Widely used chemical *(that was generally phased out in the 70s) linked to Parkinson's. Still important, but you don't need to start searching product labels in 2023 for it.
I'm not for panicked reporting, but in the face of the stated facts (as far as true) your comment is overly dismissive:
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.
...and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children
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?
> It makes a great solvent, so let's put in anesthesia?
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.
Well, when you put it that way...yeah, with some thought it begins to make a little sense. Because my observational evidence says that solvents in general seem to soak into human skin pretty well, so the same would easily get absorbed by whatever it is that turns the lights out. Thanks for the explanation.
> and why N₂O is both an anesthetic and is dissolved in cream to form whipped cream.
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.)
as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children and women in labor
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 had a couple of operations as a youngster, and from my memory (could be faulty) they would speak to you while you were still on the trolley then waft some gas in front of you as you needed to breathe in. Then, when you were sedated they would get on with the business. I guess they would be able to inject you with something a bit more serious without you squirming, and transfer you to the table etc..
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...
> 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.
LOL, that's the exact opposite of the majority of my experience in the 70s. In your case, you got the gas, then the shot. I'd get the "pre-op" shot for the mild sedation, then the gas for the main event. "Count backward from ten.", and I'd make it to about seven.
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.
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.
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.
It's used in dry cleaning in the USA, and their suppliers will deliver it to you by the gallon [0]. MSDS of course [1]. If you're in Australia and go to the dentist, there's this as well [2] although surely that container with its death's head and POISON label are kept well out of sight. Of course there's the lab supply chain, but that's usually more expensive. It's really easy and legal to get if you want it. I've known many mechanics and similar, professional and otherwise who use workaround sources like these to get the "good stuff" degreaser.
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.
>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.
I note that this and the Nulon brand that I’ve used list TETRAchloroethylene rather than trichloroethylene as a constituent. I wonder if that’s any safer. The Wikipedia page[0] says it has been described as a possible "neurotoxicant, liver and kidney toxicant, and reproductive and developmental toxicant ... a 'potential occupational carcinogen'"
Yes. This is why most dry cleaners won't accept bedding. It's considered too high-contact. (If they do accept it, they wash it with something other than TCE)
Source: a college friend of mine, years ago, who worked as a dry cleaner. After talking to her, I've never used one since.
That's a great question that is entirely fabric-dependent.
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'
I have silk liner socks for hiking (wool over silk is the best combination for avoiding blisters), they're tumble dry low but that's what we always use anyway--I don't treat them any differently than anything else. (Yes, appearance doesn't matter one bit--nobody's ever going to see them. However, they have no marks despite the fact they obviously get a lot of sweat.)
My wife also has some silk that likewise is done tumble dry low without being an issue.
The sheen of silk is altered by exposure to water, especially hot water, and uneven drying creates watermarks.
"[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...
yes! But I've also embarrassed myself more than once by spilling coffee (or, ahem, some other liquid) on my eider-down duvet. Moreover, the properties of a duvet cover that could keep the duvet safe from such insults -- namely, a tight weave, and water resistance -- also make it sweaty at night.
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.
Yes, this is good and effective. The oils dissolve and you spin dry, rinse in new liquid CO2 and repeat if needed, just like washing clothes. The CO2 is evaporated and back into the tank - the oil remains and is disposed.
Don't wash (dryclean) it or at least do it super infrequently.
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.
I used to wear cotton long pants (thermals) all year, under the suit pant. Not letting the suit pant touch the skin made it easier to wear it for a very long time (multiple months) before dry-cleaning.
It was 98% humidity and 70 degrees at 7:30 this morning. I broke into sweat watering plants with athletic clothes on. It’s now 86 degrees and 65% humidity. Spring has only started.
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.
Don't dry cleaners launder most things - as in, they use clothes soap not TCE? I'm under the impression that this is what happens when I drop shirts off to be cleaned and pressed
They do both, for cotton shirts they will just launder and press it, which is why its frequently $1-$2 a shirt. For many other fabrics they run it through the dry cleaning process, which is why its $5-7 a shirt.
It depends on the fabric/you can ask. I brought in one delicate item to be washed (a cosplay) and they said they'd wash it in cold and not dry clean it.
