The Florida Roundup - Abortions in Florida two years after six-week ban, maternal mortality, a Parkinson's pesticide link, weekly news briefing

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

This week on the Florida Roundup, we took a look at Florida two years after the state enacted its six-week abortion ban. We talked with OB-GYN Dr. Aaron Elkin about how his practice has changed and how patient care is affected (3:11). We also spoke with Kate Payne of The Florida Trib about how her reporting into the state’s maternal mortality committee led to the release of years of missing data (11:15). Then, we discussed an investigation by a team of student journalists at the University of Florida examining the links between chemical exposure and Parkinson’s Disease (19:23). And, PolitiFact’s Samantha Putterman joined us to fact-check a recent claim from Governor Ron DeSantis about redistricting (41:30). And later, a roundup of news from across the state including Florida’s largest teachers union filing a lawsuit against the Department of Education (45:45).

This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. It is terrific to have you along with us this week. About six hours after the Florida House gave its final approval to House Bill 300 a few years ago. The legislation was on, Governor on to Santis' desk. It was just after 10.30 at night in Tallahassee, and he was signing his name to it using blue sharpies. This is sound from a video posted on social media. at the time by John Steenberger, a long-time abortion opponent. He was surrounded by supporters of the new law that bans most abortions in Florida after the sixth week of pregnancy. This was 2023. The bill went into effect the following May, and right away, the number of abortions in Florida dropped about 2,500 per month.

We see now, two years later, is that drop was largely sustained. This is Isaac Maddo Zimitt. He's a data scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, the Institute Research, reproductive rights around the world. There were 84,000 abortions in 2023. That's the last full year before the six-week abortion ban. This year, the state is on pace to see fewer than 32,000 abortions. That's a drop of 62%. It does not necessarily mean Floridians are getting fewer abortions,

just not here in the Sunshine State. We also know from a lot of evidence, both in Florida and in many other places, is that when these kinds of restrictions go into effect, people are still really motivated to get this extremely common and safe kind of reproductive care. They might get in different ways. They might travel. They might access care through telehealth.

They might access care through other modes, through community health networks or ordering pills from websites overseas. The number of Floridians traveling out of state for abortions almost tripled in the first year of the six-week ban. North Carolina has a 12-week ban, along with the 72-hour waiting period. It's the closest state with the least restrictive law. The most popular states, though, are further away, Virginia and New York.

This increase in travel out of state has in some ways shifted where Floridians were accessing care and not necessarily whether they're getting that care. Providers in Shill law states like New York or Massachusetts have been continuing to offer telehealth abortion services to Floridians. Before the six-week ban, Florida had one of the last week. least restrictive abortion laws in the southeastern U.S. About one out of every 11 abortions was performed on a woman who traveled to Florida from out of state. This year, it's about one out of every 30. One of the big impacts that we saw with the ban going into effect is the number

out of out of state patients dropped. Two years after Florida instituted a six-week ban on most abortions, what is the state of reproductive health for women? What's the supply of care and the cost? What have you experienced? Call us now, 3.0.000. 305-9-5-1800. 305-9-5-18-00. Dr. Aaron Elkin is an OB-GYN with Memorial Regional Hospital in Broward County. Dr. Elkin, thank you so much for your time. We just heard a representative from the Gutmacher Institute mentioned Floridians using telehealth abortion options.

When we hear references to Floridians turning to telehealth abortion options, is that the Mifapristone medicine? That is one medication that we use in pregnancy care. Pregnancy care may involve other medications, for example, for miscarriage that may involve mifoprostone and may be involving mifephoprason accommodation with other medications to actually help patients with miscarriage. Florida has restricted abortions to six weeks in the last two years. You've been practicing OBGYN in Florida.

for 30 years. Have you seen changes in your medical practice? More than 30 years, actually. More than 30 years. Appreciate the correction. Have you experienced any changes in your medical practice in the past two years that you can attribute to the more restrictive abortion law in Florida? I absolutely. I think it's not just my practice. As an OBGYN and as a practicing physician, first you got to understand that as physicians, we really need to try to really have shared decision making with the patients and you're valued the patients. And we should be able to actually prescribe their treatment. In the last two years, there have been an enormous difficulty for physicians to understand

the law and then to clarify the law and then to actually provide medical care for patients. So the difficulty occurs that when the law first came out, is that physicians were simply we're, so what do we do now? How do we treat certain patients with certain clinical scenarios? So now we have to start, instead of taking care of the patients, we have to start consulting legal departments in hospitals, consulting other entities trying to understand and to clarify the law. And so where have you landed two years later on that clarification and how it intersects the medical services that you can provide your patients. When the law first came out, it was not clear at all.

