Paraquat is one of the most acutely toxic herbicides still in commercial use — so hazardous that the EPA restricts it to licensed applicators and more than 50 countries have banned it outright. Sold in the United States since 1966 under brand names including Gramoxone, Firestorm, Helmquat, and Parazone, it was sprayed across corn, soybean, cotton, and orchard acreage for decades. The people who handled it — farmers, commercial applicators, farmworkers, and landscapers — mixed and loaded the concentrate and sprayed it from backpack units, handguns, and tractor rigs, season after season, absorbing it through the skin, inhaling drift, and wearing splashes of it on their clothes.
Peer-reviewed research has since linked chronic paraquat exposure to Parkinson's disease, a progressive and incurable neurological disorder; one widely cited study found exposed individuals faced a 1.3 to 3.6 times greater risk. Plaintiffs allege Syngenta and Chevron understood that risk for years and failed to warn the people spraying it. More than 6,600 claims are now consolidated before Chief Judge Nancy J. Rosenstengel in MDL 3004 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, with additional cases in state courts including Philadelphia. A settlement framework has been under negotiation since 2025 but is not yet final, and attorneys continue to review new claims.
If you mixed, loaded, or sprayed paraquat — or worked and lived around the fields where it was applied — and were later diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, you may be able to bring a claim.
