Dr. Ray Dorsey
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
So I think the three environmental toxicants that are principally responsible for the rise in Parkinson's disease are certain pesticides, the poster child for them being a pesticide called Paraquat, widely used as a weed killer. The second are commonly used dry cleaning chemicals, including this one called trichloroethylene.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And the third is one familiar to Southern Californians, and that's air pollution.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
So trichloroethylene, or TCE, is a really, really simple molecule. So your listeners all know that water is H2O, which means it just has three atoms, two hydrogens, and one oxygen. Trichloroethylene is very simple. It's got six atoms. It's got two carbon atoms in black, one hydrogen atom in white, and three chlorine atoms in green, hence its name, trichloroethylene.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
This chemical was initially developed in 1864, so I think at the time of President Abraham Lincoln was the president, and it's been used since the 1920s, so since shortly after World War II. And it's been used in everything. It's been used to decaffeinate coffee. It was found in Senko or other decaffeinated coffees in the 1970s.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
It's been used to degrease metal, and it's been used to dry clean clothes. It's found in carpet cleaners. It's found in gun cleaners. It's found in typewriter correction fluid. It's found in a wide variety of consumer goods. And this chemical is known to cause cancer. There's no question about that. The EPA says it's carcinogenic by all routes of exposure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
The World Health Organization says that it causes cancer. And yesterday, the EPA long-lasted proposed a ban on nearly all uses of trichloroethylene in the United States. And this ban would go in effect in a year. And I think by taking that action, they are preventing generations of individuals from developing cancer in the future.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And I think they're also likely preventing generations of individuals from developing Parkinson's disease in the future. However, the Problem is not just the use of trichloroethylene, which in the 1970s, it's estimated that 10 million Americans worked with this in semiconductor industry, in mechanics, in printers and painters and taxidermists and varnish workers all worked with it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
But there are numerous thousands of contaminated sites, including contaminated sites in Newport Beach, California, where I went to high school and not too far from where you're sitting right now in Southern California. and in sites in Woburn, Massachusetts, north of Massachusetts, north of Boston.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
There are dozens of dry, at least a dozen dry cleaning sites in Rochester, New York, that are contaminated with this chemical and a closely related chemical. So these sites are all around us. But the good news is EPA has banned future uses of it. This proposed ban would go in effect in a year, is my understanding.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
But we still have more work to do to contain, remediate, and clean up these contaminated sites throughout the country.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Yeah, so if you think about the brain, it's basically an energy-guzzling organ. The brain's only about 3% of our body's weight, but it consumes 20% of our blood's glucose or energy supplies. And within the brain, there are many different kinds of cells. And the cell that consumes the most energy are the nerve cells, also called neurons. And many of these neurons are chock full of mitochondria.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And certain cells in the brain that are responsible for Parkinson's disease and produce a chemical called dopamine are basically just big garbage bags that are filled with jelly beans. And those jelly beans are mitochondria. And if you think about it, these pesticides, especially paraquat, trichloroethylene, and air pollution are all known to damage mitochondria.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And they actually kind of bypass our normal protective mechanisms that we have. We have the gut, we have the blood brain barrier, but all of these guys are inhaled. And so this could be a way of exploiting the front door to our brain that these environmental toxins, all of which we know damage the energy producing parts of cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And we know that the cells that are lost in Parkinson's disease have huge energy demands. and that these things are inhaled. So I think you can weave together a story by which these toxicants are causing many people to have, likely many people to have Parkinson's disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
You're right, I wasn't, or maybe I must have missed it, because I don't think I ever learned anything. I don't think I even heard about trichloroethylene when I was in medical school.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
