Amy Graham’s decision to inspect every inch of her home—room by room, armed with a large garbage bag—got me thinking. Trying to maintain a healthy body and raise healthy children in a house stuffed with toxic chemicals made no sense. That much was clear. Katherine and I had long ago committed ourselves to serving our family organic food, so that wasn’t the issue. We never used pesticides on our lawn, so we had done what we could there, too (more on this later). But the more I learned about the ubiquity of toxins in consumer goods, the more I realized that when it came to a serious cataloging of the potential hazards in our home, I didn’t even know where to start.
I decided to do what any home owner does when confronted by their own naïveté and general incompetence: I hired a professional.
This would not be like other home inspections, where you’re trying to find out about the strength of the roof, or the age of the chimney, or the efficiency of the furnace. It wasn’t the fortitude of the house I was interested in. I wanted to know what kinds of things might make my family sick. What things were safe, and what we ought to throw away.
So where should I turn? The yellow pages are full of people you can hire to test your home for lead paint, asbestos, or radon gas. As important as these problems are to address, they mainly involve the remediation of things you yourself have little control over: lead paint has been illegal for years; asbestos insulation was likely installed long before you bought your house; and radon seeps naturally through the soil. Your responsibility is limited to getting rid of these things. I wanted to talk to someone who could tell me how to make better choices of my own.
I was looking for a kind of guru, if you will. Someone with genuine intelligence and real training in seeing what to my eyes was invisible. Someone uninterested (and even distrustful) of the marketing claims of “cleanliness” with which we are all so familiar. I didn’t want someone to tell me what products I needed to sterilize my kitchen floor, or what I needed to spray in order to get rid of the ants that marched in endless formation by my back door, or what I needed to “freshen” the air in my bathroom. It wasn’t germs I was worried about. Germs I can deal with.
The way I figured it, having a toxicologist walk through your home would be kind of like stripping down in front of your doctor or spending time on a therapist’s couch: whatever stories you’ve been telling yourself—how fit (or fat) you are, how well (or poorly) you eat, how much you don’t (or do) drink—they would all sound a bit hollow when held up to the cool eye of clinical scrutiny. But as with a doctor or a therapist, I was also willingly taking the risk that the benefits of what I would discover would be worth the pain of what I learned. I expected to be surprised.
I decided to call a man named Albert Donnay. Donnay is a Johns Hopkins–trained toxicologist and environmental health engineer with a full salt-and-pepper beard, frameless glasses, and tight curls in his hair. A bright, irreverent man, Donnay has the wry demeanor of someone used to revealing things to people that they have always lived with but never really considered. He inspects homes the way a physician inspects bodies: he looks at something you know intimately and gently reveals the consequences of your behavior. For better and for worse.
Donnay has chemistry in his blood. His parents were both highly regarded research crystallographers, scientists who studied the atomic structures of solid crystals. Donnay’s mother got a PhD from MIT; his father, from Stanford. They taught together for years at Johns Hopkins and McGill, where they shared an office and always insisted on having their desks facing each other. “Imagine,” Donnay said. “You’re working at your desk, you lift your head up, and there’s your spouse. Every day. For decades!”
Albert grew up with people like Linus Pauling sitting around the dinner table, and the talk wasn’t just about the miracles of science. It was also about the dangers. For Donnay, Pauling—who had already won one Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry and another for his work against nuclear testing—became a model for the ideal career: science in the service of public health. As he grew older, Donnay made a conscious effort to follow Pauling’s path: in school and as a young professional, he split his energies between chemistry and anti-nuclear work. When he started his own nonprofit group, Nuclear Free America, he convinced Pauling to serve on the board.
But it was another, lesser-known concern of Pauling’s that became Donnay’s abiding interest: the detection of toxic chemicals in people’s bodies and what impact these chemicals may have on their health.
“It was only later that I realized what a pioneer Pauling was in recognizing biomarkers of exposure, and what a successful advocate he became to public health based on these biomarkers,” Donnay said. “His quintessential case was his campaign to have mothers send him their kids’ baby teeth, so he could check them for strontium 90, a radioactive element associated with the fallout from nuclear weapons testing. He didn’t ask moms for their teeth, he asked them for their kids’ teeth. The kids got exposed from breast-feeding, and it ended up in their bones.
“The brilliance of Pauling,” Donnay noted, “was that he could track patterns of exposure, engage a bunch of women, and then turn it all into a successful campaign to stop atmospheric nuclear testing. And that was a big part of the issue that finally got Kennedy to go after a nuclear test ban. When ranchers got up in arms over their poisoned cattle, that didn’t do it. When soldiers got exposed, that didn’t do it. But when it was children’s baby teeth, that really pushed the issue over the top.”
Donnay’s interest in the darker side of chemistry, it turns out, is more than intellectual and more than political. It is also personal. He blames his mother’s early death, from stomach cancer, on all the years she spent standing behind leaky X-ray tubes in her crystallography lab. So when Albert Donnay shows up at your doorstep to look for toxic chemicals, he wants you to listen.
When you invite a toxicologist into your house, there are a few things you ought to know. You think you’ll curry favor by telling him how frequently you shampoo your wall-to-wall carpeting?
That’s very nice, he’ll say. Get rid of it.
No, not the shampoo. The carpeting. All of it.
That couch—the one you paid extra for because it doesn’t stain? Toss it.
That air freshener that makes the bathrooms smell like a spring glade? Throw it away.
Ditto for the scented candles.
And the synthetic lavender laundry detergent.
And the dryer sheets.
And the ant sprays.
And the dish soap.
Get rid of it all.
For Albert Donnay, there’s “clean,” and then there’s clean.
When he inspects your home, he walks around with his nose in the air. The first thing he will ask you to do is gather all your cleaning products, laundry detergents, bug sprays, air fresheners, dryer sheets—anything, in effect, that you can smell—and dump it all in a big garbage bag. Then he has you tie the bag shut for a month. Once the month is up, you open the bag and … inhale. You should be prepared to be shocked. Donnay calls the garbage bag “the most effective thing I have to convince you to improve air quality in your home.”
Donnay started our inspection by sitting down at our kitchen table, opening up a folder, and, over a cup of tea, asking Katherine and me a series of questions. When was the house built? When had we moved in? When was the last major remodeling?
I was intrigued. Was the fact that our house was nearly seventy years old a good thing, or were old houses trouble? We’d lived here for seven years and had done a major renovation in 2005. That was good, right?