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 seems to be a crazy amount of chemical waste all over the metro Denver area. I don't live in Lowry, but I play hockey maybe once every 1 to 2 months at Big Bear Ice Arena, which is in that neighborhood.
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.
the 40s and 50s were unkind to the american west and to denver, in particular. a lot of the natural beauty is actually west of denver in the places that couldnt be exploited by rockwell, lockheed, and other participants in that military/industrial complex.
i also wonder how much of the environmental focus that denver-boulder is known for is something of a reaction to that exploitation.
It's no longer uncommon to (carbon) filter drinking water at the tap or in your fridge, which then makes a hot shower likely a major avenue into your body by way of your lungs unless you filter water for the whole house plumbing system.
If you read the TFA it says, "TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today."
Water vapor is co-distilled with water vapor in room temperature evaporation. Humid air a 70F has a partial pressure of about 0.2 PSI - a substantial amount.
I would have to look into tabular data on the H2O TCE system to see, but it is substantial = the smell you get. It also has it's own presence on dry air, but it is higher if water present due to low temperature co-distillation.
These soils need to be dug up -washed with super-critical CO2 ($$$), then baked dry with the vapor condensed.
This has been done in Toronto at a few old factories. Later they started to create a large underwater landfill area - the 'spit' and created a number of clay and membrane lined lagoons(embayments) where they buried it and covered it with clean fill to make a wild life area. Started about 50-75 years ago and it was well built and monitored since then and has stayed sealed.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Street_Spit
TCE is widely used in industry (and was introduced as a replacement for more toxic and persistent solvents like chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, etc.). Such non-polar solvents remain critically important for a wide variety of manufacturing processes, e.g.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
Ha. "Let's break all these cups and throw em in a hole! Future people will use something something something tech and put them back together good as new."
People are constantly assuming magical future entropy-undoers to justify their breaking and ruining things today.
I had a family member who used to educate people on recycling. Growing up it was a major fact that styrofoam was a forever material that would never biodegrade and couldn't be recycled. Today there are methods to recycle styrofoam (albeit just like all recycling it takes people and resources to take the effort to do it, which is the real barrier). I don't think being reckless with our future is a good idea. But history is full of past norms being changed by new scientific discoveries.
I've read that McDonald's phase out of its styrofoam containers in 1990 ironically prevented the recycling of a lot of styrofoam. Businesses were in the process of setting up to recycle styrofoam but the removal of such a huge source of used styrofoam eliminated their potential profitability.
Yes, they replaced food packaging that was recyclable with paper-based packaging that is not recyclable. I worked there before the transition, occasionaly we'd get an irate customer complaining about the styrofoam and we'd try to explain that it was more recyclable than using paper but most would refuse to hear it.
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.
Well one problem is that "Some of the most populated zones of" everywhere are superfund sites. Another, I learned long ago in the real estate business, is that superfund sites are just the sites they've taken the trouble to bother "cleaning up". As the article alludes to, it's not the documented TCE sites we need to worry about, it's the undocumented TCE sites that will likely get the average person. This same rule applies to real estate development.
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.
I can't help but think we've gone too far in limiting liability
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
> 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'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.
This is incorrect, or misleading at best. The map that you linked contains data about TCE levels in public water systems. It does not imply anything about the contamination of the groundwater supply which exists below many homes and workplaces in throughout the Bay Area. Contaminated soil and groundwater allows VOCs, such as TCE, to enter homes via a process called "vapor intrusion" and which can lead to negative health outcomes for the inhabitants even without ever drinking the groundwater [1].
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].
> 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.
Cancer has a fairly high incident rate in the general public, so anecdotes about people getting cancer due to industrial solvents is often suspect. Most observations can be explained by a combination of base rates, and social determinants of health.
Two extremely athletic high-school-age people die within two years of each other of mysterious cancers, with an obvious presence of cancer-causing chemicals, and you want to pretend that cancer statistics that are heavily weighted toward the older and more obese somehow have any relevance here?
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?
Well, I was trained as a scientist and medical researcher and did my phd thesis on cancer drugs. One thing you learn is that many people see patterns in cancer that are better explained by random numbers.
See this doc, including the section "Some important points to consider".
