When filmmaker Sarah Teale’s husband, Gordon Chaplin, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2021, a friend shared news about their neighbors that would upturn Sarah’s world: just up the road, she said, there were six other people living with Parkinson’s. “Our little community in Hebron, NY,” Sarah said, “is totally rural. There’s hardly anybody living right here. When my friend told me, I was like, ‘What on earth is going on?’” Sarah decided to knock on her neighbors’ doors and ask about Parkinson’s. She had no idea what she was about to unearth.
The more Sarah talked to her neighbors, the more cases she discovered. By the time her list had the names of 36 neighbors with Parkinson’s on it, she quit counting. “I know there are loads more,” she said. The thing is: this cluster of Parkinson’s cases wasn’t just an uncanny coincidence. The cause was all around them: something in the soil and the air was secretly poisoning them.
Washington County, where Gordon has had a farm for 43 years, is the largest rural county in New York state. There are some beef farmers, but mostly dairy farmers. They grow a lot of corn. Many of the dairy farms near Gordon’s are small; Sarah told me, “It’s hard to make money in dairy. They’re struggling along.” She described her neighbors as “very libertarian” and “very private.” Sarah, an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, and Gordon, a former longtime staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine, have been married for 27 years and, for all those years, they’ve spent every summer on the farm. “It’s this gorgeous place,” Sarah said, “that I love, my husband loves, and our daughter loves—and, yet, it’s killing people.”
As Sarah’s list of neighbors with Parkinson’s grew and she became suspicious that something deeper was going on, she reached out to Ray Dorsey, MD, one of the world’s most read, cited, and followed neurologists who investigates the environmental causes of brain diseases, including Parkinson’s. Dr. Dorsey offered to come to Hebron and speak to Sarah’s neighbors. The tiny town hall, where they planned to host the gathering, is meant to hold 60 people, maximum. The night of Dr. Dorsey’s visit was cold and snowing. Sarah didn’t think anyone was coming. But they did, in droves. That night, Sarah counted 85 people in that small town hall, many of whom had Parkinson’s. “It was really moving,” she said, “because they didn’t know about each other.” For the first time, they realized they weren’t alone in this—and their disease wasn’t an anomaly.
When Sarah would later interview the neurologist in Albany that many of her neighbors in Hebron went to, the neurologist had nothing to say about the cause of Parkinson’s. Gordon’s own neurologist, at the prestigious NYU Langone Hospital in New York City has never talked to Gordon about the cause, either. But, that night, Dr. Dorsey broke the silence: “only 10 to 15% of Parkinson’s cases are genetic,” he said, “The rest is environmental.” For Gordon and his neighbors, he suggested, the cause was most probably pesticides—the pesticides they had been using on their farms for decades.
For years, many of the farmers in Washington County mixed the herbicide paraquat directly with their hands, before applying it to their fields twice a year. They didn’t wear any protective equipment. In fact, this practice is so widespread amongst Sarah’s neighbors that Washington County is one of the top three counties in the country for paraquat use. And the farmers use it for good reason: when it comes to killing weeds, it’s highly effective.
When you ask Syngenta, the company that manufactures the herbicide paraquat and is owned by the Chinese government, about the safety of their products, they officially “reject the claim” that paraquat is linked to the development of Parkinson’s. But while China is fine to ship paraquat overseas to the United States, they ban the use of the herbicide in their own country. And it’s not just China: in the United Kingdom, where Syngenta has manufacturing plants to produce the herbicide, it’s also banned. In fact, paraquat is banned in 70 countries, including the European Union. One of the few countries that doesn’t ban it? The United States.
Sarah, who’s about to begin postproduction on a film that investigates the causes behind the high prevalence of Parkinson’s disease in her farming community, uncovered decades of deceit. In her film, she talks with Carey Gillam, an investigative journalist who worked for 17 years as a senior correspondent for Reuters. Sarah told me, “Somebody dropped a whole load of boxes off at [Carey’s] house. They contained studies from Syngenta going back to the sixties and seventies, and contained a lot of their correspondence, a lot of very damning stuff.” Stuff that “showed their own scientists have known since back then that paraquat causes Parkinson’s.”
In fact, Sarah alleges that Syngenta hasn’t just known; they’ve orchestrated a coverup. A plethora of reports have indicated that, for years, Syngenta has hired PR firms to go after the reputations of scientists and journalists who are working to expose the toxicity of Syngenta’s products. Carey herself was a target. When Syngenta began threatening her bosses at Reuters, Carey says that she was told to stop her reporting. Instead of stopping, she quit.
