Widely used chemical strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease
science.org
science.org
https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...
One of the dirty secrets of development is that we really have just poisoned a lot of our environment. Now you can work around that in real estate dev because there are creative ways to interpret disclosure regulations. But Mother Nature doesn't care about such tricks. She has a set of, (in this case chemical), rules and if they're broken, she'll happily punish you without a second thought.
I'm not sure how we solve the issue of toxins in our environment? It gets complex not only because of the competing interests, but also because research like this will continue to come out, and something we didn't think was a problem, will turn out to have been a problem. So you're in a situation where you know a lot. You even learn more everyday. But you don't know what you don't know.
Doing so may be an effective way to catalyze invention and economic activity but ignoring externalities becomes existentially risky as our capacities develop
If we prefer human arbitration to nature's blind and brutal judgment, we had better put toothy disincentives in place
Is it possible that occasionally punishing an honest mistake or absence of forethought may be the price we have to pay to prevent poisoning by diffusion of sociopathy?
It feels wrong, but so does perishing because the species can't deploy technology in the long term interest
It's not even about punishing. If you cause a car or home accident because of a mistake, your insurance rates will go up, and if the damage exceeds your coverage, you'll pay out of pocket. There's nothing punitive about it, you're just responsible because of fault.
That shouldn't feel wrong. It should evoke pity, but not a feeling of wrongness.
For the heirs of the stockholders of these polluting companies we need a special tax to clean up the "accidents" of those companies. These taxes could be limited to the maximum value of the company, or better yet the proportion of the total wealth of the heirs that the company stock represented at the time they sold or dissolved the company. That's still limiting liability, but in the original sense of the term (clawback of sold and wipeout of retained shares).
For the heirs of anyone who made a purposeful decision to pollute despite knowing the harms, then the limited liability should be pierced to allow taxation of the fraction of the total wealth of the heirs that derive from the polluter.
That being said, if you run your own private well, you’re not subject to this.
> The Oakland Unified School district announced the temporary closure of the McClymonds to test for the chemical tricloroethylene (TCE), which was found in groundwater under the campus.
> "This is West Oakland and so there is a history of environmental injustice, of racial injustice that happens in this community. So these are places where there are leaks, there are dumps, there are things like that that are not healthy for our community," said Jumoke Hinton Hodge, Oakland Board of Education District 3 Director.
> McClymonds has recently seen a handful of students and former students develop cancer, including the high-profile cases Darryl Aikens, a McClymonds football player who died of leukemia a month after graduating in 2017, as well as 2018 graduate Ramone Sanders, who died of cancer last fall. Sanders was playing football at Laney College when he broke his leg and it was discovered he had bone cancer that spread to his lungs.
Honestly I am quite disgusted at this take. How many readers want to bet this take is informed by more than a little implicit racial bias, these being Black men at a primarily Black high school in a primarily Black neighborhood?
See this doc, including the section "Some important points to consider".
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/understanding-...
You can be disgusted all you want but I think you're making an error.
But note there was more than TCE at those superfund sites.
The vast majority of the Bay Area population gets its water either from the Hetch Hetchy (SF, South Bay, Peninsula) or the Mokelumne River watershed (East Bay). This is surface water that is mostly clear of VOCs which is why nothing shows up on the map for the Bay Area that you shared.
For a more accurate representation of the state of the groundwater in the Bay Area, see this map of chemical plumes (hint they're everywhere) [2].
[1] https://www.epa.gov/vaporintrusion/what-vapor-intrusion
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20141120123953/http://www.nbcbay...
Growing up I knew a lot of kids that were affected by it, they were called "fairchildren" or a "fairchild".
I was born elsewhere and my family moved to the area, the kids that were born there weren't so lucky.
https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL60019...
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Is...
A few years back I found an internet search for “United States TCE” would turn up articles about Camp Jejune. A search for “China TCE” would turn up a picture of a truck with a bunch of barrels and an offer to buy it on Alibaba.
Untrue.
Wiki isn't great, but here is what I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene
Fetal toxicity and concerns for carcinogenic potential of TCE led to its abandonment in developed countries by the 1980s.
The use of trichloroethylene in the food and pharmaceutical industries has been banned in much of the world since the 1970s due to concerns about its toxicity.
The saddest one I found: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
Historically, TCE was used as a surgical anesthetic and inhaled analgesic. The Food and Drug Administration banned such use in the United States in 1977.