Hmmm, Donnay said, writing on his sheet. Tell me about this renovation.
Uh-oh, I thought. It had been ten minutes, and already I was flashing back to the public health researchers in the cancer hospital, and their questions about my toxicological history.
We added a new kitchen and bedroom to the house, I told him. We put down new flooring, painted the walls, the whole bit. New cabinetry. This was good, wasn’t it?
Not necessarily, Donnay said flatly. He lifted his eyes and, for the first of many times during his visit, explained what he clearly felt ought to be common knowledge. (The fact that it isn’t, of course, is what keeps his services in such demand.) Remodeling projects, he said, present one of the most acute and complex sources of exposure to synthetic chemical compounds. Plywood sheathing and cabinetry are glued together with formaldehyde. Fiberglass insulation, paints, stains, and caulk—they all contain harmful chemical compounds. Astonishing amounts of dust are released, much of it—airborne, on the floor, in the countless corners and crevices—containing thick loads of toxins. All of this stuff sticks around in your house for a long time. It circulates in the air. It settles along your baseboards. It clings to your clothes. You can find it in your dryer lint. It gets on your skin, and on your dinner plates. It rolls in and out of your lungs.
Anyway, tell me more about your renovation project, he said.
Well, I told Donnay, since our daughter had been just eighteen months old at the time, we had decided to move into an apartment while the work was being done.
Excellent decision, Donnay said, adding a note to his sheet. You don’t want a toddler playing with cans of floor sealants or taking in lungfuls of all that debris.
He continued with his questions.
How often do you use indoor bug sprays? (That very week, Donnay pointed out, a study released by a cancer center at Georgetown University had found that patients with childhood leukemia had elevated levels of household pesticides in their urine.) How about outdoor pesticides? Herbicides? Do you use a professional lawn-care company, and if so, do you know what they spray on your grass? Or do you mow your own yard? If so, do you use a gas-powered mower? Did we know what kinds of chemicals our neighbors might be using on their lawns? Do you clean your own house or do you hire out this work? Either way, how attentive are you to the ingredients in your household cleaning products? How often do you vacuum your house? What are your carpets made of? How about your cupboards and bookshelves? Real wood or composite plywood? Do you dry-clean your clothes? Do your kids play with soft plastic toys? Do you use perfumes or other cosmetics? Fabric softeners? Scented candles?
Once again, it was quite a list. As Katherine and I answered, Donnay scribbled on his sheet. Here I was again, being asked to think hard about things to which I’d never given much thought. The setting was a bit less grim; we were sitting in my kitchen, after all, not in a preoperation waiting room. Nobody was sick. And, as far as I could tell, nothing in the house had caused me any harm.
Nonetheless, Donnay’s list, like the list in the hospital, gave me pause. I’d lived in a lot of houses and apartments over the previous forty-five years, with little awareness of the potential toxins in my surroundings. What, over the long term, had I been marinating in? And, more important, now that I had children of my own, what kind of marinade had we unwittingly prepared in our own home? Neither of my children, so far, was experiencing any chronic health problems; no asthma, no headaches or “brain fogs,” no learning issues at school. Neither had shown any signs of chemical sensitivity. But as Donnay was quick to point out, acute symptoms of chemical exposure are only one worry. At least as important are problems that crop up over a lifetime of exposure. Reducing a child’s risk of asthma is one thing; reducing their exposure to carcinogens and endocrine disruptors is something else entirely.
Donnay put down his pen and took another sip of tea. “Okay. There are two possible effects of chemical exposure,” he said. “One is immediate: ‘I know this is happening and it is making me sick.’ The other is the long-term buildup that you don’t notice until you have a tumor or a terrible illness. These two things are not necessarily linked. People who aren’t bothered by multiple chemical sensitivity can’t have any confidence that they won’t be affected twenty years down the line.”
Cancer, it is true, kills more children under fifteen than any other disease. But when it comes to the long-term implications of chemical exposure, it’s important to understand that we’re talking about many more illnesses that cancer. We are also talking about insults to the endocrine system, one of the body’s primary communications networks. Hormones are produced by endocrine tissues like those in the ovaries, testes, and pancreas, as well as the thyroid and pituitary glands. The hormones are secreted into the bloodstream, where they act as chemical messengers to organs in the rest of the body. In conjunction with the nervous system, hormones control everything from the body’s growth and energy level to reproduction and responses to stress. During development, hormones within the womb determine which of a baby’s genes will be expressed, and how often, over the course of its lifetime. “Nothing has been changed in the individual’s genes, but if a particular note hasn’t been punched into the music roll during development, it will remain forever mute,” write Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers in their groundbreaking book about hormone-disrupting chemicals, Our Stolen Future. “Genes may be the keyboard, but hormones present during development compose the tune.”
Chemicals can mess with a body’s music in a number of ways. They can mimic estrogen, the female sex hormone, and androgen, the male sex hormone. They can imitate thyroid hormones, causing overstimulation. Alternatively, they can bind to a cell and block the cell’s ability to interact with a normal hormone. Or they can interfere with the way hormones are made or controlled—for example, by blocking metabolism in the liver. Higher risks of breast cancer have been associated with exposure to estrogenic compounds, but also to depressed thyroid levels—both of which can occur when people are exposed to environmental chemicals.
“This is a degree of sensitivity that approaches the unfathomable,” the authors of Our Stolen Future note. “If such exquisite sensitivity provides rich opportunities for varied offspring from the same genetic stock, this same characteristic also makes the system vulnerable to serious disruption if something interferes with normal hormone levels.”
Once we had finished the questionnaire, Albert Donnay drained his cup of tea and stood up.
“Let’s take a walk around the house,” he said.
We began on the ground floor, where, it seemed, there was much that he was pleased to see. We have no synthetic wall-to-wall carpeting, which is often treated with toxic stain-resistant chemicals; our floors are made of oak and are covered here and there with area rugs made of wool. We avoid cleaning products that contain bleach and ammonia, and instead clean our floors, counters, and bathrooms either with plant-based commercial products or a homemade mixture of water, white vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, and lemon juice. We threw out our nonstick cookware a long time ago, and do our best to remove our shoes before we walk into the house.
