You're listening to Movers and Shakers, a podcast about living with Parkinson's. The show is

sponsored by Cure Parkinson's, whose urgent and only goal is to find a cure, and funded by Bordwave,

a networking community for technology leaders and a passionate supporter of

Kure Parkinson's. For more details on the charity's progress around research and its fundraising,

please visit cureparkinsons.org.uk.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Movers and Shakers, the award-winning podcast.

We're living with Parkinson's. I'm Mark Madel. Who else is here, please?

Former Mayor Harker. Rory Ketland Jerns.

Nicholas Mawston. Jillian Lacey Solomon.

And today we're going to be asking a profound existential question. What causes Parkinson's?

It seems to be very obvious we can't solve it, can't cure it, can barely treat it unless we know what actually happens, why it starts. And today we're going to look with filmmaker Sarah Thiel, one possible cause. Spoiler alert, she and leading researchers and neurologists increasingly convinced that pesticides play a big role. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for flying in from the States.

How are you? Very well. Thank you. Thank you, Mark.

Before we get into who you are and what you've done and why, I'd like to go around the table again, because I think when we looked at this last, there's a great deal of skepticism about it. Nick, you were mad, skeptical? Was I? I think so. Possibly. What do you think about pointing the fingers at pesticides? Nothing looked into Paraguayat. Paraguad is filthy stuff. It's absolutely lethal. I mean, it is literally lethal. One teaspoonful drunk by a human of paracquat would kill them. Yet it's used to clear fields of weeds and other vegetation in the United States in order to improve crop productivity. This is despite the fact that it's banned in the UK, although it's not banned for the purposes of manufacture and export rather embarrassingly. Its use is banned in the UK.

It's banned in the EU, it has been for some time. It's banned in China. It's banned in Brazil.

It's banned in Nigeria, but it's not banned in the United States of America, where it is

extensively used, even though it is extremely dangerous.

It is a highly effective herbicide. It kills anything green that it touches.

Rory, there's a huge amount of work on Parkinson's research and your patron of cure Parkinson's.

What do you think?

I've seen quite a lot of evidence which seems reasonably convincing.

And then I wonder about how many of us have been exposed to Paraguat,

because most of us around the table do not work in agriculture, do not live in the countryside.

...