For example, I'll give you a perfect example, to save the mother's life, right? There's an exception in there to save the mother's life. But that exception is so vague. We don't really know what that means. Is that mean to save the mother life when the mother is about to die? Is that means when there's a certain clinical scenario where continuing a pregnancy is completely futile and 100% of the time will end up in the mother dying, for example, an ectopic pregnancy. Up until later in the clarification, ACA, the Agency for Health Care Administration,

came out and said, okay, wait a minute, ectopic pregnancy, for example, is not a termination of pregnancy and abortion. It is a medical care. So ACA did take some steps to clarify for us, But that took a while. And I think that what have happened to patients and physician, they simply were stuck in delay of care. And then care will occur in other states. Patients will probably leave to other states. But most importantly, I think that what it created is difficult for patients to get

pregnancy care. Even if they do not want to terminate the pregnancy, what most people don't understand is that because of that delay of care created issue for patients that are getting sicker for simply trying to get pregnancy care and also miscarriages. Before the abortion restrictions, Florida already was experiencing what the Centers for Disease Control called a significant increase in the percentage of women not receiving prenatal care. One out of nine women were not getting care during their pregnancies. That was before these restrictions.

It sounds like you think that situation has probably gotten worse with the restrictions. Is that accurate, doctor? Yes, that is absolutely accurate. I think that you can't limit it to one factor alone. I think insurance premiums are going up. I think the availability of OBGYN and practitioners to provide that prenatal care has been so limited. And physicians are like any other entities are in practitioners. if it's becoming too difficult, they may choose to not do obstetrics and do just gynecology.

And maternal health is so important in our state that they just simply can't access a physician. And they may not get prenatal care in time or early. There's also been differences, years-long differences in income and racial access to prenatal care. Nationwide, a third of black women did not receive. care in their first trimester. How has Florida's restrictive abortion law impacted those differences amongst income and racial demographics? I think that it affected everybody, and certainly we know for sure that there is a racial discrepancy sometimes at obtaining prenatal care and reaching out to the limited resources that sometimes an OBGYN has or any practitioner.

It's part of one factor that is affecting an entire obstetrical care in Florida. I think that we're well aware that we want to have healthy babies. I went into OBGYN in order to take care of women and children and families for years and years. It's just been so much more difficult with all the different things that are actually preventing us from being able to provide what's called medical care, right? And I guess the pointed question here, doctors, two years after this abortion restriction in Florida, down to six weeks, has that compounded those difficulties for you to provide the kind of care that you were trained for and desired to give your community? Yeah, absolutely. I think that there are very few physicians and ability for patients to get a pregnancy care, including termination of pregnancy, including care for miscarriage.

A woman can have a miscarriage and she's just unable to find. a practitioner that's going to help her with it. That partially is because of the law, that partially because of the unavailability, and everything that you've been describing before. Two years after the six-week restriction was put in place here in Florida, are you clear about what the law allows you as an OBGYN practitioner in Florida to do and to not do to with a pregnant patient seeking an abortion? I'm certainly clear about the law.

What is not is that everybody else may be still hesitant, and that hesitancy creates delay of care, potential more intervention by legal team as opposed to the practitioner and the patient. I think that there needs to be some more clarification. I think there needs to be some more fine-tuning to understand what can we do in certain clinical scenarios. For example, let's say there's a clinical scenario where there is a pregnancy that is completely. completely incompatible with life. And you're kind of, not forcing, but you're telling the patient, you've got to go through this whole pregnancy and deliver the pregnancy that may not make it, but you have a life risk of dying from this pregnancy yourself.

Dr. Aaron Elkin, OBGYN with Memorial Regional Hospital in Broward County. Doctor, thank you so much for sharing your time with us. Thank you. Supporters pushed for Florida's six-week abortion ban for several reasons, including protecting life. but it was impossible to assess moms dying from pregnancy-related causes for a couple of years because the state did not release the data. Florida's Maternal Mortality Review Committee finally dumped three years' worth of reports only after the online news site the Florida Trib reported on the absence. Kate Payne was the reporter behind this story. She joins us now from our partner station WFSU in Tallahassee.

Kate, always nice to talk to you. Great reporting. Thanks for sharing it with us. Thanks for having me, Tom. What did these missing reports show about pregnancy-related deaths in Florida over those three years? Yeah. So just to underscore that, when we first started reporting on this, the State Department of Health, which is where this committee is housed, had not released publicly any new analyses of deaths of pregnant women since its report on 2022 deaths. excuse me, 2020 deaths, which was released in 2022. And so that was really significant because at that point, we had no insight into deaths in 2021 when maternal deaths spiked nationwide because of the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, as well as no insight into 2022 deaths when the state implemented a 15-week ban.

