John Durnell just wanted to make things around his St. Louis neighborhood look a little nicer. So, on occasion, he’d spray a bit of Roundup in the obvious places — along weedy sidewalks and in public spaces he thought needed a little extra attention. Decades later, after multiple rounds of chemotherapy, Durnell is recovering from blood cancer that a Missouri jury found in 2023 was caused by…
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Syngenta, maker of a controversial pesticide linked to Parkinson’s disease, said on Tuesday that it will stop making its paraquat weed killer by the end of June. The announcement comes as the company is facing several thousand lawsuits brought by people in the US who allege they developed Parkinson’s disease due to their exposure to Syngenta’s paraquat products. The company did not…
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SAN JACINTO RIVER, Texas — Over the past 30 years, federal and state agencies in Texas have allowed hundreds of oil and chemical barges to amass in a once-tranquil section of the San Jacinto River, just east of Houston. Only about 100 barges were on the six-mile stretch of water in 1990, according to a Public Health Watch analysis of archival satellite imagery. Today, at least 600 crowd the…
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Hundreds of thousands of times each year in California, farmers and their contractors spray pesticides on fields and orchards in the state’s agricultural heartlands. Farmworkers young and old can be exposed to dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals if they are not properly trained, left uninformed about when they can safely enter sprayed fields or exposed to pesticide applications…
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