I was calling out the lies, not doing other people's research for them.
People ought to understand that this stuff stays in the industrial pipeline for years (I'm avoiding the tangent that was brought to mind by another poster's mention of carbon tetrachloride...) and we are still in the process of simply classifying it according to its dangerousness. It's not close to being gone yet.
(it's not even banned in the EU yet, and I just assume that will happen well before it's banned here)
I don't understand why you would write that, particularly after having read my comments and throwaway2037's comment on this thread. "This is a chemical that is currently produced in various forms by companies and used by people in 2023" and "it was phased out in the 1970s" would seem to be mutually contradictory facts. There's no "nuance" involved. I get that we're not giving you essay-length analysis here, but... I give up.
edit: the LMGTFY for "who makes trichloroethylene": https://www.thomasnet.com/products/trichloroethylene-8767360...
For example: Generally people don't make their own clothes, is a true statement even though there's still plenty of people who make their own clothes.
it's in picrin [1], which is a spot cleaning solvent. You can buy that today.
A paper from 2020 indicates that it is still used and not banned [2]
[1] https://www.a-1products.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Picri...
Trichloroethylene has been a long-standing chemical utilized in dry cleaning and spot removal processes, but its safety towards dry cleaners' health has been questioned in recent years. In 2012, California enacted a ban on using TCE or TCE-based products for dry cleaning.Might even be unknowingly imported into other countries
This article is from 2000, before the housing development began. People knew TCE was there but the housing development happened anyway
https://extras.denverpost.com/news/news1126.htm
It’s also at Stapleton, another huge residential area, and previously Denver’s primary airport:
“At the former Stapleton Airport, which is also being redeveloped, the TCE is 35 to 40 feet deep, according to Tom Gleason, spokesman for Forest City Stapleton Inc., the private developer overseeing the building.
He said it won't have any effect on the redevelopment, which will include homes and commercial areas.”
Indeed, it didn’t. The redevelopment happened anyway. And now I’d guess it’s in the air, water, and of course the soil.
There's also the Rocky Flats nuclear site, the chemical plant in Lakewood, and also the wildlife "refuge" north of the city.
Seems somewhat ironic given Colorado's reputation for pristine natural beauty.
i also wonder how much of the environmental focus that denver-boulder is known for is something of a reaction to that exploitation.
>> About 90% of Parkinson’s cases can’t be explained by genetics, but there have been hints that exposure to TCE may trigger it. The new study, led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), represents by far the strongest environmental link between TCE and the disease. Until now, the entire epidemiological literature included fewer than 20 people who developed Parkinson’s after TCE exposure.
That is to say, the relation between TCE and Parkinsons had, until now, no strong evidence to support it. It seems (not sure, not my field) that now it does.
Also note, from the article:
>> “Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
They only studied TWO military bases and compared the rate of Parkinson's. There could be any number of environmental differences between these two locations besides the TCE levels in the water.
The other issue is that there is an active class action lawsuit about this exact military base. When a study is published that directly reinforces the claims of one side of an active lawsuit, you always need to be cautious about taking it at face value. There could be some conflict of interest or even just sympathy from the scientists that introduces bias in their research methodology.
> TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
the groundwater route still seems pretty troubling
If it's so cheap, and available in such large quantities, it's definitely getting used today, in massive quantities, in some parts of the world.
~20 000 tonnes today vs. 250 000 tonnes in 1970.
The things we did with (now known) hazardous chemicals in the 20th century are really disturbing. My question is are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
My guess is no, certainly not with every product imported from other countries. We joke about sketchy smelling products from China, and you occasionally hear about imports being recalled or blocked. How much of it are we missing, both known and unknown chemicals?
On the other hand, it's also easy for people disposed to anxiety to go down a rabbit hole where the only conclusion is you should go live off the land in the middle of nowhere...
Nope. For instance some of the chemicals in sun screen never had to pass rigorous safety testing because it was assumed they couldn't enter the blood, but in fact that's not the case, and already at least one is known to have negative effects on reproductive health: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2733085 . Who knows what other chemicals are floating about in various cosmetics entering the bloodstream through the skin without ever being safety tested for that.
I doubt it. One obvious example is plasticizers: there was a big ruckus about BPA a few years ago, so manufacturers phased it out and switched to different plasticizers, many of which are incredibly chemically similar to BPA. It's seems very plausible that they have similar negative health effects, but there's no regulation (or even disclosure, in most cases) of which plasticizers are being used.
https://www.science.org/content/article/bpa-substitutes-may-...