Donnay liked all of this, especially the no-shoes-in-the-house rule, something he practices somewhat religiously in his own home. He also liked the fact that we generally don’t dry-clean our clothes and when we do, we use an “organic” cleaner. For years, dry cleaners have used perchloroethylene as their primary solvent. The problem is that a number of studies have shown a link between perc exposure and neurological problems, especially related to vision, in the people who work in the cleaners. (A study done in New York City showed that people who lived in apartments in the same buildings that housed dry cleaners were exposed to perc at nearly eight times the levels considered safe. Two of the study participants were nursing mothers; both had levels of perc in their breast milk from two to twelve times the safe levels. How big a concern is this? In New York City alone, 600 apartment buildings also house dry cleaners. That’s about 170,000 people. And for the rest of us? It’s safe to assume that three-quarters of us have measurable perc in our urine.)
Donnay was less impressed with our cheap vinyl window blinds, something I confess I had never thought about. Do you really want PVC plastic shedding from your windows, he asked me, smiling in that therapeutic “It’s my job to reveal the obvious to you” kind of way.
Then we got to the bathrooms. Donnay glanced at the personal care products—baby lotions, soaps, shampoos—lined up on the shelves, and frowned. Virtually all of these products contained “fragrances,” which typically are made with phthalate plasticizers—compounds similar to those found in plastic baby toys and water bottles. Evidence is mounting that these compounds mess with the body’s endocrine system, and Donnay is especially concerned about putting these chemicals on warm, damp skin. A 2006 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that more than 80 percent of infants had been exposed to at least seven different phthalate metabolites, most likely from lotions, powders, and shampoos. This is particularly worrisome given the large percentage of an infant’s skin that is typically covered with these products, and their developing metabolic systems.
In recent years, researchers have linked phthalate exposure to a wide swath of developmental, hormonal, and reproductive problems in both laboratory animals and humans. Of particular concern seems to be the damage phthalates can do to the DNA in adult sperm and to the reproductive hormones in fetuses and infants, especially males. Laboratory tests show that phthalates damage reproductive organs of both males and females, but the male organs—especially the testes, prostate, and seminal vesicles—appear most vulnerable, especially in the offspring of contaminated animals. Testicles atrophy or fail to descend. The opening of the penis appears at the base of the organ rather than at the tip (a problem known as “hypospadias”). Sperm counts drop. And on and on.
Public health experts worry that these hormonal shifts may also contribute to problems like breast cancer and uterine disease. In May 2002, a coalition of environmental and public health groups contracted with a national laboratory to test 72 name-brand, off-the-shelf beauty products for the presence of phthalates. They found these plasticizers in nearly three-quarters of the products, including 9 of 14 deodorants, all 17 fragrances, 6 of 7 hair gels, 4 of 7 mousses, 14 of 18 hairsprays, and 2 of 9 body lotions. The phthalates appeared in fractions ranging from traces to nearly 3 percent of product formulation. None of the products listed phthalates in its ingredients. Loopholes in federal law allow the $20-billion-a-year cosmetics industry to put unlimited amounts of phthalates into many personal care products with virtually no testing, monitoring of health effects, or labeling.
Do you really want all that stuff in here? Donnay asked.
Okay. So we would throw out most of what we had in our bathroom. Got it.
As we walked toward the basement stairs, I did my best to lighten the mood. You know, trot out a little toxic-chemical humor. I brought up a story I’d read about a mortician who’d shown up at his doctor’s office with a pair of odd complaints: he had no libido, and he had grown breasts. Turns out the man regularly applied hormone-heavy embalming cream without wearing gloves. Once he changed his behavior, he returned to normal inside two years.
I’m sure Donnay would have smiled at this, but by the time I got to the end of the story we had already opened the door to the basement. One step down, and I could practically hear him cringing.
I had to confess: the underground air did have a sickly, rather sweet smell. Had I never noticed it before or had I just turned a blind nose to it?
I should say at the outset that my family does not have a garage—during the construction project, we had converted the attached garage to a den—so most of the extra stuff that has accumulated over the years has ended up in our cement-floor basement. Old rugs, boxes of books, camping gear—it’s all underneath the house. All of it, Donnay was quick to point out, basically functions as a giant mold hotel—even in a basement that is comparatively dry, and in which two small dehumidifiers are running constantly. Get rid of all this stuff, Donnay said, or move it upstairs.
But what really got Donnay wrinkling his nose was off to the right, back behind an old pair of skis: a pile of fifteen paint cans, jugs of sealants and floor finishes, and a half dozen tubes of grout, caulk, and polyurethane. The sealants, he pointed out, were particularly worrisome: some tubes were covered with warnings that their contents were skin and eye irritants and could cause respiratory distress. Others warned of dangers to the neurological system.
Donnay gave me a look. For a family with a pretty clean house, this is a real problem, he said. What do you think happens to all the fumes coming out of these cans and tubes? They don’t dissipate, especially when there are no open windows down here. Remember the garbage bag filled with cans of toxic chemicals? This basement is like a giant garbage bag. The fumes seep through walls and floorboards and—depending on how well a home’s ductwork has been installed—circulate throughout the house. Ditto for the combustion gases leaking from the furnace and the water heater. Especially carbon monoxide. In winter, when your furnace is working overtime, your basement can be the warmest place in the house, and hot air—along with the host of toxic chemicals it carries—has a way of rising.
How bad can this be? I wanted to know. Haven’t people been storing stuff in their basements as long as they’ve had basements?
Donnay looked at me and smiled. Yes, they have, he said, and that’s a problem. You’ve got a degree in literature, right? Ever read any Victorian fiction?
A little, I said.
Well, you know all those crazy women in the attics, and all those ghosts roaming around ancestral homes? In the nineteenth century, Donnay said, an entire class of illnesses was given a name, neurasthenia, which doctors at first blamed on the stress of Victorian life. They were convinced that the fast pace of life—the printing press, the steam engine, the telegraph—had pushed people’s stress to such levels that they were getting sick. Contemporary literary critics blame patriarchal oppression for such distress; why else would the victims almost always be women?
Donnay had a different theory. It wasn’t stress—technological or patriarchal—that was causing so much illness. It was toxic chemicals, especially carbon monoxide from gas-fired lamps. Just look at the literature of the day, he says. Victorian stories and novels are full of perpetually complaining female patients who never seem to get better. Their big-city doctors do everything they can until, exasperated, they lock their despondent patients in a room, either in the family manse or a crumbling sanatorium. From there, it’s a short trip to madness.