The real gift is I had a sabbatical about five or six years ago, and I spent a lot of time reading the work of my colleague, a woman, Dr. Caroline Tanner, who's a professor of neurology and an epidemiologist at University of California, San Francisco. And she and her colleagues had done a study looking at TCE 10 years ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And finding that the rates of rates of Parkinson's among twins who had either worked with it or had hobby exposure to TCE were increased rates of Parkinson's by 500 percent.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And then research from animal from other researchers, Don Gash in Kentucky and others have showed that when you feed TCE to laboratory mice or rats, they develop the clinical and pathological features of Parkinson's and they lose those dopamine molecules. producing nerve cells in the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And then I read a lot more of Dr. Tanner's work showing that in the late 1990s, that twin studies suggested that environmental causes were the predominant explanation for people who develop Parkinson's disease. She showed that exposure to Paraquat 10 years ago among farmers was associated with 150% increased risk of developing Parkinson's disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Dr. Jeff Bronstein and Dr. Pieta Ritz at UCLA, not too far from where you're sitting, did research showing that air pollution and well water drinking were associated with Parkinson's disease. So I had the gift of a sabbatical in which I read a lot of literature. And the more I read, you know, a lot of time you go down rabbit holes. But this time you kept going and you kept going and kept going.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And I'm not even I don't think I'm even close to finding anything. the true extent of the effect of these environmental toxicants on Parkinson's disease and other brain diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, ALS, intellectual disabilities, brain cancer, and many others.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Yeah, so let's do indoor air first, because that's really people probably less familiar with. But many people know that radon can evaporate from the soil and enter people's basements, for example, and it increases the risk of lung cancer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
It turns out other chemicals, including trichloroethylene and a very closely related chemical called perchloroethylene, which just has one more chlorine atom on it and has the prefix per, which means for. These chemicals can contaminate groundwater, which is about 15 feet or 15 to 50 feet below our surface and form underground rivers.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And these underground rivers that are contaminated with these chemicals, these chemicals are readily volatile. They evaporate and they can evaporate into people's homes, schools and workplaces undetected. And then people can be breathing in these chemicals and never know about it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
and be increasing their risk for developing cancer and likely increasing their risk for developing Parkinson's disease. In Newport Beach, California, less than a half mile from where I went to high school in Cronenmar High School, there's a former aerospace facility that's been contaminated with trichloroethylene and a closely related chemical called perchloroethylene.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
It's been rezoned and made into residential homes. So there are multimillion dollar homes in Newport Beach, California, about three miles from the Pacific Ocean or from Pacific Coast Highway, that are sitting on top of a plume of trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
That trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene has been documented to be evaporating into the homes above this plume, and they have found trichloroethylene or perchloroethylene in people's master bedrooms, in their living rooms, and in their kids' playrooms.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
There are thousands. There are not 150 of these contaminated sites. There are thousands. Half of the Superfund sites in the United States are contaminated with this chemical. I told you there are at least 12 dry cleaning sites just in Rochester, New York. alone. There are thousands of these sites. I visited them in New York. I visited them in Indiana. I visited them in West Virginia.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
I visited them in Kentucky. I visited them in Arizona. I visited them in California. I visited them in North Carolina. I don't think there's a state in the country that doesn't have these contaminated sites. It's estimated that up to 30% of groundwater in the United States is contaminated with these chemicals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And there is a reason why people are getting cancer, and there's a reason why people are getting Parkinson's disease. And I think one of the major reasons for both of those is trichloroethylene. There was a study done in Italy, so this is not just the United States, that found trichloroethylene in the blood and urine of three quarters of the men in Italy. These chemicals are everywhere.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Dry cleaning is still using, lots of dry cleaners are still using perchloroethylene. That releases gas. When you take your dry cleaning into your car, you are now breathing in perchloroethylene. These chemicals dissolve in your fat. Your brain is a fatty substance. You bring your daughter into a dry cleaner with a chocolate ice cream cone,
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
When you leave that dry cleaner, if they're dry cleaning on site, your daughter's now eating perchloroethylene.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
So I don't know. I focus on Parkinson's disease. So I look at the world from a narrow view. And I think there are other indoor air contaminants that could be. Some of those indoor cams can be coming from outside, you know, just from the ambient air when we're outside. And that has filled with particulate matter. And that particulate matter can be carrying toxic metals with it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
We also know that people in agricultural areas or even people who work on sports fields or play on sports fields or golf courses that are sprayed with pesticides, you know, they're walking in them when they bring their shoes into the house. They can be bringing these chemicals into their homes and then pollute their indoor air that way.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