For degreasers, it was replaced by 1,1,1-Trichloroethane, a chloroalkane later banned by the Montreal Protocol. It's use in refrigeration was replaced by 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane, a hydrofluorocarbon banned in the EU today for global warming potential. And finally, its use as a general anaesthetic was succeeded by Halothane, which doesn't seem to have any major health affects (beyond those coming from being an anaesthetic). However, that too was later replaced by Sevoflurane, which is suspected to accelerate Alzheimers.
Also both those anaesthetisc are greenhouse gases.
So no, we are definitely going to have more problem chemicals in the future, because chemistry is complicated.
> "TCE the solvent ENTEK uses is essential to ENTEK's separator manufacturing process TCE has a unique combination of chemical properties that , together , facilitate the controlled removal of process oil while allowing ENTEK to efficiently recover and recycle previously used TCE for reuse in both the lead- acid and lithium separator production processes in a manner that minimizes worker exposure while resulting in a product with the characteristics demanded by the battery customers . TCE possesses the following properties critical to ENTEK's use and reuse" (ENTEK TCE rulemaking report to EPA, July 14 2021)
The fundamental issue (that led to widespread contamination in the past) is that capturing and recycling TCE after use is fairly expensive, and since it was cheaper to buy new TCE, manufacturers would just dump their dirty used TCE, creating superfund sites etc.
There are some approaches to replacing organic solvents entirely (supercritical CO2 for example) but they're often quite expensive.
This isn't a problem, us future generations can just engineer our way out of it at a cheaper cost than it would have been to deal with it in the first place.
/s - For sarcasm, and sorry.
People are constantly assuming magical future entropy-undoers to justify their breaking and ruining things today.
That said, at the store I worked at, the only things that actually got recycled were the cardboard boxes from the stockroom, and the oil from the fryers. Everything else went into the dumpster.
[0] https://garmentcleaningsupply.com/picrin-1-gal-streets.html
[1] http://www.cleanairsupply.com/CleanAir_Web_Image/Chemical/MS...
[2] https://henryschein.com.au/impression/accessories/finale-sol...
Does it remain in the fabric after use? Is there danger to the wearer of dry-cleaned clothes or only to the people working at dry cleaner businesses?
Source: a college friend of mine, years ago, who worked as a dry cleaner. After talking to her, I've never used one since.
What do we do about our formal wear then?
If your formalwear is wool (for example, a tuxedo or blazer) you'd probably want to swap it out for a version of the garment which is made from Superwash wool, which is machine-washable. (Or your choice of alternative fabric.) Creating superwash wool is still a pretty chemically-intensive process, but that might not be forever: https://www.moderndailyknitting.com/community/superwash-part... It should at least cut down on your TCE exposure.
Silk is trickier -- if you wet it, you have to take great care to dry it without overheating it, while at the same time getting it to dry evenly, so you don't get watermarks on the fabric. It's doable, but it's a total PITA. The best strategy here, for me, has been to wash my silk blouses very rarely, and with a great deal of care, and tumble-dry low. I also use the 'vodka trick' I picked up working in the backroom of a theatrical costume company, many years ago -- get a bottle of cheap vodka, pour it into spritz bottle (one with a fine-mist setting -- the kind at beauty stores work great) and turn the garment inside-out; hit the pits, etc. It's safe for silk, fur, and other delicate fabrics.
If you're going to be wearing silk, do it in winter or in air conditioning :)
Fur -- well, you wouldn't have been dry-cleaning fur anyway, right? right?? This is a whole chapter on its own. (The vodka trick works tho)
Finally, there are also lots of wonderful new machine-washable fibres on the market -- tencel, etc. -- that may be suitable for formalwear.
But putting formalwear aside, the biggest problem I see is down-filled jackets and duvets. I have literally no good ideas here, other than 'wash very rarely and tumble dry low, low low'
While highly prized, I've decided that eider down is simply not a practical material for either my jackets nor my bedding. There are plenty of suitable alternatives on the market these days, and no geese are harmed in their making.
I confess though that I have yet to bear to throw out either my eider down duvet (or, for that matter, my luscious fur coat, guiltily secreted for special occasions in the back closet). Perhaps I should hold my tongue until I can do as I say.
Yet I say this as a lover of fur and rabbit felt hats
My wife also has some silk that likewise is done tumble dry low without being an issue.
