I was able to find the references (including photos of the mentioned forearms) on PubMed and the RIMJ after a quick search. Paraquat is nasty stuff.

- [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33769492/

- [1] http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima... (via https://rimedicalsociety.org/rhode-island-medical-journal/)

- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat

"Paraquat, a heavily regulated weed killer, is banned in more than 70 countries…"

Seventy countries kind of suggested to me that something is up with this chemical.

Why does that sound untrustworthy? Do you have any idea of what the tobacco industry hid about second hand smoke exposure? How is it somehow more plausible this nurse made up her condition than pesticide manufactures being honest about the impacts?

I mean you can click on the source right there, that is literally what happened: http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima.... The description maybe makes it sound a little more extreme than it actually was, but it's the correct terminology and an accurate description of events.

I agree. If merely being splashed by his corrosive urine sloughed off her skin, I think he would not be alive to urinate.

I just finished reading article and honestly, my BS detector is going off the charts.

I’m not saying pesticides are health tonics, but this piece feels like pure litigation PR rather than an actual investigation. It prioritizes storytelling over science and engages in what I can only describe as lying by omission. Here are the main issues I found:

The nurse whose skin peeled off just from touching a patient’s urine? The article frames this to make you think, "Wow, this stuff is so toxic that if a farmer uses it, his body becomes a weapon." I looked into the medical case this is likely based on. That patient didn't just "farm" with Paraquat; he ingested a lethal, concentrated dose (usually a suicide attempt). By leaving out that the patient drank a cup of poison, the author conflates Acute Poisoning (death in days, acid urine) with Chronic Exposure (trace amounts over years). If the farmer in the main story had enough Paraquat in his system to burn a nurse’s skin, he wouldn’t be alive to give an interview about Parkinson’s. He’d be dead from multi-organ failure. Omitting this context is manipulative fear-mongering.

Then there is the math: Parkinson’s affects about 1% of the elderly population. There are 2 million farms in the US. Even if Paraquat was essentially harmless water, you would still have tens of thousands of farmers with Parkinson’s purely by chance. The article ignores this base rate to imply that every diagnosis is a result of the chemical. It treats a probabilistic risk as a deterministic cause.

It also ignores confounders (like the "Rural Cluster" Problem). Farming is a "chemical soup" lifestyle. You have well water (a known PD risk), head trauma risks, and exposure to dozens of other chemicals like Rotenone or Maneb. The article presents a direct line: Paraquat -> PD. But scientifically, isolating one chemical from 30 years of rural living is a nightmare. The article doesn't even attempt to falsify the hypothesis or look at other factors; it just assumes the lawsuit's narrative is the scientific truth.

The article also fails basic science standards. It is storytelling, not science. A real scientific inquiry follows Popperian standards—you make a conjecture and then try to disprove it. This article does the opposite: it acts like a defense attorney. It stacks up emotional anecdotes and selective correlations to confirm its bias and ignores the replication crisis in epidemiology where results often don't stick.

This isn't journalism and it’s not science; it’s advocacy via outrage. It uses the real tragedy of these farmers to push a specific narrative, relying on readers not knowing the difference between drinking poison and spraying crops. If you’ve ever wondered why science doesn’t make more progress, and we have the replication crisis, look no further.