You know, I recommend increasingly recommend such people who live in areas of high pollution, such as Southern California, think about air filters or air purifiers so they can decrease their exposure to these chemicals.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Yeah. If you want to live a short and unhealthy life, breathe polluted air. Um, and so there are lots of ways that people get air pollution, you know, Southern California, you know, people remember that fifties and sixties, uh, you
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
The air pollution was so bad in Los Angeles, people wore masks, not because of COVID 1950, but because of air pollution and because of the burning effects of air pollution. The governor of California in the 1960s said we should eliminate all unnecessary driving in Southern California.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
The governor of California in the 1960s said we should eliminate all unnecessary driving in Southern California because of the toxic effects of air pollution. That governor was Ronald Reagan. So there are tons of reasons to do so. Air pollution as a whole costs every human being in the world on average three years of life expectancy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
If we didn't have air pollution, industrial air pollution in the world, all of us in general would be living three years of life longer. And so air pollution is strongly linked to heart disease, strongly linked to stroke, strongly linked to a wide range of lung diseases, and increasingly has been linked to brain diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And so what is air pollution? So when you're looking out in the smog, you can see smog, right? You know, in Southern California, it's visible. And what you're seeing is particulate matter, which is just little pieces of dirt and soot, many of them about 1 30th the width of your hair.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Hitchhiking on these pieces of dirt and soot are toxic metals, lead from leaded gasoline before it was banned, iron from brake pads, platinum from catalytic converters. Most of that particulate matter we either catch in our hairs and our snows and in our nose and sneeze them out or we cough them out. But some are so small they're called
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
small particulate matter or ultra-fine particulate matter, they can actually bypass our normal protective mechanisms, enter the nerve responsible for smell, which is hanging down from the base of our brain, and make its way back to the smell centers of the brain. A really, really, really smart and creative way
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
scientist named Dr. Lillian Calderon Garci Duenas, who's now at the University of Montana, was from Mexico. And as you might recall, Mexico City had the worst air quality in the world in the early 1990s. And she wanted to know what the effects of this was on kids. And so she looked at the brains of
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
young children and young adults who died prematurely from car accidents and gun violence in Mexico City. And she looked at 203 brains. In 202 of those 203 brains, she found evidence of Alzheimer's pathology. And in over 20% of the brains, she found evidence of Parkinson's pathology. This pathology was found in children as young as 11 months old.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And obviously 11 month old doesn't have Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, but it's quite concerning that the seeds of the future cases of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease might be being placed in our children simply because of where we live and what we're allowing them to breathe.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Yeah, so I'm not a toxicologist. And so I recommend a carbon filter for water. Like, you know, I'm not here to endorse any brands, but Pure and Brita and things like that can help reduce your exposure to chemicals and pesticides in your water. And we talked about air filters, which can reduce your exposure to particulate matter and other chemicals in your indoor air.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And when you're driving, you can roll up your windows and turn your air on circulation and decrease your exposure to particulate matter, especially when you're driving. Testing your home. People have had their home's basements tested for radon. The testing for trichloroethylene is very similar to that for getting your home tested for radon. I've never had my house tested for trichloroethylene.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Fortunately, my house was likely on a cornfield before it was a house.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
Yeah, no. And be clear, but there are lots of like, if I live near a dry cleaner, I would get my home tested. If I live near a site that was in metal fabrication or anything with degreasing metal, I'd get my home tested. If I live near a landfill site. Well, I'd test my water and I would probably test my indoor air. So there are lots of reasons why I would think about testing indoor air.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
And then you can get it tested and if it's found to have high levels of trichloroethylene, it's addressable. You get, I think the cost is like $1,500 to $2,000. You get a radiation system that basically pumps the air underneath your foundation from where the chemical is coming up from the ground and vents it above your house and it goes in the atmosphere and dilutes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More
You know, not perfect solution, but, you know, it's a very practical solution. Lots of people have radon remediation systems in. I think even one of our homes had a radon remediation system put in. And that's a way to address indoor air pollution.