And, you know, still we don't have insight publicly. into 2024 data when the six-week ban was implemented. But as far as those new reports, something that was notable, we did see that increase as expected in deaths in 2021, again, part of a national trend related to COVID-19. And those deaths in 2022 did drop as expected again as the pandemic subsided. But then especially among black Floridians, we saw a significant spike in deaths in 2023. And is there any causes or attribution included in these reports about these changes in pregnancy-related deaths? So the reports do outline the top causes of death.

And so those are conditions like hemorrhage, hypertensive disorder, infection. embolism, but, you know, these reports, especially the most recent reports that were released after we started asking questions about this were much narrower than the reports that the state panel released in previous years. What do you mean by narrow? I reviewed reports going back a couple decades. So much narrower as far as the details that are provided in what's contributing to these deaths and the public health recommendations for how to stop what are overwhelmingly preventable deaths.

I was going to ask, how have these reports been used in the past, those more robust reports prior to 2020? How did regulators or health care providers use them? Sure. So this panel dates back to 1996, interdisciplinary panel of a number of different kinds of experts, midwives, doctors, folks who investigate deaths, social workers,

and their findings were then able to be used by hospital systems across the state because they are looking at specific trends of what is driving these deaths among pregnant women and women up to a year postpartum and really helping develop targeted programs to educate physicians, to educate patients, themselves on what to look out for. Because again, the CDC has found, by some analyses, about 80% of these deaths are preventable. They don't have to happen. And so with this critical information that is typically released yearly, annually, we can

respond in real time to what pregnant women in Florida are facing. What was the agency, the health department's agency's explanation for not publishing the three years of data prior to your reporting? So they said that the delays in releasing them were part of just regular business of making sure the reports were ready to be published. We have not gotten a lot of information out of the Department of Health. That's been one of the challenges in reporting on this. We still don't know, for instance, the basic duties in response.

responsibilities for this panel, the Department of Health will not release that information. So like a mission statement, for instance? A mission statement? Yeah, you know, when the panel meets, who is on the panel, the department still will not release that information. And all of that puts Florida in stark contrast to many other states. All 50 states have a panel like this one. And it's best practice for these panels to be inscribed in state.

state law to be articulated specifically what their responsibilities are, who sits on these panels, and Florida's panel notably is not written into state law or state rules. So we really have very little insight into the specific articulated responsibilities and duties of this panel. Well, when state lawmakers return to where you're sitting today in Tallahassee for that special legislative session around redistricting a couple weeks ago, they were greeted by a couple billboards that were, I think, inspired by your reporting. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so these billboards were put up a couple weeks ago, and yeah, it was by a reproductive health nonprofit called Mayday Health, and the director of that group told me that, yeah, they

read our story and were shocked and decided to put up those panels that said, release the data abortion bans kill. And the billboards are still up. I drove by one on the way to the radio station today. And yeah, just really underscoring, you know, what advocates and public health experts say is the vital importance of having this information transparently and timely available in order to stop more preventable deaths. So the billboards are up, but the 2024 data, which is now two years old has not been released yet. Is that correct, Kate? Correct. Yeah, we're still waiting on that. And there are often delays, you know, in releasing these reports. That is something we've seen in other states as well. But again,

it's striking the lack of information, public information that we were getting from the department. And we do have a public records request outstanding with the department trying to figure out. you know, who is on this panel. Yeah, providing a little bit of sunshine for this panel, the Maternal Mortality Review Committee in the state of Florida with the Department of Health. Kate Payne has been on the story. She's a reporter for the Florida trip.

Kate, we appreciate you sharing your reporting with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. Kate, joining us from our partner station, WFSU in Tallahassee. If you're a registered voter in Florida, we are looking for your voice for a future voter roundtable here on the Florida Roundup. Just send us a quick note.

Introduce yourself in the email, Radio at the Florida Roundup.org. Radio at the Florida Roundup. org. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. This is the Florida Roundup.

I'm Tom Hudson. We appreciate your time with us today. Katie Shealy's great-grandfather lived long enough to meet her. She was 10 years old when he passed away. His name was Haywood Shealy. He was a farmer cattle rancher, and he grew citrus.

The Shealys have farmed in Gulf County near the small town of Wewa Hitchka for five generations. Whenever he was 12 years old, his father actually left him and his older brother out there to cultivate the fields instead of going to school. So this has been a lifetime of farming for him. Comquots, lemons, oranges, grapefruit, all the great Florida citrus fruits were grown on this land. And Katie can reminisce about being out in the groves with her great-grandfather. We had stray cats running around and I would just run around with my. My sisters, we would get on each other's backs, climb the trees. We would go up there and grab all the fruits.