"[Silk] may be dry-cleaned but should not be washed with water , as water can alter the sheen and crispness of the silk fibers and cause staining if dried unevenly." Banner, Bernadette. _Make, Sew and Mend_, p15 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57693333-make-sew-and-me...
I find the jacket and pants of a suit don't get very dirty if you just wear them at work, and dry cleaning ruins them anyway. I've gone many months of regular wear, probably more than a year in some cases without washing. You can spot-clean if you spill something on it.
Don't miss those days of mandatory suit-wear.
For me it’s not an option. I have to dry clean. It is easier to find alternative materials to cotton for the office but they don’t replace button downs and jeans. They can’t replace a suit, linen is still much too casual.
Supposedly wool doesn't shrink in cold water on gentle and air-dried.
Now, sure many dry cleaners will offer laundry services, but that isn’t dry cleaning.
Proven to cause neurological damage, horrifically acutely toxic and chronically toxic, causes colorblindness of all things...
Oh yeah, when it thermally decomposes into phosgene, a WWI-era chemical weapon. Spray brake cleaner on hot brakes and you're pretty much instantly dead.
brake cleaner is bad -- i'm not here to dispute that -- but i've witnessed quick-lube/inspection mechanics spraying brake cleaner onto hot brakes for 20+ years, both in shops i've worked in personally and in shops i've witnessed as a customer.
Oil-lube guys routinely work on very hot just-off-the-highway cars. Brake inspections are often a required element of such jobs, and there are few better ways to spray the brake dust off of calipers/drums/disc-hats/suspension components in a hurry than sprayable brake cleaners, as horrible as they are. Not only is the solvent and kinetic action of the spray itself useful, but the wetting action towards the brake dust prevents aerosolizing the brake dust for everyone in the shop.
I have never witnessed a death on-site.
I have no doubts that what you say about instant death is true in some laboratory environment or closed conditions, but it doesn't really correspond to practical reality.
The reality is that these folks go home, create a family, live their life , and then die at an early age from a chronic illness that is brought about by the conditions.
That's why these practices continue unabated; people aren't dying instantaneously from exposure, they're dying from the pernicious long term exposure effects.
https://www.amazon.com/CRC-05089-BRAKLEEN-Brake-Cleaner/dp/B... vs https://www.amazon.com/CRC-05089-BRAKLEEN-Brake-Cleaner/dp/B...
the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. The movement disorder afflicts about 1 million Americans, and is likely the fastest growing neurodegenerative disease in the world; its global prevalence has doubled in the past 25 years.
It’s used today mainly in producing refrigerants and as a degreaser in heavy industry.
But in the 20th century, TCE was used for many purposes, including making decaffeinated coffee, dry cleaning, carpet cleaning, and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children and women in labor. TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
As one who went under inhaled anesthesia a dozen times or more as a child in the 70s, I can only say, "WTF?" It makes a great solvent, so let's put in anesthesia?
To be fair though, the restricted audience for the administration of this particular chemical would seem to indicate considerations of safety have been applied, otherwise one would expect a more general pattern. One must suspect there are many more chemicals with similarly hard-to-test-for longterm effects in daily use, note especially the so-called 'forever chemicals' (PFAS).
What's more, dose / length of exposition makes a poison, so it's not possible to say in the abstract how a short but intense exposition of TCE stacks up against 24/7 exposition of low levels over the entire childhood. Meaning there's hope here.
Also can you be sure it was TCE you received? I remember one general anesthesia when I was maybe 9 or so and that was pretty definitely laughing gas. It might have been the same in (some of) your case(s), too.
I'm pretty sure they don't cut you open on nitrous oxide (that and...that stuff just wasn't nitrous). Was it TCE? I don't know, nor do I really care. What's done is done, and worrying about it isn't going to change anything. My reaction is more to the fact that there were just not a lot of fucks given back then. Rivers were open sewers, lead was in gasoline even when it was known to be a bad idea, and we put solvents in children's anesthesia.
I remember feeling like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich being folded in half, and then the lights went out.
Hopefully one-off cases don't significantly affect the chances of getting a serious neurological disorder later in life -- it seems we'll find out in the coming years...