It’s an interesting idea, I had to admit, not least because I’d never really thought about literature from a toxicologist’s point of view. Donnay was happy to indulge me.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator is asked to visit one of literature’s most famously creepy houses, to see a friend who is suffering from “acute bodily illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him.” The man lives in the mansion with his twin sister; the two never leave the house, and both—like the house itself—are suffering from an unsettling rot. When the sister dies, the brother and the narrator carry her coffin down into a dreary cellar that had been used to store gunpowder “or some other highly combustible substance.” With one last look, they fit the lid on the coffin and screw it down tight. Over the next several nights, the brother—and the narrator—slowly lose their minds. They are oppressed by a “faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation that hung about and enshrouded the mansion.” They notice strange sounds—footsteps, grating iron chains, a beating heart—coming from the basement. The narrator bolts from the house. Had they buried the sister alive? Were they crazy, or was it just the fumes?
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a physician moves his wife to a room in a creaky ancestral hall for the summer, to help her recover from a “nervous depression.” Locked in solitary confinement, the wife, who narrates the story from her bed, slowly descends into paranoid madness. With little else to occupy her mind, she starts to obsess over the patterns in the room’s wallpaper, the “great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.” She blames her condition on a peculiar smell that has enveloped her senses like a toxic fog. “Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here,” she says. “It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair. Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell! Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad—at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell.”
By the end of the story, the woman is crawling around her room on all fours, tearing at the wallpaper. After shouting for an ax and breaking through her door, her husband sees her, and faints.
Albert Donnay believes these characters might have been suffering from what he calls “haunted house syndrome,” an illness that would be familiar to any Victorian—real or fictional—fated to spend a night in a gloomy mansion. “People will tell you that they saw ghosts coming in the window to strangle them, that they taste metal in their mouths, that they smell things, that they feel creepy-crawlies on their arm,” Donnay said. “At the turn of the twentieth century, they were locking millions of people away in insane asylums, and it was true, some of these people were completely nuts. But this was also the time of the peak use of gas lamps. Freud was writing at the time that these symptoms were all due to sexual trauma or excessive masturbation. But these are quite physically real symptoms. It’s just that people’s senses were lying to them.”
This would all be quaint, Donnay said, if the parallels to our own lives weren’t so chilling; we are now exposed to chemical loads that would make the Victorians, a century and a half ago, seem pure by comparison. Chronic exposure to even low levels of things like pesticides, formaldehyde, or carbon monoxide have been shown to have a serious impact on our health. Indeed, it may be that we’ve become so comfortable with these products that we no longer see them—or their constituent chemicals—for what they are. It’s like the dry cleaners, Donnay says. A customer walks in, smells the chemicals, and says to the person behind the counter, “How can you work in here?” The people who work in the cleaners—the very people most saturated by the chemicals in the room—don’t even smell it.
“We all get neurologically habituated,” Donnay said. “We need a certain amount of stimulus to fire our nerves. But nerve firing is modulated. If your exposure has been random and isolated, like the guy who goes binge drinking every three weeks, you don’t habituate very well to alcohol. But the guy who drinks every day gets very habituated. We all have the ability to slide up and down the scale.
“Ironically, the people who are most sick often have a lower chemical body burden, because they’ve tried for years to reduce their exposures. They are careful about their food and water. They don’t even go out much. But they are still more sensitive than people with higher body burdens. Once you are sensitized, even chemicals at low or nontoxic levels can provoke symptoms.”
Albert Donnay believes that exposure to toxic household chemicals may contribute to an entire host of illnesses and disease, from attention deficit disorder and autism in children to chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple chemical sensitivity in adults. And even if people are not directly sickened by a single chemical compound, he says, constant exposure can lead to chemical or sensory sensitivities that can be utterly debilitating.
“Pesticides, formaldehyde, chemicals used during remodeling—these things can cause the olfactory nerve to become hypersensitive to any chemical stimulus,” Donnay said. “The dose might not be toxic itself, but it can still cause a reaction. It’s like caffeine, or alcohol, or cigarette smoke. Ex-users can become so hypersensitive that they react to much lower levels than nonusers.
“We all have a sensory radar system that lets us know when we are threatened by a novel exposure,” he explained. “The sensitivity of that radar can be turned up or down by the pattern of our exposures. If we are healthy, we can tune it out. It’s not that these levels of stimulus are necessarily toxic, it’s that some people have become so hypersensitive to stimulus at any level. They just can’t tune out the background noise.”
Where a nonsufferer might smell perfume, or a lawn pesticide, or cigarette smoke, and react no more strongly than wrinkling their nose, someone with chemical sensitivity might kick into a full-blown physical and emotional panic.
“It’s a tremendous burden,” Donnay said. “These people go into ‘fight or flight’ even if what is present is only a benign level of exposure. But ‘fight or flight’ takes a huge toll physically and emotionally. It degrades your immune system, it degrades cardiac health.” Equally troubling, of course, is that hypersensitivity can make people feel isolated, even paranoid. It’s not just that they suffer; it’s that they suffer from exposures that most people don’t even notice.
In other words, we may no longer use nineteenth-century terms like “neurasthenia,” but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t living in haunted houses. Or working in haunted offices. If the last century has done anything, it has introduced many more of us to many, many more chemicals. And it has, for some people, meant lives that can seem like an Edgar Allan Poe fever dream.
Just finding a time and place to meet with Debra proved unusually difficult. When I suggested we get together in April, she balked. Spring, she said, is when the state uses helicopters to spray for gypsy moths, which meant she would have to stay close to home for weeks at a time. Coffee shops were out of the question, because she is allergic to the chemicals used to clean them. When we finally settled on a date, in July, we had to find a room that had never been sprayed with pesticides. After some calling around, we found one in a public library outside Washington, D.C.
Debra had short black hair and blue eyes that can seem twinkling or melancholy, depending on the story she is telling. As we sat down, she began waxing nostalgic about a time in her life when she could walk down her block without fearing an attack brought on by dryer sheets.
“I remember before they put fragrances in fabric softeners, when you could go out and take a walk in your neighborhood,” she said. “Now, no one in our group can take a walk because of the fragrance that gets vented out from the dryer exhaust. Even though we walk out on the sidewalk in front of a house, we smell it coming out of the back of the house.”
When it comes to chemical exposure, Debra holds to what she calls the “barrel theory.” A human body is like a barrel: it can hold, or tolerate, a certain volume of toxic chemicals. But when it reaches its limit—when it no longer detoxifies properly—it overflows. It is as if a safety valve has broken. The trouble is, most of us are exposed to so many chemicals, for so many years, that by the time we notice the valve is broken, the barrel is already brimming. The mystery may not be why people like Debra start to break down, but why many more of us do not.