It was just a great farm life. Katie's great-grandfather was in his 80s while she was growing up. She remembers when Haywood's daughter, Katie's grandmother, told her her great-grandfather had Parkinson's disease. Katie was young and didn't really know what it meant at the time. I just know that my great-grandfather, he trembled. He shuffled when he walked. He had trouble sleeping. But aside from that, he lived a very full life.

About a decade after he died, Haywood Shealy's great-granddaughter was studying journalism at the University of Florida. Katie Shealy is now part of a team of student reporters who examined Parkinson's disease and links to a once popular weed killer called Paraquot. Paraquat is used at the base of young citrus trees and it's used to kill all the weeds because the weeds can out-compete with woody plants. Their reporting series is called Poisoned Pathways. The data on Parkinson's disease is alarming. Double the number of Americans have the disease today compared to just six years ago. Parkinson's disease is growing faster than Alzheimer's disease. More than 80,000 Floridians are living with Parkinson's today.

One of those is Roland Weigel Jr. He grew up in the citrus groves of Central Florida and goes by the name Rusty. All he could think about was getting to the beach. And so he had to do all the chores his dad told him to. He was shirtless. He wore a pair of shorts and he wore some rubber boots or tennis shoes, depending on the day. And he said he just got out there and he would hand spray paraquot along the base of these young trees. And that's what they did each summer. And he had friends that would do it

with him. And now he's 76 years old and he was diagnosed with Parkinson's after years of doing this. The weed killer paraquot is banned in dozens of countries but is still legal here in the United States. Studies have shown long-term exposure leads to a higher risk of developing Parkinson's. For Steve Caruso's wife, Jill, a simple sound was the hint something was changing with her husband, Steve. She said the first sign of his Parkinson's disease was the sound of coins jingling in his pocket as he put his hand in his pocket to calm his tremors. Steve Caruso worked for years as the CEO of Florida's natural growers. Now, you may recognize that name from the carton of OJ in your refrigerator. She said it never slowed him down, but it did have his roadblocks and she did have to remind him to.

take medicine, he got dementia. There was a lot of things that went along with it that eventually led him to retire. Steve Caruso died from complications of Parkinson's in 2023. He was 75 years old. Katie Shealy's reporting for the Poisoned Pathways Project brought her back to the Florida farm fields and groves of her youth and how farmers did what they had to do to make a living, knowing only what they knew back then. What would my great-grandfather have done? He wouldn't have put on those gloves and that respirator, he would have went out there with his bare hands and he would have gotten it done because he had a million other things to do to feed his family. We have to understand how these farmers operate and we need to do things to protect them while respecting their

occupation and their lifestyle. Florida has one of the highest number of people living with Parkinson's disease in the country. Hundreds of thousands of families throughout the state are touched by the disease. So what links are there to chemical exposure? What are the regulations for those compounds used to fight off weeds and bugs from our fruits and flowers. Who's most at risk? And how can you protect yourself and your family? 305-995-800 live on this Friday here on the Florida Roundup. 305-995-1800. Dr. Michael Oaken is with us now, Executive Director of the University of Florida's Institute for Neurological Diseases. Dr. Oaken, welcome to the program.

Thank you for your time. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Why does Florida have such a high prevalence of people with Parkinson's? Well, it's a great question. And I think a really important, and we are finding that the numbers and the cases are really high. And when we moved to Florida over 20 years ago to start the Fixel Institute, we were rising on the list of cases for Parkinson, particularly as we age and we were thinking this is mostly a disease of aging. But it turns out there we have the citrus industry.

We have other toxins and other chemicals. And so it isn't just our expanding population of aging folks. We're now beginning to realize that there are things in our environment that also put us at great risk. And Florida now sits behind California and growing and might overtake California in the number of cases. California obviously has a much larger overall population than does the Sunshine State here. Why are the diagnoses increasing so rapidly nationwide, doubling in six years, a 2x increase in six years? Is it just better testing? Yeah.

