Skepticism, Science & Pseudoscience

And science. in my opinion, has a strong vested interest (financial) in denying and concealing the effects of the thousands of chemicals that have been introduced to the human environment over the past 100-plus years. Look at the military's decades of denying the impacts of exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam veterans - my husband's cousin is one of them. DDT. Glyphosphate, the effects of which Monsanto lobbied successfully to hide for years.

FYI I am not some airheaded hypochondriac. I was a newspaper reporter for a major newspaper and regularly covered toxic waste dumps and chemical spills in New Jersey in the 1980s. I owned and often used in my reporting a copy of a thick USEPA guide to chemical compounds that listed their flammability, explosive potential, other hazard potential and suspected or known carcinogen potential. In those days various NJ manufacturers tried to hide the byproducts of their processes
by packing the materials in 55-gallon drums and hiring shady truck drivers to dump them anyplace they could - often in swamps, on farms, fields, vacant lots or - illegally - in landfills. That's how a number of NJ Superfund sites were created. About once a week or more in my part of NJ one of these trucks would overturn and spill, or lose a barrel, or someone would find chemical drums on their property or spot someone dumping them. We used to call it the "dump a day" story because these incidents were constantly happening.

Once I was invited by a company to visit a landfill that was accused of leaking stinking leachate into the Raritan Bay. The owners claimed there was no problem with the landfill. I strolled around for a bit, seeing nothing going on in the limited area I was permitted to see. When I got back to my car, I found that the feet of my pantyhose (I was wearing sandals; it was summer) had completely dissolved. There was absolutely nothing different about what I'd done that day except walk around on dirt paths atop a landfill suspected of containing toxic chemicals. Some airborne compound was obviously emanating from the soil atop the dump. Heaven knows what it was. My paper's rule was that a reporter did not inject oneself into a story, so I didn't write about the invisible fumes coming out of the ground. I wish I had. The landfill's owners had big political connections and whatever was going on that prompted hundreds of people to report the odors coming from the landfill, was more or less quietly settled. The only other time I'd seen nylon pantyhose damaged by chemicals was when I worked inspecting vials of Xylocaine (a successor of Novocaine) at (then-called) Astra Pharmaceuticals in Massachusetts in 1971. We used to toss rejected vials at one another to invite people to join us for coffee breaks. Someone tossed a vial at my feet, it broke and spattered Xylocaine on my leg, and my hose dissolved where the liquid hit. Were those incidents "all in my head"?

I'm not asking you to believe anything, but please don't issue blanket condemnations of MCS, because you know nothing about what it's like to have it. I can't go to CVS and pick up shampoo or laundry detergent like other people, because these will almost certainly cause unpleasant physical symptoms for me. By trial and error I'd found Trader Joe's laundry detergent, and one of their shampoos because they don't give me redness, itching, hives, etc. It is a pain in the ass and costly trying to find things I can use, since I don't know specifically which chemicals are causing my problems. I can guess at a few, and I avoid things containing chemical fragrances, since manufacturers only list "fragrance" as an ingredient and are not required to list specific compounds.

If these companies were ever forced to list, in detail, all the compounds they use in their products and to test them properly, it is my belief that MCS would turn out to be sensitivity to various specific chemicals, but not necessarily the same ones in different people. Not everybody reacts to the same chemicals in the same way, just as some people are allergic to strawberries and others to dust mites and still others to peanuts. And some people have no allergies, or suddenly develop them. I had a 6th grade teacher who was immune to poison ivy all her life, but one day when she was in her 50s she pulled down some poison ivy vines and got a whopping allergic reaction to them. The study of allergies is still in its infancy, and there is much more to be learned.