Publication: Guardian

UCLA Expert: Beate Ritz: Professor, Fielding School of Public Health; Professor, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Faculty, Center for Occupational & Environmental Health

Synopsis: In a court filing challenging the EPA’s paraquat assessment, three scientists — including Ritz, said that numerous studies implicated paraquat as a cause for Parkinson’s.

UCLA News: The scientists said that the EPA had looked at 26 epidemiological studies in its assessment of paraquat and Parkinson’s and all but two of them found positive associations between the pesticide and the disease. Yet the EPA downgraded most of those studies, focusing on those that did not find an association, the scientists said. “EPA discounted many important epidemiological and animal studies for reasons that were not sufficiently grounded in science,” the scientists wrote.

Read more at Guardian.