INTRODUCTION to Category: “Surviving the Chemical Age”  

“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now being subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.”  Rachel Carson, The Silent Spring

“Canary in a Coal Mine”

In the past, coal miners would lower a canary in a cage down into the mine to check for the presence of dangerous gases. If the canary was sick or dead when its cage was pulled back up, the miners knew not to go down into the mine.

Nowadays, all of us, our loved ones and our pets are “canaries.” We are the subjects in an uncontrolled experiment by the Chemical Industry. We are all being sickened by it, whether we know it yet or not.

When I was a young child, we worried about “The Bomb”— annihilation by nuclear war. Today the government keeps us on constant alert about possible terrorist attacks, even though our personal risk of being affected by one is close to zero.

A Clear and Ever-Present Danger to Public Health

But there’s another serious risk to our health and our lives about which our governmental agencies are remarkably silent.

The Chemical Industry is killing us slowly, with overexposures to millions of unregulated chemicals that have not been tested for human safety. There are 70 million chemicals on the market today. Only a handful of them are government regulated. And 15,000 new ones are added every day.[1]

A single product can contain hundreds of chemicals. And no one knows how these chemicals interact with each other to cause harm to us and the environment.

Consider the steep rise in modern health conditions:

• In the 1950s, 1 in 200 people was diagnosed with cancer during his or her lifetime. Now the cancer rate is 1 in 2.
• Alzheimers was unusual in the 1950s and ‘60s; now every family has at least one, if not several, members who have some form of dementia.
• Obesity and diabetes are at epidemic levels.
• Autism, once rare, is now commonplace.
• Sexual deformities in children, especially feminization of male genitalia, are increasingly occurring.  The prevalence of other reproductive issues is increasing.
• People (especially women) with malfunctioning glands such as the thyroid, pancreas, pituitary, etc. are crowding the offices of endocrinologists.
• Breast cancer rates are at an all-time high.
• Fibromyalgia, once unheard of, is only one of a growing number of neurological ailments.
• Diagnoses of attention deficit disorder (ADD) and hyperactivity (ADHD) are increasingly common in adults and children.
• Asthma is the number one reason for school absences.
• According to a 2018 study, people who are at least moderately chemically sensitive now constitute one in four of the population. One in three people are fragrance sensitive. [2]

What do all these health conditions have in common?

All of these health conditions are significantly influenced, if not directly caused, by exposure to synthetic chemicals – including the kinds found in common household, workplace, and personal products, as well as in our water and food.

When I was a small child in the 1950s, at the dawn of the Chemical Age, I worked in agricultural fields where I was in frequent contact with newly developed (but untested) herbicides and pesticides. At age 19, I worked as a perfume counter clerk in a major department store. In my 30s, I was overexposed to common household products, including bleach mixed with vinegar (which makes chlorine gas) and high VOC paint.

I later developed an autoimmune thyroid disease, plus disabling conditions called multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). Consequently, now I have to avoid even small or brief exposures to most synthetic chemicals, especially those found in nearly all scented products.

My spouse Andy during his early 20s had a two-month exposure to an ammonia-based photocopier in an office setting. Twenty years later he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of multiple myeloma—a “smoldering” cancer of the immune system that research has shown to be associated with chemical exposures, especially to ammonia.

He also developed multiple chemical sensitivities. Even a whiff of perfume would cause him to get an instant migraine with nausea.

Many of the individuals who worked on “The Pile” after the World Trade Center attack, and soldiers who tended the “burn pits” of debris in the Afghanistan, also suffer from such “environmental illnesses:” that is, caused by overexposures to toxic chemicals.

Toxic Health Care Settings

When Andy was receiving treatment for cancer, we were shocked that nearly all the health care professionals who cared for Andy wore scented products–so strong they made him feel sicker and worsened his medical conditions.

We also had trouble finding people to help us who did not wear scented products—friends, neighbors, and professional service providers–even home health and hospice workers. As a result, we often had to make the difficult choice between not obtaining the help we needed or being made sicker in order to get it.

Many health care settings (and some schools and workplaces) have established so-called “fragrance policies” asking people to refrain from or reduce their use of scented products.

However, such policies are rarely enforced. Administrators often defend their decision not to take action saying, “Fragrance use is a personal choice. We can’t restrict it.”

I remember when smoking tobacco products also was considered a “personal right” that could be freely exercised, even in health care settings.

That attitude changed when the serious health risks of “secondhand smoke” for others became widely known. Now smoking is restricted in most public places. Some employers go so far as to require that their employees not report to work even smelling of tobacco smoke. Chemical residue from tobacco smoke on clothing, furniture, in cars, etc. is “thirdhand” smoke, also known to be dangerous.

Today, chemicals in scented products are a major source of secondhand and thirdhand exposures. They contain a lot of the same chemicals, with the same health impacts, that are found in tobacco products.

“Health-Conscious” but Scented?