“Once you pass the threshold, you never go back to normal,” Debra said. “So many people are ignorant of this disease, it takes years after you have passed that threshold to find out what’s wrong with you. So by the time you figure out you have multiple chemical sensitivity, it’s way too late to get back to normal.”
The compounds that cause Debra such trouble are collectively known as VOCs, or volatile organic compounds—essentially, any chemicals that “volatilize,” or spread invisibly through the air. In my house, this would include obvious things like the cans of paints and thinners in the basement, but it would also include things like perfumes, deodorizers, rug cleaners, and detergents that can be found in almost every room.
“This illness completely changes your life,” Debra said. “It changes what you eat. Not only do you have to avoid pesticides and artificial ingredients, you have to rotate your diet. With this illness, if you eat the same things every day, you will develop food allergies. It takes three days to totally process your food, so something you eat on Monday, you can’t eat again until Thursday. I often tell people I’m allergic to certain foods, but everyone with MCS develops food intolerances and allergies.
“When we buy new clothes, we have to soak them in baking soda, or baking soda and vinegar. Some people use hydrogen peroxide. Even the dyes in cotton clothing can cause problems. Some people who are very sick can only wear all-white, organic clothing, with no dyes or colors or pesticides of any kind.”
When Debra thinks back on how her barrel began to overflow, she tries—mostly in vain—to find the first drops in her childhood. She was born in Florida, but her family moved to southern Rhode Island when she was eighteen months old. She grew up near the Quonset naval station and lived there until she was seventeen. There was some industry around, but there was also a cleansing breeze from the ocean. Her father was a carpenter, so Debra was no stranger to construction sites. Back then, she said, builders used real wood, not plywood glued together with formaldehyde. Since it was the 1950s, everyone around Debra smoked cigarettes, which release not just carbon monoxide but dozens of other combustion chemicals as well. In college, where she studied languages, a third of her classmates smoked in class; some professors smoked like chimneys. Worse, the building had sealed windows; on exam days, the room was a noxious cloud.
Still, for years, Debra showed no signs of chemical sensitivity. Her barrel was filling but was not yet full. It wasn’t until she went to work as a linguist for the federal government in the mid-1970s that her ability to detoxify was affected. Ten months into her career, she started spitting up blood. Doctors thought she had tuberculosis. The X-rays were negative.
Two months later, a woman in Debra’s office threw up at her desk, apparently sickened by the paint fumes billowing in from a crew working down the hall. For the first time in her life, Debra started noticing the quality of the air around her. The windows in her building did not open. Air circulation was poor. Many of Debra’s colleagues smoked on the job, and some were sickened by the poor air quality. Her building was routinely cleaned with products containing volatile organic compounds; walls and ceilings were painted with volatile paints. Mold and other microbial contamination were common; Debra noticed black streaks near the ceiling vents. Even the copy machine gave her headaches. Years later, a toxicologist’s report would conclude that the chemical load in her office created “a high-risk environment for adverse health effects in susceptible individuals.”
If many of the people in Debra’s office could tolerate the cigarette smoke—and the cleaning solutions, and the paint, and the mold—without complaint, Debra could not. Just six months after she started work, she was diagnosed with asthma, allergies, and sinus infections. She started getting nosebleeds. She complained of intense fatigue. She installed a HEPA filter near her desk, but it did little to help her symptoms. She tried asking the painters to use low-VOC paints, or at least to work at night. Her requests were rejected as too expensive.
Around her first anniversary on the job, Debra took a month of unpaid leave to try to regain her health. Soon after her return, her vision started to blur. She was transferred to another office, on a different floor. People still smoked around her, perhaps a bit less, but the cleaning solutions and the carbonless copy paper were the same. The sinus infections persisted.
After five or six years of this, Debra was given workers’ compensation for her sensitivity to tobacco smoke. But the smoke, if it was an initial cause of her distress, was just the beginning. Over the next decade, she became acutely sensitive to paint fumes, developing intense headaches, nausea, and intestinal cramping even when painters were working down the hall. By 1988, even the perfume worn by her coworkers made her ill.
By 1990, it wasn’t just indoor air pollution that made Debra sick. One day in May, while walking across a parking lot, she looked up and saw a plane spraying Bt, a pesticide used to combat gypsy moths. The next day, she woke up acutely ill and, for the first time, began to feel like her memory was going as well. (She learned this the hard way: while backing her car out of her garage, she forgot to punch the button on her electronic door opener, and slammed her car into the garage door.) Bt spraying, she testified before a state pesticide board, has added short-term memory loss to the headaches and “brain fog” she had suffered for years. For nearly twenty years, Debra has had to leave the state for three weeks whenever the helicopters come out to spray. She used to escape to visit relatives in North Carolina, but now gypsy moths—and the people spraying for them—have spread south as well.
A month after the garage door incident, Debra’s troubles began to snowball. She was diagnosed with a pair of tumors in her thyroid. (They were benign.) Two years later, she was diagnosed with adrenal problems, which were causing her night sweats and chronic fatigue. She got muscle spasms from the shampoo used to clean the office carpet. She got sick from the formaldehyde in the glue in the office furniture. Fumes from paint and perfume and printer ink continued to be a curse. The smell of microwave popcorn became intolerable, as did the grease used on the office escalator. In 1998, her thyroid tumor began growing again. Her short-term memory loss recurred; after a week of exposure to a colleague’s perfume, Debra—a linguist—could not remember how to spell her own name. The mold in her office, resulting from a leaky roof, only magnified her symptoms.
After twenty-five years, at the age of forty-seven, Debra decided she could no longer work. By then, she had finally found her way into the care of a doctor familiar with multiple chemical sensitivity, or MCS. He attributed her conditions to “multiple acute exposures and continuous low-dose exposures” to both toxic chemicals and biotoxins like mold and bacteria. A neurotoxicologist concluded that her health effects “are likely to be irreversible.”
The mechanisms for MCS are mysterious. When a sensitized person is exposed to a certain airborne chemical—a pesticide, say, or a perfume—the chemical passes through their nose to the centers in the brain that control the way their body operates. “Those centers in your brain get hammered and they start misfiring,” Debra says. Your chest tightens. Your breathing speeds up. You can’t digest your food. You get dizzy. You forget things, like how to add numbers in your head. You become clumsy. You get depressed. Synthetic fragrances can give Debra horrible headaches that can last three days. A friend of hers had it far worse. When she walked by someone wearing perfume, she would lose her balance and collapse.