Syngenta has allegedly engaged in other secretive efforts to suppress evidence of the causal link between their products and Parkinson’s. When Dr. Deborah Cory-Slechta published a study showing that paraquat impacts the brain, correspondence indicates that she was blocked from becoming a member of an EPA advisory panel that helps decide which farming chemicals are approved—or banned—in the United States.
For Sarah, this film is personal. “It’s about my husband, about my neighbors. It has my wedding video in it.” Her mission is to use it to educate: “Farmers need to know,” she said. “People need to know.” As Sarah started to share her findings about paraquat with her neighbors, one farmer said to her, “Sarah, our government would never let me use something that would damage my health.”
“I just felt awful about that,” she told me. “Because I know differently.”
Sarah has seen the toll this disease takes. “Living with someone who has Parkinson’s is extremely difficult. You just watch people get worse and worse,” she said. Her husband, who’s in his seventies, has started to hallucinate small, furry animals. He’s lost his sense of time: “He’s up at four o’clock in the morning,” she said, “demanding a martini or a beer because he thinks it’s nighttime. It’s really strange.”
She admits that she’s lucky to be able to afford help. “It’s very hard balancing [my career and caregiving],” she said. In addition, she’s still a mother to an 18-year-old daughter while looking after her 92-year-old mother. “But if I didn’t work,” she said, “I would go insane. I have to escape. But I have help.”
For many of her neighbors, paying for help isn’t an option. “The human toll is massive, especially if you are a farmer,” she said. “One of my neighbors, Robert, died recently. Before that, he had to give up his farm. He had to give up his cows, which was their income. And then his wife had to start driving an Amazon truck, which around us in the winter is really not fun because it’s steep, with dirt driveways in snow and ice. She was trying to take care of Robert and trying to earn a living for their kids. It’s awful. It’s really damaging.”
Recently, Syngenta announced that it will stop production of paraquat. Sarah insists that it’s not for humanitarian reasons. “It’s because they have all these massive lawsuits. One of them has 6,000 people taking part in it.” In fact, Sarah had planned to film one of the trials, back in February 2026, but on the eve of the trial, Syngenta quietly entered into a settlement. The plaintiffs were forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “There have been so many settlements at this point,” Sarah said, “that it was cheaper for Syngenta to just say, ‘we’ll stop making it.’ But it’s still being made.”
There are now generic versions of paraquat on the market, which will continue to be shipped to countries without a ban, including the United States, Australia, and many nations in Africa. In the past decade, paraquat use in the United States has doubled. Without a ban, that upward trend is expected to continue.
Recently, Sarah spoke with journalists in the UK who said they live in London, far from farms; herbicides like paraquat won’t affect them. Why should they care?
The truth is: herbicides like paraquat affect everyone. “When there were big fires in Canada,” Sarah said, “we [in the United States] were all choking. It travels in the air a long way. Or when there’s a hurricane. We know it drifts.” These chemicals are in the air. They’re in our water. They’re in our food. “It’s sprayed on corn,” she said, “and high fructose corn syrup is in everything. It’s in every chip, every soda. It’s in absolutely everything.”
Just recently, residents of Siskiyou County, California, were placed under a shelter-in-place order after a major paraquat spill exposed hundreds, including children at a nearby school. As the Environmental Working Group commented, “This isn’t just about one incident. It’s a reminder that hazardous pesticides don’t stay contained to farms—they impact entire communities.”
When studies, like the ones done by geographer Brittany Krzyzanowski, PhD, overlay the data sets around Parkinson’s, it’s clear: our exposure to toxic pollutants is often at the core of these disease clusters.
“You know what’s wild?” Sarah said. “It’s largely preventable. We can stop this.” In March, PMD Alliance joined advocates from around the country on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress to prioritize brain health research and ban toxic chemicals like paraquat. “97% of the money raised goes to a cure when we know that 90% of Parkinson’s cases are caused by the environment. We really need to be looking at the cause. It’s difficult—and controversial—but we need to.”
The title of Sarah’s forthcoming film is “Where the Sweet Birds Sang.” It comes from a Shakespearean sonnet, which her husband, a writer, quoted in the film. In the poem, Shakespeare confronts his final years, imagining himself like a tree whose leaves have all but fallen, who faces twilight as the sun fades in the west. It is an ode to impermanence, to the love that arises when we realize all that we behold dear is temporary. It is a reminder: cherish this moment.
As Sarah prepares to launch this film in the world, she hopes to share it widely: to bring it to Parkinson’s conferences and Rock Steady Boxing groups. The film is meant to break your heart—to make you behold the toll of this disease and these chemicals on families and communities. But it is also meant to underscore our love: we can bring light to what’s causing this disease. And, together, we can end it.