My father and grandfather were anesthesiologists. We kind of adopted an older nurse anesthetist as a surrogate grandmother when I was a kid. She told us stories of back in the old days, sitting there with a stopwatch with one hand on the patient's wrist taking their pulse, and a dropper full of chloroform in the other hand, placing drops on a gauze mask over the patient's mouth when the pulse rate started going up. She always got significant amounts of second-hand anesthetic exposure.
She said it was pretty common after a long day of work to drive home quite high from all of the chloroform exposure. I presume TCE anesthesia was similar, and nurse anesthetists likely got at least 10,000 times the lifetime exposure that you got. Granted, there can be differences due to age of exposure, and often non-linearities of exposure. However, if the risks of a single surgery under TCE anesthesia were significant, I'm pretty sure someone would have noted absurd rates of parkinson's in nurse anesthetists.
Certainly, read up on the early signs of Parkinson's, and talk to your doctor if you think you might start showing symptoms, but don't get hypochondria over it.
Cyclopropane as an anesthetic on the other hand... particularly with electrocautery pens... I have no idea how they were ever allowed in the same operating room, at least not without some kind of fume hood around the patient's head pulling air rapidly out of the room using a non-arcing fan.
Literally, yes. The potency of an inhalation anesthetic is usually directly proportional to its lipid solubility. (Known as the Meyer-Overton correlation.) This is why solvents such as ether and chloroform were used as anesthetics and why N₂O is both an anesthetic and is dissolved in cream to form whipped cream.
The mechanism of inhalation anesthetics is not completely understood but it's thought that they interact with lipids in cell membranes and disrupt stuff. The better they dissolve in lipids, the lower the concentration that is needed for anesthesia.
There's a nice graph on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaestheti...
Whipped cream is cream with colloidal air in it. Mostly regular atmospheric air, but any gas that is safe to eat and has no flavor would function equivalently. If the air were dissolved in the cream, it would just be cream, not whipped cream.
Wikipedia says that the purpose of nitrous oxide in commercial whipped cream canisters is to be stored (dissolved) at very high pressure so that, when the pressure is released, it can whip the cream by undissolving from it. (And that the secondary purpose is that the nitrous oxide doubles as a preservative.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipped-cream_charger#Culinary
Whilst there are many who call decaffeinated coffee a crime against humanity, it is somewhat disconcerting that at one stage, it actually was just that.
Was this meant to be reassuring?
Per the article, you won't find in retail products; but rather, in the soil and groundwater -- where it is "highly persistent".
> However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
Yikes.
> Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
Yikes.
Your comment was very misleading.
This is exactly the reason I never touched decaf coffee until I found Swiss water process (SWP) decaf. It never made sense to me to use hydrocarbon solvents in a food application
- SWP is a means of treating green coffee beans pre-roast. They can be roasted any which way afterwards.
- Any type of bean can be treated this way.
- The process is pretty specific in targeting just caffeine. In removing caffeine though, the total dissolved solubles in the end coffee will be lower for the same amount of beans. Probably a lessor body unless you use more.
Interested to hear from someone who has tried it.
Also, SWP or MWP coffee removes nearly all caffeine unlike the more heavily processed versions.
At this point, it looks like the solvent thing is probably overstated (in highly developed/regulated countries)). This page has info about the history of different solvents: https://www.coffeereview.com/coffee-reference/coffee-categor...
I get your point, but isn't this kind of a broad statement? After all, ethanol is a hydrocarbon solvent, and it's been used in food applications for a long time.
As organic solvents go, ethanol is one of the safest — but it's too flammable for dry cleaners.
"A widely used chemical"
....
A widely known basketball team wins NBA finals
Clickbait?
Does the average reader of science.org know what trichloroethylene is without a prompt?
> Depends on the audience i guess, im not sure i can name a basketball team.
It's bordering on tautology. After all, who else would win National Basketball Association finals - a soccer team? A more astute reader will also observe that NBA finals aren't something casually won by random teams nobody heard of - by the time they get to the finals, the team is already widely-known.
Equally informative, but non-clickbait version of the headline, would be "NBA finals complete" - or, for basketball fans, "Today is 18th of June, 2023".
More people know the names of basketball teams than know the significance of TCE.
"I work for a major search engine (rhymes with Scroogle) and...blah"
Just come out and say it at that point.
A major one.
“Once widely used chemical in the 70s…” or a “Formerly widely used chemical” - was that so hard?
There's just no way to condense enough important information into the headline, and the chemical name would mean nothing for 99% of people.
But if I need to click to get the basic information it's clickbait.