“Some products will say they are ‘unscented,’ but if you look on the list of ingredients it will have ‘masking fragrances,’ which still give off VOCs,” Debra says. “People will say, ‘Gee, how can she be reacting to this? I can’t smell it. She must be crazy.’ ” Indeed, like Albert Donnay, Debra has a theory about all those women fainting their way through nineteenth-century novels: they had MCS. Their drawing room swoons weren’t caused by a gentleman’s gaze. They were caused by his perfume. Or their own.
When Debra began looking for a house, she had to find one that was at least five years old, just to make sure the formaldehyde in the plywood and the VOCs from the paint had had enough time to off-gas. Even house hunting was problematic, since people trying to sell their homes tend to use of lot of air fresheners, paints, cleaning chemicals, and lawn-care pesticides. Imagine asking a real estate agent to show you a house that hasn’t been “treated” this way, and you’ll see what people like Debra are up against.
So what causes someone to become hypersensitive to synthetic chemicals? There are theories: that chronic exposure to low levels of chemicals corrodes the body’s nervous system; that it suppresses the immune system; that chemicals can lead to “limbic kindling,” a triggering of the pathways between the olfactory nerve in the nose and the limbic system in the brain, which governs everything from sleep and mood to appetite and impulses like aggression. In short, no one knows for sure.
But there does seem to be a consensus on a few key points. The condition is chronic and can be brought on by low levels of exposure to chemically unrelated substances. Symptoms involve multiple organ systems, including respiratory, musculoskeletal, endocrinological, immunological, and others. Symptoms improve when chemicals are removed.
Yet the broader medical community remains at odds—and even downright skeptical—about the causes of MCS, with perplexing implications for people suffering from it. Some physicians insist that MCS is a purely psychological condition, and try to convince patients to overcome their fear of exposure by exposing themselves to more chemicals. Other physicians, those who consider MCS a physiological syndrome, advise the opposite: they tell patients to avoid shopping malls and other crowded places where they are more likely to encounter perfumes or detergents that can set their symptoms aflame.
It is true that MCS leaves psychological scars. Worse yet, people who get blindsided by subtle odors—people whose brain chemistry has been adversely affected by neurotoxins—can develop bouts of depression, anxiety, even agoraphobia; in her book Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: A Survival Guide, Pamela Reed Gibson writes of people who were so affected by their carpets and plywood they began living in cars. Or tents. One poor soul lived in a horse trailer for a year.
“Imagine a situation where you have a chronic illness where there is no known treatment,” Debra told me. “You spend all your money trying to get well, trying to take the edge off the headaches. You’re broke, and you can’t find safe housing. If I buy a new car, I have to keep my old car for a month or two and run an ozonator in the new car to get the ‘new car’ smell out. Every aspect of our lives is controlled by this. What you eat. What you wear. Where you go. When I go to church, I have to go early and sit in a corner to be away from everybody.”
The trouble for people like Debra is that these chemicals can pass through the body so quickly that even were she to be tested immediately upon exposure, the chemicals might not show up in her blood. But just because a body has voided itself of an irritant does not relieve a person from suffering its effects.
“Everything you do is dictated by your illness,” Debra continued. “You have to be constantly vigilant to avoid or lessen your exposures to the greatest degree possible. The best thing we know to do with this illness is avoidance. If we take medicine, we usually get all the side effects, and the side effects greatly outweigh the benefits. Doctors get frustrated with us because they can’t sit down and write a prescription. We have to start very gradually, with much smaller doses, and even then we may never tolerate it. It’s very individual, from person to person, what will help them and what will not, what we react to and what we don’t. And that has stymied the medical community for a long time.”
You have to wonder: With so many chemicals wafting around us, throughout our lives, who wouldn’t become distraught, especially if one doctor tells you to avoid crowds and another tells you to get over your fears and wade right in? Especially when doctors’ offices themselves (to say nothing of hospitals) are saturated in the very chemicals people with MCS are sickened by: plastic tubing, vinyl blinds, endless gallons of cleaners and perfumes and pesticides. And especially when people with such an ambiguous disease are dismissed as malingerers or, at best, neurotic.
“We are a culture that wants desperately to believe that a positive attitude will make everything right,” Pamela Reed Gibson writes. “This attitude can be tricky, however, when you are nose deep in a neurotoxic exposure. Because neurotoxins alter brain chemistry, simply trying to maintain a positive attitude will not be enough to stay healthy.”
In the mid-1990s, Albert Donnay helped found MCS Referral and Resources, a national nonprofit organization that works with physicians and researchers to document cases of multiple chemical sensitivity and to look for causes and cures. Donnay gets hundreds of calls a year from people claiming they’ve been poisoned by their homes, their lawns, or their offices. “These people will say, ‘I’m your canary in the coal mine,’ and indeed they are,” Donnay told me. “Their alarm bells are always going off, even if yours aren’t.”
All of which made me interested to hear what Donnay would say once he got up off our kitchen floor. We had climbed up out of our basement, and Donnay was on his hands and knees, sniffing under a Persian rug that had been in my family for at least fifty years. C’mon, I thought, this thing is made of wool. How bad could it be?
Donnay looked up, already one step ahead of me. It’s not just what the rug is made of, he said. It’s what the rug collects, how long it holds on to it, and how much time we spend breathing it in. Donnay is most concerned about compounds that are emitted by a long list of home furnishings made with toxic chemicals. Rugs and mattresses (made with toxic flame retardants), cabinets and wallboard (glued together with formaldehyde), interior paints (full of volatile organic compounds), even vinyl window coverings and shower curtains (made with plastics like phthalates and PVC)—all of these contribute to a level of interior air contamination that can lead to both short- and long-term health problems. Off-gassing follows a parabolic curve, Donnay said. When you first pull a mattress from its plastic sheath, or first lay down wall-to-wall carpeting, the chemical releases are very high. They decrease quickly in the first few weeks, but may continue at low levels for months or even years.
