Clostridium novyi

You know, they wouldn’t have to be doing this state-by-state if, despite knowing it’s a Parkinson’s risk for decades and having seen multiple class action lawsuits by victims conclude as much, the EPA (Biden’s, not Trump’s, surprisingly!) hadn’t caved to lobbies and instead of banning this stuff had made it fully, unrestrictedly legal again in two separate decisions (2021 and 2024).

This is the likely cause of my grandfather’s Parkinson’s, which is what killed him. He was born in 1933. My mom and her siblings all have heightened risk, because they were born/grew up around it in the 1960s. It’s a specter that hangs over all of them as they’re aging.

My generation of cousins was the first who, as far as we know, aren’t under that cloud. We grew up after it was known to be toxic to humans, after its use was discontinued by many farmers, and away from the immediate vicinity of its usage.

I’ve known about what happened to them since I was a kid (I spent years watching him slowly die of it). Back then I never thought I was going to live to see generations of people my age and younger who were at heightened disease risk due to exposure (as adults and children). When I was older, I learned that it was only banned piecemeal, not nationally. It was and is still in use in conditions where largely-migrant farm workers who have no control over their working conditions are poisoned much more directly, sometimes dying before they even have time to develop cancer or Parkinson’s. And that was with restricted usage, when you needed a license to poison people (which is sick in and of itself; but RUA did at least curb it a little in some cases).

In 2021 it was opened up for freer use by anyone, aggressively marketed. The EPA said the many, many longitudinal studies of lung damage, cancer, and Parkinson’s weren’t enough grounds to stop its use.

It is banned in 70 countries. Poisoning from it has no cure. There is no way to undo this for those exposed. The only “treatment” option for my family who grew up on a farm where, in the 1960s and 70s, my grandparents naively thought that what they were told about its safety was true, is a choice between whether to seek expensive testing for microscopically-early signs of what they know to be an incurable disease, or to wait it out without knowing. There are no good options.

They are the lucky ones, in a lot of ways. They were not the chemical factory workers whose lungs and livers and kidneys fail in days or weeks if they are exposed. They are not the migrant children of today working in the fields directly, burning their skin, showered with dilute poison sprayed from airplanes. They are not even their father, working outside all day in the midst of his crops. But they still have to live with that fear, had to live with the trauma of decades of their father’s slow, degenerative sickness, because they once were little kids who lived near their land. They went out in the wheat to find a quiet spot to read; they played outdoors; they existed like any child would. The chemical manufacturers would say my grandparents are to blame; that they were at fault for not knowing what they did not know. Stupid and naive for believing in modernity, responsible for poisoning themselves and risking their children’s health. It’s what they say about the class action plaintiffs now, as legal battles drag out with the sued parties just hoping it will take long enough that the injured parties might give up or lose their cognitive function or die.

"I forgive you everything, Lord," she whispered. And she slid her hands inside him.

Edit: had to update this one too 👍

Original below + alt with a black circle