But so all are forced to read it because Parkinson concerns everybody.
Why not simply "Widely used TCE strongly linked to Parkinson's disease"
Key message in the title, further information in the article.
Since this is related to a Marine base, I’ll give you an example. What if the headline was “2/4 gets new Bradleys”
To a Marine, it’s a clear headline: 2nd Battalion 4th Marine Regiment gets new armored personnel carriers”. But to a laymen a better headline would be “Marine unit gets new Tanks.” The former would be almost deliberately meaningless to a casual reader.
But, you don't know that, right? How many people would? 1% has to be a vast overestimate. What exactly are we optimizing for, saving a tiny minority from having to click once and read a single sentence?
It seems like "clickbait" has morphed into "any headline that does not make its associated article completely redundant".
Could it be that upon learning the name, the reader would want to determine context and applicability to their life?
There’s a subtle line between a hook and bait. Maybe this type of a title makes. A scientific topic more approachable.
I’m not sure I’d title it the same way, but it is generating discussion and awareness :)
1. The authors only studied two military camps. One with high TCE levels, and one with low TCE levels. But, obviously, there might be any number of other factors that are different between the two camps with a causal relationship to Parkinson's Disease.
2. There is an active class action lawsuit from this military camp. Doing a limited study that benefits one side of a class action lawsuit should always be taken with some extra skepticism and evaluated for conflicts of interest.
"Activated carbon filtration can remove TCE from drinking water effectively."[1]
[1] https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/hazar...
Really disturbing.
> I used to go fishing in a river near paper mills and eat the salmon I caught; I've been to a lot of farms; I smoked a lot of pot in high school when the government was poisoning the crops. But you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out
There's TCE in paper mill wastewater...
By 2021, 279 of the Camp Lejeune veterans, or 0.33%, had developed Parkinson’s versus 151 of those at Camp Pendleton, or 0.21%. After adjusting for differences in age, sex, race, and ethnicity, the scientists found veterans from Camp Lejeune had a 70% higher rate of Parkinson’s disease than the Camp Pendleton group.
I guess it can be encouraging news for some people. My mom died with Parkinson's and I've almost certainly had less exposure to TCE than she did. I'm aware that there isn't really a known genetic link, it's just nice to occasionally see evidence that it can be exposure related. The increase in prevalence mentioned in the article isn't good, but that can be due to better techniques for diagnosing it.
Not to mention when getting it has been the whole point of drinking coffee in the first place.
What they actually mean is that something natural will tend to be better - and there's nuance about why that might be so (having benefitted from evolutionary pressure and adaptation, a thing empirically tested and shown working, more effortessly fitting to our biology, and so on). Of course we're talking of man-made stuff thus-far, not some futuristic utopia where we know how to make everything better.
So unless the claim is "all natural things are always better", it's doubtful how the "fallacy" accusation actually applies in real life arguments. Does it address the claim that "X is better _because_ it is natural"? Well, doesn't that being the case or not, depend on the quality of the specific non-natural alternatives to X?
If those aren't any good, then X is indeed better not by chance, but precisely because it's natural. That is, because it had millions of years to evolve, millenia to be used and tested by humans, and so on, and it had all sort of evolutionary pressures to improve it.
If their argument is not about morality but instead about risk avoidance, would it still be fallacious reasoning? They could even still be wrong (because they incorrectly calculated the risks) without suffering a fallacy, right?
I am genuinely asking. I don’t know the answer.
Not to mention that the use of fallacy listings is the lowest form of argumentation (or, in any case, close).
It's not exactly the most delicious drink.
Would not drink it if not for the caffeine.
The history of coffee is interesting to me. Although I don’t have a link, coffee was introduced to addict populations to facilitate trade. It’s funny that trading companies were key to the adoption of tea and coffee consumptions so they had a commodity that they could trade across the world. It’s kind of like oil in that the world needs lots of it and there’s money to be made in production and transport.
Or it could be that people just really like tea and coffee and the trading companies just met the unrealized need.
That's a bit of a stretch. You could say that about any popular products - smartphones, soap, ...
Some say the industrial revolution was facilitated by the switch of Western people from alcohol based drinks to caffeine based ones.
> Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildly inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved … Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries.”
Optimal consumption of caffeine seems to be a decent-sized initial intake, then smaller doses over time to maintain (eg take a few more sips). There's no good way to do that with pills.
But it barely matters, it's not like I'd inject the whole cup into my veins and then see what happens.