But it’s not just air pollution that causes problems. The same products that produce toxic gasses also gradually break down into dust particles that can accumulate in a home and stick around for years. A person’s home, like a person’s skin, may provide a thin membrane that protects us from environmental toxins. But how much protection can the home, or the skin for that matter, offer us when our walls and our skins themselves are so saturated? The plywood sheath that wraps most of our homes is typically glued together with adhesives containing formaldehyde. (Nearly seventy thousand relocated victims of Hurricane Katrina learned this when their FEMA trailers were found to contain formaldehyde at seventy-five times the safety threshold.)
Donnay recalled one woman, in Philadelphia, who called him to complain of a constant pain in her chest. Her lungs were burning, she said, and her brain seemed to be in perpetual fog.
The woman, it turned out, had become so sensitive to carbon monoxide, pesticides, and other chemicals in her home that finding a safe place to live had become next to impossible. Once, after she returned from a vacation to find mold from a water leak, she had to throw away her furniture. She can’t have gas appliances, she can’t have fresh paint on the walls, she can’t spray her home or her garden with pesticides. Worst of all, she can’t distinguish one contaminant from another.
When she called Donnay, she thought her problems were being caused by an allergy to her dog.
“The moment I walked in the door I smelled paint,” Donnay said. “She had a terrible basement. It was full of all kinds of undecipherable odors. She had taken out all the rugs except the wall-to-wall on the stairs. We got down on our knees and sniffed it. The fabric was really off-gassing.” Not only could Donnay smell the chemical stain resisters and flame retardants that had been infused into the carpeting, he could smell other things that the carpet had absorbed over the years: mold, soot from the fireplace, organophosphate pesticides—all of which had settled into the carpet “like a sink.”
And so it is for many of us. Despite our sense of ourselves as a nation of rugged pioneers, Americans have in essence become a nation of great indoorsmen. On average, we spend approximately 90 percent of our time indoors—more during the winter months, and most of this at home. And dust, of course, is not only a by-product of construction. A 2003 study of private homes found dozens of toxic chemicals hiding in indoor dust, including strikingly intact quantities of DDT, which has been banned since 1972, and a flame retardant that has been banned since 1977.
The EPA has warned that indoor air pollution can be two to ten times worse than outdoor pollution. In Baltimore, one in five children suffer from asthma; public health experts blame everything from toxic flame retardants in carpets and indoor bug sprays to lead dust and the chemicals from (of all things) air fresheners. Pesticides drifting into homes from farm fields can concentrate in carpets at 200 times the rate in outdoor soil. The allergen level of sealed buildings can be 200 times that of older buildings. “Anything that goes into the air, anything you spray, will interact with the dust in the air and settle down,” Donnay said. “On smooth surfaces you can wipe it clean. But on rugs it’s like planting the dust in a garden. Even a vacuum won’t get it out. Just like you don’t want to wear clothes that you just brush clean, you don’t want to live with rugs that are just vacuumed. In the old days, people took rugs outside and beat them with a stick. You should wash them at least once a year, even if it means taking them down to the commercial Laundromat and throwing them into one of those machines that take monster loads.”
Household dust is a real concern, Donnay said, because it can accumulate not just in rugs but in the forced-air vents that heat and cool so many homes. Compounding the problem, some companies use a “wet” cleaning system that includes the use of scented cleaning products—precisely the kind of compounds you’re trying to get rid of in the first place.
“These chemicals enter your body, and not all of them will get out again,” Donnay said. “You breathe some out, but you metabolize some as well. The body is great chemical factory, and it’s running all the time. It doesn’t benefit you to add to the ingredients in that chemical factory. Whether you add it to your skin or breathe it, any chronic lifetime exposure is going to increase your body burden, and therefore increase your potential pathways for disease.
“Obviously, we use these things in combinations,” he noted, “but that’s where we’ve reached a dead end. We don’t have the tools, the money, or the time to understand these combinations of chemicals. We are the experiment, and our health is the outcome.”
In 2003, a team of researchers led by Ruthann Rudel, of the Silent Spring Institute, swiped samples from 120 private homes and discovered dozens of toxic chemicals lingering in household dust. Not just flame retardants but phthalates and disinfectants and even pesticides. Among their striking discoveries were “outdoor” compounds like DDT, heptachlor, and chlordane, which have been banned in this country for years and, in some cases, decades. All told, the researchers discovered 52 compounds lingering in the air and 66 in household dust, including—in both categories—some two dozen pesticides. Fifteen pesticides were discovered at levels exceeding government safety standards; the risks for another 28 could not be adequately assessed because, for them, no health standards had ever been set.
What the study revealed was not just how ubiquitous these compounds can be but how long-lasting. DDT has not been sold domestically for more than thirty years, and there it was, in people’s houses. Setting aside the question of how an outdoor pesticide makes its way inside a house, who knows how long it lasts when it is not exposed to the damaging effects of sun and weather. The breakdown of pesticides, once inside the home, is “negligible,” the report said.
And the human inhabitants of polluted homes are hardly the only ones vulnerable to toxic contamination. If you walk across a carpet treated with flame retardants or stain-resistant chemicals, you may kick up some dust, or some of it may stick to the bottom of your shoes. But your dog or your cat spends hours every day rolling around on the floor, or sleeping, or—how best to say it?—licking themselves. The synthetic chemicals in the dust in the rug end up on your pet’s tongue. The EPA has been exploring a possible connection between flame retardants and feline hyperthyroidism; cats, researchers have found, have contaminant levels up to 100 times that of humans. Richard Wiles and his colleagues at the Environmental Working Group took samples from a few dozen healthy dogs and cats in Mechanicsville, Virginia. The animals had levels of phthalates that were lower than they typically are in people. That’s the good news. The bad news is that dogs had more than twice the levels of toxic stain-resisting chemicals than people. Cats had 5 times the mercury. And the levels of flame retardants were 23 times higher. “They’re picking up the same chemicals that we’re exposed to,” Wiles said. “They have shorter life spans and they develop diseases more quickly, and so they may be providing some insight into human health problems from these same contaminants in our homes.”
Before Albert Donnay left, I invited him back into our kitchen for a final question. I wanted to know how likely our house was to become haunted by carbon monoxide. We don’t have an attached garage, but we do have a fireplace, our furnace burns natural gas, and we have a gas range in the kitchen. Was anyone in our family likely to go crazy and try to bury me alive?
