A Herbicide Linked With Parkinson’s Disease Could Soon Be Banned in Minnesota

First, Lynn Johnson’s grandfather, a farmer, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Then she got her own diagnosis, at 45. After that, her mother was diagnosed, too.

Johnson, 60, said that nobody in her family is genetically prone to the disease, which can spur tremors, instability, rigid or slow movements and cognitive effects like depression. She suspects that an environmental cause spurred her illness.

“I had to stop working, and my husband’s retiring soon because he feels like he needs to take care of me,” Johnson said at a news conference on Wednesday, March 11.

Surrounded by several other Parkinson’s patients, including members of a boxing club she joined to maintain strength and coordination, Johnson and others urged Minnesota lawmakers to ban paraquat, a herbicide that has been linked with the complex neurological disease.