So a lot of folks have speculated as to why this may be. be and there's certainly an important dialogue that's happening now. And now Parkinson's is actually growing faster than Alzheimer's disease. And the global burden of disease study, which is a study sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has showed us these skyrocketing numbers. And so we no longer believe that it's just because people aren't getting diagnosed, people are getting diagnosed earlier. And as we get better, that we're just seeing more of these cases, we believe that there are other factors. And when we think about Florida, we think about the citrus industry, we think about chemicals, we think about pesticides, and we think about this all over the world. And so these

environmental factors are really important, also considering that less than 15% of people at Parkinson have a single gene mutation causing their Parkinson disease. And so we've got to look toward the environment. Well, I'll talk more about that and ask you more about that in a moment, Dr. Kyrie Lowry is also with us, a reporter for the Poison Pathways series with WUFT, our member station and partner station in Gainesville. Kyrie, the doctor talked about the citrus industry. We heard from your colleague earlier about citrus growers and folks working in the citrus industry. But tell us about Melanie Oliver and how this pandemic of Parkinson stretches well beyond the groves in central Florida. Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

This was definitely a fantastic reporting project, very rewarding. So Melanie grew up working at Disney. She was recruited from there right out of grade school. She worked several jobs for there, but most of her time, almost three decades at Disney World in near Orlando, Florida, was working in the pavilions around Epcot. So the kind of countries around Epcot. And she worked with pesticides, helping ensure that every plant in the park, pavilion surrounding the big silver dome at Epcot. They were all pristine and perfect. And if any were less than pristine, it was her job to go into one of many, many sprawling greenhouses, pick up a

new plant and then go replant it, kind of keeping up that perfect, you know, vacation ready image that Disney has. And so my story, a pandemic of Parkinson's kind of explains the idea that With Parkinson's linked to environmental factors, there are so many different exposures. Melanie herself, she grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and she remembered running behind the DDT truck, which was later discovered to have very negative effects on human health and, you know, just being exposed to so many different pesticides at Disney World. She recalled and she told me that, you know, she would go into these greenhouses while they were spread. or right after they sprayed pesticides. And she just remembered the the wet, damp feeling on her skin from these pesticides.

And at the time, they didn't think any harmful effects of it, you know. And she definitely didn't think that she would ever get Parkinson's from that. And that is one of the main leading factors that she attributes to her neurological disease now. And she was diagnosed at a very relatively young age compared to the Parkinson's diagnosis of years past, right? Yes, sir. She was diagnosed in her early 30s. So that would be early onset Parkinson's. And I'm sure Dr. Oaken can speak to this a little bit more.

But it is something that is definitely increasing. And it's a worrisome problem. You know, when you hear Parkinson's disease, I think the stereotype is that you kind of associate it with a more elderly population. But the fact that she was diagnosed so young raises this series of red flags and the series of problems and links to what we're putting out into our environment and these kind of pollutants. Yeah, Dr. Oaken, to speak to that causation correlation and the role of these diagnoses

earlier in life. Yeah, and it's really troublesome. And also, you know, scientifically, one of the things that is a head scratcher, right? We learned, you know, the gods of Parkinson disease and of all of these, you know, research studies have taught us for years that if you get Parkinson before the age of 50, it's probably a gene. It turns out that's only 20 percent, one in five people, you know, in that group. And so we've had to rethink this, particularly as we're seeing it now, growing faster than Alzheimer's. And so when we look at folks like Melanie Oliver, we say, what is it that these young people are doing and doing

differently over a lifetime? And there's a word that people throw around called exosome. It's a big word, but all it means is how much exposure do you have of these things over a lifetime? And maybe we should begin to care about these things in our environment. You know, we think about our kids and playing fields and, and, you know, kids don't mind playing with weeds, but, you know, we should probably get rid of some of these pesticides and things and think about that exposome. And so the dialogue and the thinking about this has really shifted. And I think it's a great and important discussion for our villages and our communities all around the world to have. Well, that's what we're doing here on the Florida Roundup, Dr. Michael Oaken, with this executive director of the University of Florida's Institute for Neurological Diseases.

Kyrie Lowry is with us, a reporter on the Poison Pathway series from our partner station WUFT in Gainesville, 305-995-1800. Andrew, has been listening in and patient in Sarasota. Andrea, go ahead. You're on the radio. Hi there. I'm a speech-language pathologist traveling to people's homes, and I'm originally from a situate Massachusetts. I've been blown away by how many Parkinson's cases I have down in Florida. The common denominator for these people that I've seen are either golfers or they tend to golf courses or they did landscaping.

They were outside. Also, I have a client who is a veteran from the Vietnam War and he was in Vietnam and he was loading Agent Orange onto his planes and dropping it. His Parkinson's is the worst Parkinson's I have ever treated in my life. Andrea, thank you for sharing the stories and for the work that you're doing with Parkinson's patients in the Sarasota area. Doctor, you spoke about citrus industry. Andrea and Sarasota spoke about the common denominator. She has anecdotally with folks working outside. What about the backyard gardeners?