If the caffeine was too high (within reasonable variations), you'd notice and slow down consumption before it mattered. If it's too low, you can just drink more. You can do it by feel, which is I think what just about everyone does.
Some of it might be placebo, but if so I'm not sure it changes anything really, since the goal is just to feel a certain way anyway.
I drink it because when I need caffeine, decaf has enough for me. When younger, I drank it to fit in.
With enough sugar and milk, it tastes great, but so would anything. I am sure high-end coffee is great, but it’s never worth the effort to me, so I don’t know about that.
I've dropped caffeine but still really like good coffee, so I'll occasionally go out and get a cup of decaf.
"Like regular coffee, decaf coffee begins as green, unroasted beans. The hard beans are warmed and soaked in liquid to dissolve and remove the caffeine in one of four ways: using water alone, using a mixture of water and solvents (most commonly methylene chloride or ethyl acetate) applied either directly or indirectly, or using water and “supercritical carbon dioxide.”"
Even our local coffee roaster replied and said they only use Swiss water process on their more expensive organic beans - the rest of their lineup uses MC.
I'm pretty sure we used TCE however, its distinct smell still lives in my memory, and the fact if you got any on your fingers you could taste/smell it within seconds. Butanoic acid was the other one you didn't want to get on your fingers.
All this was 25 years ago, I assume things have changed since then. I'm surprised I remember any of this.
Why didn't they adjust for socioeconomic status? Wealthier people tend to be able to afford better medical care, live in healthier environments, eat healthier foods, etc.
These could all be confounding factors, and a study like this should take them in to account.
Some might have wound up being relatively wealthy compared to the rest, and that could have influenced their long-term health.
We won't know until we check.
(This isn’t to say they originally came from the same socio-economic group, but that isn’t the type of distinction usually made in these kinds of studies.)
They only looked at two military bases. One with high TCE, and one with low TCE.
...but there could be thousands of causal differences between two locations. They should have looked at dozens of military bases across the country/world.
This wasn’t a fishing expedition where they took two cohorts of marines and looked down a list of 20 diseases to find one with p<0.05 distribution between the two cohorts.
> Occupational exposure to the industrial solvent trichloroethylene (TCE) was previously associated with a 6-fold increased risk of Parkinson disease (PD) in a small study of twin pairs discordant for PD.1 Animal studies provide biological plausibility for this association by recapitulating key pathologic characteristics of PD
Given this - a previous finding, a plausible mechanism - they went and found two good existing cohorts who had different exposure to the compound of interest and for whom they could access medical records.
That is good study design. Which is probably why it got published.
From the paper (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...):
> To control for potential confounding, we included age, sex, race (Black, White, other), and ethnicity (Hispanic, non-Hispanic) in all models. We also tested models that included rank (officer, enlisted) and smoking status (ever, never), though smoking status was unknown for a substantial proportion of the cohort. We repeated analyses in subgroups defined by sex and by race and ethnicity. We conducted several analyses to explore possible biased ascertainment of PD in Camp Lejeune veterans due to potential awareness of the contamination and presumptive service connection that entitles them to VA benefits.
…
> We additionally tested associations in men and women separately and conducted sensitivity analyses that adjusted for total number of years of VHA health care usage.
These analyses were evidently deemed adequate by peer reviewers. If anyone thinks there are other confounding factors they can go ahead and do that analysis and publish as well. Sciencing continues.
Oh wait
I found a paper about it: Cyanide Toxicity of Freshly Prepared Smoothies and Juices Frequently Consumed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7731941/
Asbestos has been banned for most usage in Canada since the early 1990's.
However... Canada continues to be one of the biggest exporter of Asbestos in global-trade.
Can't allow multi-national - and national corporations with local holdings to not turn a profit, right? After all - there are local jobs that are more important... (well, until the taxes collected on those activities are outweighed by the healthcare costs of the local population as they age...)
TCE was a safer alternative.
"Carbon tetrachloride is one of the most potent hepatotoxins (toxic to the liver), so much so that it is widely used in scientific research to evaluate hepatoprotective agents."
This study is like saying subdermal exposure to lead bullets increasea chance of premature death.
Here's my experience with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887615
https://www.google.com/search?q=sniffing+trichloroethylene&r...
[0] https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/82/2/590/1656962
So is this chemical very stable and folks just dumped it into pits or something and it seeped into the groundwater? How did it get deep into the earth like that without being degraded or reacting with other stuff down there etc?