The link between TCE and kidney cancer has already been very well established though. The Parkison's is just a cherry on top. If we know this place is contaminated, then we know there's increased risk of cancer. Full stop
There are small TCE plumes virtually everywhere in urbanized California. Every dry cleaner in history was just dumping waste TCE and PCE into holes in the ground. If you click around on this map, half of these sites are TCE/PCE (the other half are usually gas, diesel, and MTBE).
I lived near the Fairchild superfund site for many years. I remember when it was a hollow husk of a concrete building. And then the paved it over and put a supermarket and whatnot there.
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.
Curious, Treasure Island (in the San Francisco Bay between SF and Oakland) is absolutely a Superfund site, but isn't marked on that map. Oh huh, apparently it avoided getting classified as a Superfund site[0]. Really makes me think that designation isn't all that useful anymore.
This paragraph from the article explains the significance of the reported result (and the motivation behind the study):
>> 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.
If I remember right, the phase-out happened in the 1990s, just when a lot of manufacturing was leaving the U.S.
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.
> 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.
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...
>My question is are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
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.
Not to mention that many kinds of sunscreen have chemicals in them that kill Coral reefs. It's becoming fairly common for ocean tourist communities to pay attention to, but that won't really stop whatever washes down the rivers.
TCE was originally conceived as a replacement for chemicals such as chloroform and ether, which were deemed to be too toxic to the liver for anesthesia. Once the toxicity of TCE was discovered, it started being phased out in various industries.
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.
> are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
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.
For chemicals that cause illnesses that take decades to show up, it's my guess that we will never find all of them, and there are likely a lot of them out there. It's a hard problem. Maybe it can be helped by using modelling techniques to extrapolate effects over time.
You can look into how many studies are done in currently used chemicals, spoiler is about 10%, when the chemical is declared unsafe like biphenol, they come up with a a non studied version. Ie: biphenol b and so the games goes
I remember my chemistry teacher in high school telling how they used to use 'tri' (that's how they called it) a lot to wash their hands in. Until they discovered that it was highly carcinogenic.
But yeah, that chemistry class was in the early 80's, so it is now ages ago that tri was still widely used.
> 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
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.
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.
> However, your post also did not provide references.
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)
Yes but it’s not a lie to say it was phased out in the 70s. Your comment would be more substantial and useful if you made whatever nuance you’re trying to highlight clear.
If the poster you responded to is right, it is in fact a lie to say it was phased out in any meaningful manner. I don't see this comment as unhelpful - if the use just didn't stop, that's that. What is there to discuss? It was poison, it's still poison.
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]
Good point about spot cleaning. I didn't know that. Here is what Google told me about it:
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.
It's a component in some solvents a consumer might use, as you noted, but it's also used in manufacturing, in areas where a trace amount might end up in a consumer product but the major problem is for the people who are exposed to it during that item's manufacture. (or for the people who have to deal with the manufacturer's waste)
> Yes but it’s not a lie to say it was phased out in the 70s
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.
Mass, widespread, unchecked use and subsequent dumping of the chemical was phased out because that practice was understood to be harmful to people and the environment. The fact that it is now used in a controlled and regulated manner is entirely different. You either missed this nuance, or you are deliberately being obtuse to make a point that "it's technically still used" which, obviously, is true, and also doesn't contradict the fact that it was phased out in the 70s once found to be poisonous.
Anytime you see something unnecessarily and deliberately non-specific in a headline it's always some alarmist bullshit. "Famous actor is arrested for drunk driving" and they had one role in TV twenty years ago. "This everyday snack leads to kidney stones" and it's fish-butthole-flavored chips that were produced in Japan for six weeks in 1998.
Did you read the article? Your comment almost made me dismiss this altogether, but imagine my surprise when I started reading the article:
> 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.
>"But in the 20th century, TCE was used for many purposes, including making decaffeinated coffee" ...
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
> It never made sense to me to use hydrocarbon solvents in a food application
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.
Ethanol is also a horrible toxin, it just happens to be common enough in nature that our bodies, and animal bodies as well, have had hundreds of thousands of years to evolve some mitigations against.
Ethanol is only a "horrible toxin" if it's consumed in amounts that would be nearly or certainly lethal for any other solvent (save water). Human gut bacteria do not produce trichloroethylene.
