April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month and, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation, nearly 90,000 people in the US are diagnosed with this disease every year.
In the summer of 1982, seven heroin users were admitted to a California hospital paralyzed and mute. They were in their 20s, otherwise healthy — until a synthetic drug they had manufactured in makeshift labs left them frozen inside their own bodies. Doctors quickly discovered the cause: MPTP, a neurotoxic contaminant that had destroyed a … Lire plus