Andy and I were surprised how many of our highly educated, environmentally aware, health-conscious friends didn’t know the risks of using scented and other chemical-laced products. Many were careful about health risks for themselves, their children and their pets—by not smoking, eating only organic non-GMO gluten-free food, taking their pets to the vet, exercising, avoiding the use of yard pesticides and herbicides, etc.

But they would launder their family’s clothes using strongly scented products, lather “fruit essence” shampoo on their toddler’s head (I challenge anyone to find any real “fruit” in such products), allow their teenager to wear body spray, and unintentionally poison their beloved dog and cat with flea treatments and scented shampoos.

This contradiction boggled our minds.

Going “Chemo-Lite”

As a cancer patient, Andy declined to take the prescribed high doses of chemotherapy, opting for a “Chemo-Lite” approach instead. Invariably, he negotiated with his oncologist that he would use 2/3 or less of the standard recommended doses. (I will say more about this approach, and why it worked, in a post under “Medical Madness.”)

We also took extra precautions to keep synthetic chemicals out of our home, vehicles and possessions. We generally avoided going out into public and worked mostly from home.

We urged our health care providers to establish and enforce effective scented product use policies. We pushed back with scented staff and their reluctant managers, even though we occasionally experienced retaliation as a result.  More than one medical appointment was canceled by the provider at the last minute because a nurse had “forgotten” and used her scented products that day, violating the staff fragrance policy.   

Some Personal Choices Have Unintended Consequences

On one of those occasions, we both had appointments with a much-needed specialist an hour away from our home that had been scheduled months in advance. An intake staff person had not followed the scented product policy that day, so she canceled our appointments–via an email. Luckily, we saw it before leaving for the appointment. 

It took us two hours to convince the clinic managers to convince the doctor to agree to meet with us by telephone instead. (Since COVID, telemedicine has become commonplace, but back then it was rare.)  

During our joint appointment, the specialist quietly listened to both of us. Then he told us he could not do anything for our conditions because he had not seen us in person.

Such events became typical and still are in most medical facilities.  It is extremely rare to find a medical office that is not heavily contaminated with unnecessary chemically scented products, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has understandably prompted widespread use of hand sanitizers in clinical and other settings to reduce infection rates.

The Irony of Scent in Products

Hand sanitizers don’t have to be scented to be effective against viruses and bacteria. They are a bit cheaper than the unscented brands. However, such products present a different health risk to building visitors, especially individuals who already have other health conditions like lung issues, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune illnesses, etc. that are worsened by chemical exposures.

An Under-Recognized Factor in Illness and Death

Some health conditions can make individuals more susceptible to contracting COVID and other airborne pathogens. For example, lungs that are irritated by inhaled scent chemicals are much more likely to become infected. Immune systems already “compromised” (i.e., struggling to work well) can be further weakened by exposures to chemicals. 

An immune system that is already in overdrive (due to an autoimmune condition) will react more strongly to chemical exposures than a healthy one, because it detects the chemicals as a physical threat. (In truth, they are.)

Scented product use by medical staff played a role in Andy’s premature death. In 2014, during a hospitalization for an opportunistic infection, Andy was denied care by two hospitalists, in part because they didn’t want to follow the special protocol I had helped the hospital establish and field-test regarding safe care of patients who are chemically sensitive.

In addition to the staff being required to follow stringent infection prevention measures (e.g., wearing a mask and gloves,) they were expected to forego the use of scented personal products—which was supposedly already prohibited in the hospital’s staff “fragrance” policy. 

Instead, the hospitalists illegally “handed off” (medically abandoned) Andy to someone with less qualifications—a nurse with one year of experience who accidentally overdosed him on a triple cocktail of pain and anxiety medications.  

Suddenly, Andy stopped breathing. As I frantically tried to resuscitate him with CPR, he exhaled his last two breaths into my mouth. 

Pharmaceuticals are toxic chemicals with some beneficial side effects.  An MD

Over-exposure to synthetic chemicals caused Andy’s cancer and our disabilities; other people’s over-use of scented products and chemical products made our lives much more challenging and presented significant barriers to health care (still true for me); and ultimately the synthetic chemicals in pharmaceuticals ended my young husband’s life.

I was a health educator by profession long before Andy was diagnosed. Before he died, I promised him I would tell others our story, including how we extended his life in part by avoiding unnecessary exposures to chemicals.

This blog thread is one part of my fulfilling that promise. I hope to inform and inspire others to reduce their own and their loved ones’ risks of developing cancer and other serious health conditions by avoiding unnecessary exposures to toxic chemicals, including those prevalent in scented products.

Thank you for reading and sharing these posts.

Categories:  “Surviving the Chemical Age” and “Medical Madness”

Footnotes:

[1] “Chemical Abstract Service Registry (CAS)” http://www.cas.org

[2] Anne Steinemann, PhD, “National Prevalence and Effects of Chemical Sensitivities,” National Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine: Mar 2018, Vol 60, Issue 3, pp 152-156.

See also: “Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and the Workplace: Current Position and Need for an Occupational Health Surveillance Protocol,” Martini, Iavicoli and Corso, Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, Vol 2013, Art. ID 351457 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/351457