As organic solvents go, ethanol is one of the safest — but it's too flammable for dry cleaners.
Interestingly -- when it comes to toxicology it is not the substance that determines the poison but the dose. Water is still a toxin, we just have evolved ways to handle up to a certain amount of water per day before water poisoning takes hold. Everything is a toxin, we just have it in our bodies to handle some of it.
Wouldn't there be another word for this effect? It's not that water per se is toxic, is that eventually if you have a lot, your body "overflows". Being toxic is not an intrinsic property of the element, but is being derived by its quantity.
I would say water is a solvent rather than a toxin. The water we consume is just not pure water and has lots of minerals in it already diluting the solvency (?is this a real word) of the water. Truly pure water will strip the minerals right out of your hair: https://www.businessinsider.com/super-kamiokande-neutrino-de...
I would say that's not completely accurate either at a biological level. For example, if a neurotoxin merely disables sodium channels temporarily, that's different from a neurotoxin that somehow permanently disrupts or damages neurons (I believe some heavy metals work that way?). In the case of permanent damage, there is essentially almost no "safe dose", although I guess very small amounts will be negligible compared to background cell death. But you essentially want as little as possible, which is different from water, that goes from therapeutic to toxic at extreme amounts. (Not sure how TCE toxicity works)
Ethanol is not a hydrocarbon, nor is TCE. By definition, a hydrocarbon is composed of carbon and hydrogen. Ethanol contains oxygen, while TCE contains chlorine.
Alcohol hydrocarbons are hydrocarbons with an alcohol group attached (see the diagram at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxy_group)
The simplest would be methanol, from methane. Any organic chemist would know what you meant, although it's not really correct terminology. IIRC the hydrocarbon would be called an 'alkyl group'.
I thought the SWP involved supercritical carbon dioxide, but apparently it just involves solubility tricks and sacrificial beans, and CO2 is the new, new method.
Halogenated solvents should definitely be avoided at all costs but I'm generally not too concerned about how hexanes are used to extract cooking oil, for example.
I am very sensitive to caffeine and recently switched to decaf only after drinking coffee daily for 20+ years. I drink mainly Mountain Water Processed coffee, which is the same thing but from coffee sourced in South America. It is roasted by a local roaster in Minneapolis. I honestly can't tell the difference between the decaf and regular (except for the lack of caffeine).
Also, SWP or MWP coffee removes nearly all caffeine unlike the more heavily processed versions.
- 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.
I roast my own coffee beans. I usually get decaf SWP beans from Sweet Marias. https://www.sweetmarias.com/green-coffee/decaf.html
The decaf SWP beans start out a different color of green bordering on tan compared to the light green of regular "green" coffee beans. Its not just the starting color, they roast differently too. Coffee beans crack during roasting - there is a first crack and then if you want it dark there is a second crack. The sound is usually pronounced. With the SWP beans the crack sound is more of a poof. Apparently SWP changes the structure of the beans, possibly introducing cracks or holes. The roasted beans seem drier and duller brown in color, less mahogany, less shiny. Its hard to know what the flavor impact of SWP was b/c I haven't tried the same beans before they were made decaf. It could just be my own prejudice or lack of skill in roasting but I would say on average the decaf coffee turns out 5-10% worse in quality.
In practice, it's far easier to find good single-origin roasts than to find good decaf options. I've actually never been able to find anything lighter than medium roast in SWP -- not sure if that's for some functional or taste reason, or just because it's a sliver of a sliver of the market.
Coffee can also be decaffeinated by supercritical carbon dioxide, which was the first process I learned about (as an intro to supercritical fluids in a thermodynamics course).
Not sure I'd call it clickbait, and they do mention it right away. It'd be like putting a mathematical expression in the headline of an article about neural networks.
Funny how making an informative title for a piece of text is on the curriculum but good-for-readers titles don't earn money... so writers have to learn good-for-ARR titles instead
Not to ruffle any feathers, but I notice this trend on HN also. People will post something the city they live in and drop all kinds of hints... except the name. Same for employers. Strange. It's like we need to play the old boardgame "Guess Who?"!
> 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".
