you're just wanting something on average, it's probably at least a doubling of the risk.

But it depends on the length of exposure and the intensity of exposure, as well as your individual susceptibility or vulnerability to these agents.

Because some humans are actually much more vulnerable to these mechanisms of oxidative stress than others.

Actually, breathing it in through your nose, let's say, is probably extremely dangerous because we know that the cells in the nose have a direct link

to the neurons in the olfactory bulb.

And that is also where actually Parkinson's often starts.

It starts with a loss of smell and probably a protein aggregation that we call alpha-synuclein.

aggregation which is the hallmark of Parkinson's.

It's the proteins that we find in these Lewy bodies that we are seeing in the brain of Parkinson's patients.

So that is really starting in the olfactory bulb

And from there, it could actually then move on to the dopamine neurons in the midbrain.

So the nose is an access organ directly to the environment.

And through the nose, you can get into the brain, you can get toxins into the brain, basically avoiding also what we call the blood-brain barrier, where you have some defense against toxins from the environment.

They can't as easily come from the blood, let's say, into the brain.

Well, I think it's really time that somebody has the courage in the US to do what you just said, which is ban Paraquat.

Paraquat should have been banned 25, 30 years ago when we basically found that we can give rodents Paraquat and see all of the signs and symptoms of Parkinsonism in humans.

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