EDIT: my bad, they did talk about the absolute risk later on. Should have been the first thing they mention, though, to avoid looking sensationalist.
> The researchers calculated the rate of Parkinson’s disease in the veterans and compared it with the rate in more than 72,000 veterans who lived at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, a similar training ground in California where there were not high levels of TCE. By 2021, 279 of the Camp Lejeune veterans, or 0.33%, had developed Parkinson’s versus 151 of those at Camp Pendleton, or 0.21%.
There isn't a whole lot they can do if you don't actually read the article. I always try to read the article before I pass judgement on whether it's sensationalized or not.
https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/sites/default/files/2018-01/Pr...
Alternatively, the idea that you can get actual Parkinson's (not PSP) from mitochondrial complex 1 inhibitors might be new and noteworthy on its own, because I'm not aware of other research showing this.
Journalists and their tricks are so tiresome.
[edit] ignore the comment, read it wrong, its 279 cases
So they upside is that it probably significantly reduces your risk of both cancer and type 2 diabetes, which you're >100x more likely to die from than Parkinson's.
There are even longevity bloggers, like Peter Attia, who advocate that everyone should be taking mitochondrial complex 1 inhibitors.
Also, if watch Jerry McLaughlin's YouTube talks about pawpaws and cancer, he summarizes the research that mainly focuses on the mechanisms of action of annonaceous acetogenins in fighting cancer -- these are also Mitochondrial Complex 1 inhbitors, similar to Metformin but much stronger.
Basically these chemicals cause a buildup of radical oxides in your mitochondria, which reduce their efficiency. If your mitochondria have too many radical oxides, or have them for two long, then your mitochondria will die. And if enough mitochondria in any given cell die, their host cells will also obviously die. This is what causes progressive supranuclear palsy, which is what this article is probably (incorrectly) referring to as Parkinson's.
But because the metabolic needs of cancer cells are higher than the metabolic needs of non-cancer cells, there may be a certain dose of these chemicals that is high enough to inhibit cancer but low enough that it doesn't cause palsy. Further, the way that cancer cells often develop resistance to chemotherapy drugs is by using ATP to pump out the drugs once they have entered the cells. These mitochondrial complex 1 inhibitors can prevent these protein pumps from working by making the mitochondria less efficient, and therefor effectively prevent cancer cells from developing certain types of resistance to chemotherapy drugs.
Basically if you go through Google Scholar and read the research on pawpaws, rotenone, graviola, and Metformin, it's all more or less the same stuff. John Clifton's book Your Fourth Choice is also a fun book you can get on Amazon and read in an hour or two. It does a good job summarizing the academic research on annonaceous acetogenins. (I bought it because I collect books on North American Pawpaws, not because I was in the market for an experimental cancer treatment.)
These processes have billions of years of evolution behind them and are highly conserved.
People shouldn't mess with them until there are huge studies, and not in the context of cancer therapy. Just because something helps with cancer, like mitochondrial complex 1 inhibitors (or radiation) doesn't mean we should all do it.
Remember all the talk about how we should all eat lots of anti-oxidants to prevent cancer? It turns out it's more complicated than that, and an anti-oxidant rich diet can actually increase cancer risk.
Which is probably because Mitochondrial Complex 1 inhibitors work by producing radical oxides in the mitochondria.
I definitely agree with you that it's inherently very risky to mess around with them, but I also don't think it's at all obvious that being exposed to them will increase your all-cause mortality. It may even reduce it. We just don't know.
Which seems reasonable?
There are some areas where being conservative can be a wise decision. It could pay off though. That’s always the gamble, right?
Did you ever discuss end-of-life options with him before the disease progressed so far? I have a close relative with PD. I am terrified of the last years, but no idea how to raise the issue of end-of-life options. My family's culture is pretty much "try to live forever" instead of "try to live well". Are there any Swiss/Belgians/Dutchies here with experience on planned end-of-life options? Those three countries are exceptionally liberal on that matter.
Torts against the government are a funny thing. It requires anti-government attitude to suggest that the government is incompetent, harmful, or criminal, but the solution is always more programs, more taxes, more laws, more bureaucracy. Oh and the ‘victims’? They will sign on expecting a huge payout, claim all kinds of problems, and end up with $0 and a weekly appointment with a VA occupational therapist. If they happen to have a problem that can actually be solved, too bad, no funding.