I know of it as "dry cleaning chemical and why you don't want to buy a building which used to contain a dry cleaning shop with on-premises processing".
My first thought would be, "What is this? Is it a common chemical?". Then I'd probably call the article click bait even though it says it's common early in the article.
It's also highly toxic, works as an anaesthetic (i.e., knocks you out); it also decomposes into phosgene and hydrochloride when exposed to light and air. But on the other hand, it is a great organic solvent.
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.
> If I already know TCE is dangerous and need to be avoided I might not need to read the article or I could if I need further information.
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".
So instead they use wording that means nothing to 100% of people and require anyone to click through to the article to discover what they're talking about.
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.
Not that it proves anything but one of my uncles was a marine who spent a lot of time at Camp Jejune. He died of ALS, another neurodegenerative condition, and he got care for it through the VA as the marines thought it was a service-related condition.
I think the phrase "linked to" should be banned in science-adjacent journalism. It's too vague. "Antibiotics are linked to disease", just negatively. Any correlation can be called a "link". Far too vague.
If memory serves me this is the chemical at the basis of the John Travolta movie A Civil Action, which is based on the true story covered in the excellent book of the same title.
I disagree strongly. The article very quickly discloses the identity of the chemical the title alludes to, and including the full chemical compound in the title is a poor choice for a variety of reasons.
"But that “really means nothing for what’s already in the environment,” De Miranda says. Mitigating against exposure is tricky, she adds, because, unlike with pesticides, underground TCE locations aren’t always documented."
> 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
Fortunately it's a big increase in relative risk and not absolute risk:
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.
Never exchange the "devil you know", especially if it's natural and has been used for centuries by billions, for some novel lab-made crap, proprietary owned, and marketed to death.
Not to mention when getting it has been the whole point of drinking coffee in the first place.
Note how there is no actual substance to the classification as "fallacy". In general, it only makes sense if it condemned some absolute claim that "anything natural is better than anything man made". But people appealing to nature rarely if ever claim that - even when they appear to be making that argument, it's because they use loose language.
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.
I don’t think GP is making a moral argument. It seems more they are arguing that novel techniques lead to novel consequences, which could be harmful. GP assesses the potential risks outweigh the benefits of a new process when a process with known consequences exists.
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?
It's rather good advice, based on massive real-world empirical testing by billions for centuries (which would have uncovered statistically significant adverse issues way sooner), the Lindy effect, plus a basic understanding of profit motives and of the fast-track cavalier way lab-made substitutes get into the market.
Not to mention that the use of fallacy listings is the lowest form of argumentation (or, in any case, close).
Given that drinking coffee lowers your risk of getting Parkinson's by up to 80%, the lack of caffeine is probably doing more for your Parkinson's risk than whatever chemicals were used to decaffeinate it.
This isn't really true, there are a few different methods to decaffeinating coffee beans:
"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.”"
We drink a lot of decaf and I email roasters before ordering to see what method they use (even though it's stated that methylene chloride is "totally safe"). It seems most commercially available beans are processed via this company: https://en.descamex.com.mx/ (which does both: https://en.descamex.com.mx/mountainwaterprocess)
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.
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.”
Whole coffee has a well established safety record for long term use. Pure caffeine at the doses coffee drinkers use, less so. There might be other unidentified chemicals in whole coffee that interact with the caffeine in some way to modify its safety.
Caffeine pills it's a bit easy to unconciously take too much and get all jittery, and it's not really spread out enough.
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.
Any chemists here know if use of TCE has been phased out in school and graduate labs? When I was doing my degree I recall benzene was out in favour of toluene - which adds a methyl group to the ring, massively reducing toxicity.
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.
Just a reminder that "70% higher risk" is a relative value describing the _fractional_ increase in risk. In absolute terms, the probability of developing Parkinson's (prevalence) was 0.33% in group exposed to TCE and 0.21% in the non-exposed group. So you might also say TCE increases the risk of Parkinson by 0.12 percentage points.
"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."
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.
They were all active duty military and largely the same socio-economic cohort, and use the same medical system. Maybe they could draw a distinction between enlisted and commissioned, but my hunch is the disparity between raw numbers would lead to low statistical power.
(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.)
> 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.