What about the folks, you know, trying to tend to some. mango trees or, you know, a couple of orange trees or holding on to a bed of flowers that they're trying to grow in Florida and using, you know, the best judgment, perhaps the best chemistry as well to get results. Yeah, you know, when Ray Dorsey and I wrote the book, The Parkinson Plan that came out last year, you know, people started to look in their garages. And it turns out if you look in your garage and you look in your sheds, a lot of these chemicals are there in your house. They're right there underneath your nose. And one of the most tragic stories I can share is one of my mentors at Emery, Tim Greenemeyer,

who's at the University of Pittsburgh, actually used one of these chemicals to make Parkinson in the lab. It's called Routanone. And he ended up getting Parkinson himself. And there's a paper in science where he talks about this. And he didn't use protection. And he thinks that if he had protected himself better, that he may not have come down with the disease. And so we have a Parkinson 25, 25 things in the book that you can do to make sure that you protect yourself. And even if you have Parkinson not to worsen those symptoms.

But yeah, there are things in the house. And the other story was as my wife, you know, after the book published, sort of read the book and went around our house and may have emptied out some of our cabinets. And so it's just it's an important thing to pay attention to it. I laugh, but some serious stuff there. Kyrie, you heard from the caller there talking about working with the Vietnam veteran and Agent Orange. There have been cases of chemicals that have been banned because of health effects. DDT being one of them, you mentioned the kind of old school mosquito sprayer. How do these bans happen and are there lessons to be learned about that process in regards to chemicals and compounds that are at least linked in your reporting to Parkinson's?

Yeah, that's a great question. And so a lot of these bans happen through a legislative process. We have a reporter on our project who kind of explained an RFK statement. He originally said, I think a few months ago or at the beginning of the year, that the U.S. was going to try and ban the kind of worst of the worst pesticides. And for a little bit, that included Paraquot. And while there is some, you know, some progress. Syngenta is one of the leading manufacturers.

of Paraquot, they announced that they're going to completely stop production of Paraguat by June, but, you know, there's still hundreds of other manufacturers that still produce and still sell this. Let's go to Jeannie in Apopka. Jeannie, go ahead. You are on the radio. Thanks for your patience with us. Yes, thank you. I work for the Farm Workers Association of Florida based in the Papka with five offices in the state.

There's an unseen number of people that might have. Parkinson's disease, about 98% of the farm labor in Florida, in citrus, are workers that come here on an H2A worker visa. Some countries like Mexico and Honduras and other places. And a lot of them come here and work, and then they go back to their home countries, and they could get diagnosed with Parkinson's in their home countries, and then that never gets recorded. And then they are not welcome back. We also know of one person in particular who contacted our office about two years ago. And he had Parkinson's and other stabilitating illnesses that his doctor in Mexico attributed to exposure to Paracot in the United States. But because of the lack of reporting requirements in Florida that we don't have in Florida about pesticide reporting of use of Paracquot and other pesticides,

that we were not able to prove it. and he was afraid to make a statement publicly about it because he was even afraid in his own country that there could be retaliation. So there could be hundreds, if not thousands of former farm laborers that worked in Citrus in Florida that have gone back to their home country with Parkinson's disease. And that is invisible a side of this issue. The reliance on agriculture on seasonal workers. Jeannie, thank you for bringing up that important point.

Dr. Oaken, let me ask you finally, given that. the sharp increase and trends for Parkinson's in Florida. How is the state preparing for caring for a growing number of folks with the disease? Well, you know, I'm actually really proud of the state of Florida and we've really been stepping up to, you know, to be leaders, you know, not just at the University of Florida, but our other public and private institutions. The state legislature, there's been a recent bill passed to create a Parkinson registry. A number of us are are working along, you know, with those efforts. And, and so I think that it takes a village.

And I always tell people, you know, whether we're, you know, out at book events talking about, you know, the Parkinson plan or other things. The most important thing is tell your story. Yeah. If everybody tells their story, you told a bunch of stories today. And bravo, thank you. That's the key. I got to give thanks to Kyrie Lowry and all the reporting at WFT with the Poison Pathway project.

Kyrie, thank you for sharing your reporting, Dr. Michael Oaken with the University of Florida Institute of Neurological Diseases here on the Florida Roundup. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Last week, we spoke a lot about the new congressional map. Governor DeSantis signed that map into law on Monday, and here on this Friday, there are at least three lawsuits that have been filed against it. One is from a black-led group called Equal Ground Education Fund.

It names 18 Florida voters as plaintiffs. This is the group's executive director, Genesis Robinson, before lawmakers approve the map. To give 85% of our seats to a party that doesn't even have at least 50% of the vote in Florida, it's a problem. From where I come from, that's called cheating. Four districts that are currently represented by Democrats become much more Republican areas under the new map. Another lawsuit is from a group called the Campaign Legal Center and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. It filed on behalf of a half dozen Florida registered voters, including a woman who lives in what today is the district represented by Democrat Maxwell Frost. Now we are at risk of returning to a reality that we've seen before.