Although our bodies constantly produce carbon monoxide as a low-level metabolic by-product, adding external sources “can seriously corrupt our body’s ability to handle the flow of CO,” Donnay said. The carbon monoxide that doesn’t bind to hemoglobin floats around the body, looking for other places to attach itself. It can end up in muscle cells, where, he noted, it can lead to fibromyalgia; it can find its way into the body’s mitochondria, where it can inhibit metabolism and contribute to chronic fatigue. It can trigger acute sensory sensitivity to odors, light, sound, or touch—all symptomatic of disorders like autism and Asperger’s syndrome.
My wife, Katherine, had installed a carbon monoxide detector right next to the stove. Wasn’t that a smart idea? I asked Donnay.
Well, for starters, Donnay said, your range hood only covers about two-thirds of the stove top, and I’m guessing you don’t even turn it on unless you’re cooking a full meal. Am I right?
I gave him a sheepish smile and nodded. I’d certainly never turned the fan on when I’d made a pot of coffee.
This jibed with Donnay’s own experience. Most people think the vent is intended to shed the smell of burning food. They don’t even bother to turn on their vents unless they smell smoke.
Donnay took out his own professional-grade CO monitor. The EPA’s standard limit for outdoor carbon monoxide exposure is 9 parts per million, he said; now watch this. He turned on one burner at a time, and waited. One hit a peak of 125 parts per million before settling back to 80. Others peaked in the mid-50s or the mid-70s and settled in the mid-20s.
Our own plug-in CO monitor, mounted inches from the burners, remained remarkably consistent. It never moved away from 0.
Even six feet from the stove, above our kitchen table, CO levels hovered at 9 or 10—the EPA’s safety limit. And these were readings after running the burners for just a couple of minutes. Imagine, Donnay said, how much carbon monoxide you’d have after cooking a six-hour Thanksgiving dinner? As for the so-called self-cleaning feature on the oven? All that does is turn food residue to ash—carbonizing it—and create carbon monoxide levels of several thousand parts per million.
So what was the point of using a commercially available CO detector, if it registered 0 even when CO levels were in the hundreds of parts per million? When Donnay checked a monitor we had placed in our kids’ upstairs bathroom, he found it had at some point registered a maximum level of 13—yet its display had never wavered from 0.
Donnay pulled our store-bought monitor from the wall and held it in his hand. “This thing isn’t even allowed to alarm until the CO gets over seventy parts per million for one to four hours,” he said. “The Consumer Product Safety Commission doesn’t even want you to know about CO until the level is over thirty. Women can have babies with birth defects and low birth weight when average background CO levels increase only five to six parts per million. Imagine if smoke detectors had to wait four hours to warn you of a fire!
“These decisions were made strictly for convenience of fire marshals and gas companies,” he went on. “The manufacturers say, ‘Do not put CO monitors in the garage or kitchen or furnace room’ because they don’t want to overburden gas companies and fire departments who must respond if they get called about a CO alarm. If they find low levels in the house, they say, ‘This detector must be defective.’ Even if they find high levels, they only inspect gas appliances, and never the cars in the attached garage. They commonly say, ‘We can’t find the source of all this CO.’ But studies have shown high CO levels in the house several hours after the car has left the attached garage. It takes that long for CO to seep into the house. And how are you even supposed to test these CO detectors? All of these, when you hit the test button, you’re only testing the battery and the alarm. There’s no way to know if the sensor is even working. It’s very hard to set these things off. I’ve found they can be one hundred percent off—if the actual CO level is one hundred, the monitor could display two hundred, or it could display zero.”
Donnay speculates that the epidemics of asthma and autism that have arisen in recent decades are due at least in part to two common sources of CO poisoning: the use of poorly ventilated gas ovens and stoves (half of American kitchens have gas ovens) and the widespread construction of homes with attached garages.
“We brought our cars into our houses, took the flues off our ovens and replaced them with dummy hoods that blow the CO right back into our faces,” Donnay said. Especially when the weather (and thus car engines and the catalytic converters) are cold, starting cars inside garages produces a lot of carbon monoxide. Even though the car’s exhaust pipe is typically facing out, once the CO hits the cold air outside the garage (Donnay calls this air “the glass wall”), most of it rushes straight back into the garage. Once the car leaves, and the garage door drops down, the CO remains locked inside, where it inevitably seeps into the house, resulting in levels high enough to trigger CO alarms—provided the alarms actually work.
Donnay listed other sources of carbon monoxide poisoning, noting especially gas and charcoal grills and poorly ventilated indoor fireplaces. Time was, people put their coals in a coal bucket and took them outside, he said. In contemporary fireplaces, as the fire dies down, the force of the updraft gradually dimishes. Long after you’ve gone to bed, cold air rushes down the chimney, fans the remaining embers, and blows combustion gases throughout the house. (The solution? Install a ventilated “insert” box with tightly closing glass doors that will allow you to enjoy a fire without allowing the combustion gases to reverse course.)
Gas-powered lawn tools are another source of acute carbon monoxide poisoning, Donnay said. “Pick any two-stroke engine—mowers, leaf blowers, weed trimmers—and you’re getting tens of thousands of parts per million of carbon monoxide exhaust. There’s no chimney on these appliances, and no catalytic converter to reduce the CO. You’re either wearing it on your back or pushing it right in front of you. You’re basically walking in a CO cloud as long as you’re using that appliance.”
As someone well versed in the politics of environmental health, Albert Donnay acknowledges that his ideas about carbon monoxide are not exactly in the mainstream of medical science. He is also aware that conditions like multiple chemical sensitivity offer skeptics an opportunity to disregard any complaints about chemical exposure. That a few poor souls are suffering from acute sensitivity is unfortunate, this thinking goes, but that’s their problem, and not a problem with chemicals themselves. If the majority of us seem to get along just fine, shouldn’t we leave well enough alone?
The weakness of this argument, Donnay says, lies in the difference between a person’s chemical sensitivity and a person’s chemical body burden. It is true that people with MCS suffer in ways that most people do not. Since most of us are not chemically sensitive, since encounters with pesticides or cleaning fluids or paints do not send us reeling, we are not inclined to see our chemical exposures as threatening. But the thing about synthetic chemicals is that they do not just cause immediate problems. Far more worrisome are the problems they cause as they accumulate over time. It’s one thing to realize that you are sensitive to your husband’s deodorant. You just have him throw it away. It’s quite another thing to realize that you have years of toxic flame retardants built up in your breast tissue.
“A drug addict or a chain smoker or an alcoholic may not be cognizant of their body burden, either, but they are still likely to die young because of it,” Donnay says. “We all are accumulating these chemicals, but what effects they may have on us, we still don’t really know.”