Alot of socioeconomic factors are baked into the above co-morbidities but anyway, is there a reason to think that veterans of two different marine camps have significantly different socioeconomic profiles from eachother?
In this case (Lejeune vs Pendleton), there would likely not be a substantial socioeconomic difference between the collective backgrounds of Marines who did basic training at either one. But comparing either camp to OCS at Quantico would, in fact, show a pretty stark delineation between the socioeconomic backgrounds.
Presumably there's already known risk factors studied thoroughly for race, age, and sex. So they adjusted the numbers to account for that and their focus was on locality.
The problem with this study is even more profound.
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.
Yeah and as well as soldiers being exposed to different chemicals & other circumstances then the general population. Would be great if they would compare it with other army base around the same time.
The whole point of sarcasm is that people misunderstand causing funny situations. If you are going to signal it with eg. /s you may as well just say what you mean.
People get buttmad and downvote you for pointing out manmade global extinction events and daily death tolls from pollution. HN isn't immune from these shitbags. This site has a lot more capitalists than environmentalists.
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...)
That’s why cyanide is allowed in adult fruit and smoothie drinks without safety thresholds while it was only recently banned via pressure for children’s products. Setting a maximum amount of cyanide cuts into profits so there’s a lobby against it.
Safer? CC4 decomposes into phosgene at high (about 250 Celcius) temperature, which is why using it in fire extinguishers was a bad idea but TCE does that when simply exposed to light, at room temperature. And if those LD/LC numbers that I'm looking at are correct, TCE is actually slightly more toxic.
Carbon tetrachloride is used in research to reliably create liver damage. It's very toxic.
"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."
Started gabapentin, couple weeks later I had Parkinson’s
Took awhile to clear up. Had a few rounds of this before I figured out that gabapentin induced Parkinson’s was a thing.
Did you mean Parkinsonism, because that is an umbrella term for symptoms, not necessarily the disease. It's an important distinction, because Parkinson's is degenerative.
TCE has been banned for human consumption for decades, as it is a known poison. Percentage change increase in a certain disease isn't interesting except as a rule-lawyering way to force polluters to pay for blatantly obvious pollution.
This study is like saying subdermal exposure to lead bullets increasea chance of premature death.
It's been known for quite some time that trichloroethylene is linked to Parkinsons. In fact the doctor that assessed my father a few years ago asked him "what was your job?", "engineer," "you used degreaser didn't you? Did you know that .... ".
IANAC (I am not a chemist, and certainly not an organic chemist <shudder>) but I know that contamination by former dry cleaning sites (almost always near built up areas, in small parades of shops, often near schools, gardens, etc) is a very serious problem. In the past, such businesses frequently dumped waste into drains, soak-always, pits, or in fact anywhere other than paying to have it treated properly. Probably the only other thing I’m aware of that you might possibly encounter is the site of a former leather tannery, although these were not generally sited near houses due to the overpowering smell and obvious unsightlyness.
There was a spate of recreational sniffing of trichlorethylene when it was a common industrial solvent -later it was banned, but persists in use under well controlled industrial uses - removing caffeine was one, there were many other?.
A meta data study might show an 'echo' as people age due to later effects.
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?
I know it's the fault of the journal, but I thought we edited here to remove clickbait. Can we put at least the name of the chemical (trichloroethylene) in the title?
My father worked as a mechanic as a teen in the early 1960s. He tells stories of loading air hoses up with trike and hosing the other mechanics down with it. 78 years old and no neurological issues so far. But he is one of those people who seems to completely ignore his physical condition and yet has minimal health issues despite his obesity. Mom has had a daily 6AM workout routine for decades, is at a stable healthy weight, and has no end of health issues.
"Pesticides such as paraquat and rotenone that have been associated with Parkinson’s disease also leave that pathological signature in rodents." - oh good, it looks like these are still widely in use.
70% higher risk is meaningless if you don't give the absolute risk. Common issue with this kind of reporting...
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%.
> Should have been the first thing they mention, though, to avoid looking sensationalist.
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.
Is that the only data sets they looked at? Comparing only two locations means that there could be any number of site differences that account for the difference in the rate of Parkinson’s disease, other than the studied chemical.