A South where black communities will exist in large numbers but have little to no representation in Congress or in the state legislatures. And there's a third lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of Florida, the League of United Latin American Citizens and Common Cause. Sandy Frank is the president of the Lee County Chapter of the League of Women Voters. What we do know that it was not done in the sunshine, it was done behind closed doors, according to the testimony at the hearings, by one individual who worked for the governor over a two-week period with, according to him in the testimony, no input from anybody else. The lawsuits were filed in state court in Tallahassee. They argue the map violates the state's fair district's constitutional amendment.

That amendment requires political districts must be drawn without partisan favor and cannot deny equal opportunities for racial and language minorities to participate in the political process. Mojazzle is an outside attorney for the governor. This is what he told lawmakers last week. The governor's position on the issue is this. We should not use race at all when drawing districts. We should instead adhere to basic principles of equal protection, which are that race plays no role in the process.

We've heard from a lot of you on this new map, in the redistricting process. Yuri and Boca Raton emailed, Jerrymandering is ultimately a symptom of using a single member winner take-all voting system. The best solution is to adopt proportional representation with multi-seat districts where votes earned would match seats one. Mike wrote, I live in Naples and feel like the district map that was just replaced was already not drawn correctly.

Mike writes, my representative is located in Miami and his district slices across the state to pull Republicans into a more democratic-leaning group of Miami residents. Michael in Fort Lauderdale wrote, drawing district maps by one political party is an outright bleep to Florida voters. Michael, you did not write bleep, but I'm not going to say that word. It's truly a joke, Mike writes. That's not funny.

A bipartisan committee makes more sense to handle this matter. We got a note from Philip in Jacksonville. Philip writes, all congressional districts nationwide should be determined by independent non-partisan commissions. Philip, you probably already know this, but in some states, that does happen. Philip continues in his email. He writes, Republicans have, however, unanimously rejected all efforts at the national level. Democrats cannot disarm unilaterally, and until we have bipartisan agreement, this sort of race to the bottom will continue. We heard from Dog Park Cat in St. Augustine.

Kathleen is her real name. She goes by Dog Park Cat in her email. She writes, gerrymandering. She writes, take all the lines away and use the county lines. as districts, period, stop and codify that so it can't be changed. You know, it's not a bad idea, Kathleen. The problem with it, though, is congressional districts have to have equal populations. And Corinna writes, all this redistricting has just led to more and more of a polarized country.

You can add your voice by emailing radio at the Florida Roundup.org. Now, there's lots of claims about redistricting, so let's talk with Sam Putterman, Florida reporter with our news partner, Politifact. Hey, Sam. Hey, thanks for having me. So Governor DeSantis said one of the reasons for a mid-decade redistricting was because of population changes since the 2020 census. He went on to tell Fox Digital that in the past six years in Florida, the Sunshine State

has, quote, moved from a Democrat majority to a one and a half million Republican advantage, end quote. So check the facts on that statistic, Sam. Yeah, so we read it DeSantis half true on this one. So Florida currently has about 1.5 million more Republicans registered to vote than registered Democrats. But DeSantis overstates Democrats' former party registration edge. So Democrats had about 100,000 more registered voters than Republicans in 2020, that last year of the census. But Democrats held a plurality, not a majority of voter registrations when taking into account, you know, people not affiliated with a party or those registered with a third party.

And then when measured, you know, by actual votes cast, you know, which determines who serves in office, unlike voter registration. data, Republicans have been performing well in Florida long before 2020. They've been controlling the governorship, the legislature, the congressional delegation for decades. So the last time Democrats actually held a true majority of Florida's registered voters also was in 1992. So it's far before, you know, 2020 or anything recent. What are the other interesting kind of nuances of this justification is we know that the Supreme Court said that congressional districts can be drawn with partisan gerrymandering, essentially. But the Florida Constitution, as it exists today with you and I talking with the fair districts,

one of the two components of the fair districts is that districts cannot be drawn with partisan favor or disfavor. So that's kind of in the air as the governor talks about this Republican, quote unquote, advantage or the swing of the Republican advantage in voter registrations. Right, right. And he kind of combines, right, the swing of Republicans in a way, but also talks about it as like pure politics. population, I think sometimes to distance himself a little bit from Republican. So he kind of plays a back and forth game a little bit of whether it's population growth, you know, whether it's particularly a partisan act. And yeah, exactly. Yeah. What's the measuring stick that we're actually using here? All right. Well, one of the areas significantly changed with this new congressional map is in the Tampa area. The Tampa Democrat district is kind of drawn out,

split across a number of other Republican-leaning districts. Florida House Democratic leader, Fentress Driscoll, represents the Tampa area, and made this claim in Tallahassee during the special session. Under federal law, you cannot engage in partisan gerrymandering. Sam, I made reference to this just a few seconds ago here, but fact-checked this. Fact-checked the Democratic leader saying that partisan gerrymandering is illegal under federal law, is it? Right, no, you know, so we rated this one false. There is, you know, no federal law that says states can't partisan gerrymander.

