I circulated this article to the Pipeliners last night.

Light shed on Parkinson's culprit - Iron
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Ne...r/02100701.asp

Paula's comment about the article begged the question...Does the "environmental poison" (my name for it) each on of us was exposed to at some point in our lives have anything to do the "degree" of PD symptoms that we each have and the label "designer disease" that has been attached to PD;e.g. dystonia, tremor, bradykinesia?

As a child I was raised in Central Florida until I married an moved to Texas. Central Florida is the home of Open Pit mining of Phosphate, within 10 miles of my home. In the 50s and 60s, like more Floridians, we didn't have A/C in our home, so the windows were open most of the year.

I would consider my exposure to be mild, but Paula's exposure to steel mills would be considered serious. Hence, her PD symptoms are severe compared to mine, even after 19 years for me, but less than 10 for her.

Interestingly, my husband, who as a teenager cleaned out the caked on rock from the rock crushers with a sledgehammer five days a week, developed Leukemia in his 40s and died in 1995 after a bone marrow transplant. There is no Leukemia in the family tree...now or in the past.

The only other exposure I can even begin to consider is that we lived in the middle of a huge rice paddy in norther Japan from 1972 to 1974. But, other than the rats that infested the paddy, I can't think of anything else that was used that would be a culprit.

What do you think?