Martin Bennett had been spraying ragwort and thistles with his dad on the family’s Waikato dairy farm when, as they sat down for lunch, he noticed the pot plants in the dining room wilting. It was 1975, the year of Abba the band, Jaws the movie and, in New Zealand, the Māori land march and new PM Rob Muldoon. Bennett was 16.
He remembers when the manufacturers started dyeing the sprays pink so you could see where you’d been in the paddocks. He’d take a shower at the end of the day and notice the white sock line on his ankles beneath his bright pink legs. The only precaution he remembers taking in those days was “spraying with the wind”.
Now 65, Bennett is a decade on from his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and has become increasingly convinced that the pesticides he used so freely – and without protection – from a young age have contributed to the cause. It’s not a view he came to lightly. “I really am a facts-based person and I don’t follow wild theories.”
Science supports him. Farmers, and others exposed to pesticides in their jobs, are over-represented in Parkinson’s statistics. It’s a cruel disease, causing a range of symptoms, including shaking and tremors, rigidity, and balance and movement problems as a result of the loss of dopamine-producing cells in the brain.
Now, there are growing calls for greater restrictions on the chemicals. Leading that lobby is globally renowned Dutch consultant neurologist Professor Bas Bloem, a recent visitor to New Zealand, who says a Parkinson’s pandemic is upon us because of our exposure to toxins. He believes it is not ageing that causes Parkinson’s but environmental toxins.
Whereas rates of Alzheimer’s since 1990 have largely kept pace with the ageing population, the prevalence of Parkinson’s has doubled in the past 20 years and has been expected to double again in the next 20, making it the world’s fastest-growing neurological condition.
“The reality is even worse,” Bloem says. “The latest datashows growth is exceeding our worst expectations – we have already reached the number we expected to reach by 2035.”