Pendleton seems to be a reasonable control, since the reported prevalence of 0.21% in patients under 60 matches other large data sets like the UK (0.25%).
Sure, it is trichloroethylene, but that would lose 99% of the audience as soon as they see a word that they can't pronounce. Widely used is accurate, it is everywhere.
They'll see it right away once they get into the article, and will presumably nope out of there anyway. So why not put it in the headline? Oh, yeah, advertising. Thus, clickbait.
This is to some degree reassuring; as the chemical was phased out in the 1970s, maybe it means Parkinson's rates among people who are middle aged or younger today, and thus much less likely to have been exposed, will be lower than boomer+ rates.
These kind of Mitochondrial Complex 1 inhibitor induced Parkinson's are like 1% of cases. Granted these cases are probably highly underdiagnosed, but even if they really make up 10% of cases that probably doesn't change your overall risk that much. C.f.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9496895/#:~:tex....
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.
It was heavily contaminated water that they all consumed, of the 279 veterans there were 0.33% cases vs the statistically expected 0.21%. Which means they found 9 people with Parkinson, instead of the expected 6.
[edit] ignore the comment, read it wrong, its 279 cases
> It inhibits complex 1, the leading enzyme in a chain of reactions that convert food to energy in cellular organelles called mitochondria.
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.
> everyone should be taking mitochondrial complex 1 inhibitors
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.
> 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.
I think their point was - don’t do something daily with potentially powerful but unclear effects until we have some evidence on it’s long term safety. Unless there is a pressing, specific need (like cancer that may be worth the risk).
The explanation I saw was that radical oxides do a bit of damage to the cell and this triggers alarms which cause the cell to initiate repair mechanisms or kill itself. By taking anti-oxidants you are messing around with this alarm system, and basically make the cell live longer than expected, which increases cancer risk.
Mitochondrial disfunction is the basis for a huge number of cancers. See “Tripping over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer”[0] for a good history of it.
Go on Google Scholar and read through the research on Metformin. Metformin has a complex mechanism of action, acting is as a Mitochondrial Complex 1 inhibitor in some cases but not others. But the consensus seems to be that it reduces cancer risk by about 30%, relating to its capacity as a Mitochondrial Complex 1 inhibitor.
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.)
As I understand, Parkinson's does not kill you. NHS UK says: <<Parkinson's disease does not directly cause people to die>> Also: <<But with advances in treatment, most people with Parkinson's disease now have a normal or near-normal life expectancy.>>
This is often said, but I don't think it should paint too rosy a picture, it's still a massively debilitating disease. My father (diagnosed just after 50) lived nearly 30 years with it (died 78 - I guess that's normal life expectancy, but the last decade of his life he had a pretty bad quality of life). He is unusual in that his death cert just says Parkinson's Disease as cause of death, and I wondered at the time whether the consultant was making a point that PD can be the thing that kills you after all. He really didn't have much else wrong with him except that, once the drugs stopped working he couldn't swallow, talk or walk - he lost a ton of weight and the dementia side of it (which is far less discussed) meant any kind of communication was basically impossible. Not sure what my point is - but "you don't die of it" is a bit of an oversimplification.
That is incredible. To live 27-28 years after diagnosis is a modern medical miracle. That said, I am highly sympathetic to the points that you made. Essentially, he became a vegetable: <<any kind of communication was basically impossible>>
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.
The form of atypical Parkinson's caused by mitochondrial complex 1 inhibitors (progresessive supranuclear palsy) is not treatable, at least with normal Parkinson's drugs. My wild speculative guess is that many of the soldiers in this article have a mild-enough form of PSP that it's being misdiagnosed as Parkinson's.
Smells like fodder for a lawsuit that benefits nobody but lawyers and bureaucrats. Frankly, there’s nobody in the system who has any incentive to defend the taxpayers against these things. Imagine what it would be like if they could sue any organization for any disease prevalence that popped hot on a t-test for any period of time. And they had access to everybody’s medical records to do that. And the organization doesn’t even have to pay. It’s a nonprofit, and the people that have to pay are the original donors, again. But these weren’t willing donors; they were forced to ‘donate’ by people with guns. Oh, and they were also forced to pay for the study that is now forcing them to pay again for the result and of course more studies.
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.