In 2019, it was the Supreme Court, right, that ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims are political questions that federal courts can't answer. The majority opinion, you know, they did acknowledge that excessive gerrymandering was incompatible with democratic principles, quote, but nonetheless still said that state legislatures, you know, in Congress, they have the responsibility police it, not the court. So the court's position at the time was, you know, if Congress wants to pass a law to say that this is, you know, illegal, that's under Congress's purview to do so. And it did say, you know, while courts have gotten involved in other redistricting related claims like racial gerrymandering,

the court said that partisan gerrymandering is particularly thorny because it's well-settled law that legislatures, you know, can consider politics when drawing maps. So Sam Puterman, watching Florida politics and fact-checking them with us here with Politifax. Sam, always a pleasure. Thanks so much. Great. Thanks for having me. If you are registered voter, in Florida or plan to be during this political cycle. We'd love to hear from you because we're putting together some roundtables of voter voices over the next several months. If you would like to be considered, just tell us a little something about yourself in an email. You can send it to Radio at the Florida Roundup.org. Radio at the Florida Roundup.org. I'm Tom Hudson, and you're

listening to the Florida Rondup from your Florida Public Radio Station. Florida's largest teacher Union filed the lawsuit this week against the Department of Education, alleging the disparity between traditional public schools and private schools receiving taxpayer vouchers violates the state constitution. The lawsuit comes from the Florida Education Association. It's joined by a number of parents and school board members as well. It alleges nearly $5 billion dollars of taxpayer money is being sent to private schools and charter schools via the family empowerment scholarship and that those schools are not held to the same standards and oversight as traditional public schools. This is FIA President Andrew

bar. This lawsuit is a last resort. We cannot wait for another year. We cannot wait for other elected officials. Our students cannot lose one more day of education. Florida's chief financial officer, Blaise Angolia, dismissed the lawsuit and defended the state's universal voucher program, saying it empowers parents. This lawsuit, in my opinion, is just another and a long line of excuses for them not giving the money to the teachers, them keeping it for the administration. As of March, there were an estimated 521,000 students enrolled in private and homeschool options using school voucher funds for this school year that is wrapping up. And then there's this note in Florida education this week, potty training in Pascoe County.

It puts a tremendous stress on our kindergarten teachers to have kindergartners and first graders in diapers in school. This is Pascoe County Schools Superintendent John Legg on Tuesday. We need our parents to understand. It is not a suggestion that students can use the restroom independently. It is a requirement. Parents have soon to be kindergartners in Pascoe. You have been warned.

Finally, in the roundup this week, kind of like a snowball in Florida, the Sunshine State's hockey dominance has melted away. You know, for the first time in at least seven years, there's no Florida hockey team still playing. in the NHL playoffs. Florida's reign in playoff hockey began in 2020 with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Lord Stanley's Cup came to Tampa, the Lightning winning the first of what would become two Florida back-to-back championships, and then in 2024, the Florida Panthers won their

first of two consecutive championships. The trophy called Florida home in four of the past six years. Yeah, twice in Tampa, twice in Broward County with the Panthers. The Panthers, the defending champs, they failed to make the playoffs this season, and the lightning were taken out in the first round. So maybe, like a lot of visitors to our state, the Stanley Cup will eventually grow cold and tired, dreaming of the sand and the surf and the Florida sunshine,

and will return. Just not this year. That is the Florida Roundup for this week. It is produced by WLRN Public Media in Miami with assistance from WUSF in Tampa. The show is produced by Bridget O'Brien. Denise Royal is WLRN's senior producer of content streaming and news products.

WLRN's director of live programming is Katie Munoz and the vice president of radio is Peter Maris. The program's technical director is M.J. Smith. Engineering and help each and every week from Doug Peterson, Harvey Bissard, and Ernesto J. Our theme music comes from Miami Jazz guitarist, Aaron Leibos, at Aaron Leibos.com. Thanks for emailing, calling, listening, and above all, supporting public radio in your slice of our Sunshine State. I'm Tom Hudson. Have a terrific weekend.