Dow insecticide causes Parkinson’s disease, lawsuit alleges

A New York man has filed a lawsuit blaming exposure to Dow Chemical’s once-commonly used insecticide chlorpyrifos for his development of Parkinson’s disease, a claim that adds a new twist to an explosion of litigation over alleged pesticide impacts on human health.

The lawsuit, filed in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, was brought by Alexander Ramos of Selden, New York, a former pest control worker. The lawsuit names Dow Chemical; Corteva, which is a spinoff of Dow and DuPont; and FMC Corp as defendants.

The suit accuses the companies of working “in tandem to design, manufacture, and distribute Chlorpyrifos, and to ensure that the causal link between Chlorpyrifos and Parkinson’s disease remained hidden from the public, from Plaintiff, and from the medical and scientific communities.”

The suit takes specific aim at Dow, which brought chlorpyrifos to market in the mid-1960s.

“Since Dow first applied to patent it, Chlorpyrifos’s inventors, formulators, distributors, and sellers have known that Chlorpyrifos is toxic to the human brain,” the suit states. Despite “mounting evidence of Chlorpyrifos’s neurotoxicity, Defendants fought tooth and nail to continue selling Chlorpyrifos to the unsuspecting American public.”

Dow did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did representatives for Corteva or FMC.

Aimee Wagstaff, the lawyer representing Ramos, said the lawsuit is the first to tie the insecticide to Parkinson’s disease but she expects more. She said the companies “hid the risks so they could pocket billions of dollars …”

Mass litigation

The Ramos case appears to be the first in what some lawyers predict could become a landslide of new pesticide-related litigation. Multiple large personal injury and mass tort law firms are currently advertising for plaintiffs with Parkinson’s disease they blame on chlorpyrifos use.

The litigation focus on Parkinson’s disease, which tends to afflict older individuals, comes alongside litigation brought in recent years over allegations of harm to children from chlorpyrifos exposure. There have been many studies showing children exposed to chlorpyrifos while in utero or in early childhood can suffer neurodevelopmental harm.

The claims linking chlorpyrifos to Parkinson’s also are based on scientific research, including a study published in December that found people from California farm communities with long-term exposure to chlorpyrifos were more than twice as likely to later develop Parkinson’s disease compared to residents without exposure.

The science associating the brain disease with chlorpyrifos exposure is “very robust,” including “strong epidemiological evidence,” according to Jeff Bronstein, a professor of neurology with the University of California – Los Angeles Howard and Irene Levine Family Center for Movement Disorders. Bronstein is also a co-author of the December study.

The litigation over chlorpyrifos is among a mass of nationwide lawsuits over alleged pesticide harms that are clogging up court dockets from coast to coast.

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto, the maker of glyphosate herbicide, in 2018, has been wrestling with well over 100,000 legal claims alleging its glyphosate products cause cancer. Bayer has paid more than $11 billion in settlements and jury awards and is proposing to pay another $7.25 billion for a class action settlement.

And more than 8,000 legal claims have been filed against Syngenta, the maker of paraquat weed killer, alleging paraquat exposure causes Parkinson’s disease. Syngenta earlier this year said it would stop making paraquat.

A history of controversy

Chlorpyrifos insecticides were widely used for decades, including in agriculture and in homes. In the early 2000s, however, Dow phased out most residential uses of the chemical in an agreement with regulators, but agricultural use continued.

The chemical was on track for a nationwide ban from farming as well after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  said in 2015 that it could no longer be confident that the risk from aggregate exposure to the chemical met legal safety standards.

But in early 2017, Dow lobbyists sought relief from the new Trump administration with a request to keep the pesticide on the market and made a $1million donation for the Trump inaugural fund, and the planned ban was sidelined.

In August 2021, the EPA again said it would stop the use of chlorpyrifos in food production to “better protect human health, particularly that of children and farmworkers” but several farm groups filed a court action to reverse the decision, and an appeals court vacated the EPA decision to ban it.

Currently, the EPA is allowing limited use of chlorpyrifos in agriculture.

Nathan Donley, environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the saga of chlorpyrifos regulation is emblematic of larger problems with pesticide regulation in the United States.

“I don’t think there is a better example of everything that has failed with how the US regulates pesticides than chlorpyrifos,” he said.

Ray Dorsey, a neurologist who directs research into environmental causes of brain diseases at Atria Health and Research Institute, said chlorpyrifos should be banned.

“If we want to create a world where diseases like Parkinson’s are increasingly rare instead of common, we need to reduce or eliminate our use of chemicals tied to the disease,” said Dorsey.  “Stopping use of chlorpyrifos would be a great place to start.”

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