Transcript for
Chemical Sensitivity
A 15-Minute Introduction

Opening screens contain these statements:

This 15-minute DVD contains excerpts from
various DVDs about chemical sensitivity
made by Alison Johnson and Richard Startzman.

Complimentary or reduced-price copies
of these other DVDs may be available
for members of the media,
government officials, and physicians.

Bennie Howard: Hello everybody. My name is Bennie Howard. I’m the Acting Director of the Office of Disability Policy at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. Federal laws, specifically the Fair Housing Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability. HUD considers multiple chemical sensitivity to be a disability under these laws.

Subtitle: William Meggs, M.D., Ph.D.
Brody School of Medicine, NC

Bill Meggs: There’s a significant percentage of people in our population who have a hyper-reactivity to common environmental chemicals, things like cigarette smoke and paint fumes and solvents and cleaning products, ammonia, various irritating chemicals. And the more extreme of these individuals have what we call multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, and these are individuals who are so sensitive to these everyday chemicals they have problems involving multiple organ systems, and in the more extreme cases are actually disabled by their inability to function in ordinary society where every day of our lives we’re exposed to a host of these environmental chemicals.

Subtitle: Claudia Miller, M.D.
Univ. of Texas Health Sciences Ctr.
San Antonio

Claudia Miller: The Gulf veterans that we’ve studied have also reported striking intolerances for chemicals, new intolerances that were never there before, for example, mechanics who used to love being around, you know, gasoline and solvents and all of a sudden they say they feel sick if they’re around those. Even if a truck drives into the shop, the exhaust will make them sick-nausea, vomiting, headaches, and so on.

Roy Twymon: Since I’ve been back from the Gulf War, you know, I also notice that a lot of things bother me that never bothered me before. Different perfume, different cologne, gas, different smell of even smoke or cigarettes, you know, I just automatically get sick, and sometimes it takes me days or weeks to recover. One day I was on the elevator and someone got on there with some loud perfume, and then all of a sudden it hit me, and I got lightheaded.

Narrator: Roy’s blood pressure shot up so high that the emergency room staff thought he was having a heart attack. He ended up spending four days in the hospital.

Tim Smith: You know, the chemical sensitivity is just becoming unreal, and you notice it now. It’s before when you used to pump gas, you’d just stand there and smell the fumes. Great, you know, this stuff don’t bother me. And now you’ve got to try to hide and pump at the same time.

Dr. Ronald Blanck: In the mid-1990s, I commanded Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I continued to work on looking for causes for the illnesses suffered by many Gulf War veterans, illnesses that were clearly more than stress related. I looked at vaccines, I looked at exposure to smokes, to other toxic chemicals, petrochemicals, and so forth, all that were part of that battlefield experience, and I came to the conclusion that at least one of the explanations was multiple chemical sensitivity, something where a variety of toxic elements even at low levels by themselves in combination may in susceptible individuals be causing these illnesses, and I believe so much more work needs to be done on that, but it is clearly one of the explanations.

Subtitle: John Sferazo, Ironworker
President, Unsung Heroes Helping Heroes

John Sferazo: So being an ironworker and being a person in the construction field, where every day you face some type of hazard, some type of danger. Well, right after we witnessed that collapse, we knew that we wanted to go into the Trade Center site. Meanwhile everybody else is running from it, and here you’ve got a bunch of guys, first responders, that are looking to go in.

Bonnie Giebfried: We were one of the first units into the South Tower. We got three individuals out of the South Tower. The last thing I remember seeing actually was a helicopter trying to go on one of the towers to get people off the tower, and just briefly remember hearing it, someone say it was going to blow and at that point, you had a humongous fire ball; it looked like a meteor coming at us.

Bill Meggs: Chemical sensitivities are often acquired after a high dose of devastating exposure to chemicals. This is exactly the situation that developed after the World Trade Center collapse.

John Sferazo: Since 9/11, the smell of gasoline and diesel fuel is such that I don’t get out and even fuel my own vehicles. I don’t even want it on my hands because of the odor. Being around the job sites and being around the smell of the diesel and gasoline, I am so symptomatic to that involvement that I was constantly getting problems with my throat, I would wind up going hoarse, and I would lose my voice, sometimes the next thing you know from a sore throat, I’d have a chest infection, I’d get lung infections, then I’d get pneumonia, and this never ever happened to me before in my life. Now the smell of smoke actually ensickens me, sometimes giving me a headache. I know I can’t use any type of cologne or aftershave. I can’t take that smell, it’s sort of like a burning inside my nostrils. I’m very acute, or I have an acute response.

Bonnie Giebfried: I can’t be in restaurants because God forbid someone has perfume on. I can go into a fit. I can feel nauseous and throw up. My throat can close up. The multiple chemical sensitivity issues that have come from 9/11 have not been addressed. Household cleaners, Oh, my God, you just might just as well pack me up at that point and just send me to the hospital.

Subtitle: Joel Kupferman
NY Environmental Law and Justice Center

Joel Kupferman: I’ve been tracking the firefighters post-9/11, and what many, many have told me and that medical reports have showed that they become hypersensitive to other chemicals that are out there. The could be fine for a while, they have, you know, respiratory problems. They’re on 3/4 time, meaning that they’re not on active duty, and boom, they’ll come across perfume or other chemicals out there, even household cleaning chemicals, and they’ll just become immobilized, and some of them just become so sick that they can’t, they basically can’t function on a daily level.

Narrator: Christine Oliver, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, is the former director of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Christine Oliver: So it’s very important if you’ve experienced something like the September 11 attacks, very important for New Yorkers to understand, that in order to prevent development of chemical sensitivity, development of multiple chemical sensitivity, worsening of multiple chemical sensitivity, it’s very important that they avoid to the extent possible further exposure to irritant chemicals.

Subtitle: Stephen Levin, M.D.,
Director, Mount Sinai
Occupational and Environmental Clinic

Stephen Levin: Another striking thing is that many of our patients are much more reactive to strong odors than they were before, not always with exactly the same reaction that they’ll experience when they are exposed to cigarette smoke or bus exhaust, but they notice these odors more and find themselves reacting physically unpleasantly to these odors in ways they never did before. I have patients who cannot walk into a department store cosmetic area without experiencing shortness of breath and chest tightness in ways they never did before. I have patients who cannot get on an elevator where someone is wearing strong perfume or cologne without experiencing fairly intense respiratory reactions. We don’t always understand why this is so, but it is extremely commonly reported among our World Trade Center responders and many of our patients say that they are simply unable to wear fragrances themselves or be around other family members, friends, who wear such fragrances because they simply can’t tolerate them.

Subtitle: Alison Johnson
Producer/director

Alison Johnson: Before she developed multiple chemical sensitivity or MCS at age 32, Jenn had a lot going for her in life. She had degrees from MIT and NYU, she had excellent and creative jobs, and she enjoyed activities like dance, yoga, and African drumming.

Jenn Duncan: I had developed chemical sensitivity prior to 9/11. The office building where I worked was doing renovations and after a prolonged exposure over several weeks in a poorly ventilated area to a number of those chemicals I had a number of strange symptoms and unusual things that were going on that then later on I realized developed into multiple chemical sensitivity and other chemical injury symptoms. After 9/11, with all the exposure of the smoke and the fumes blowing over from Manhattan into Brooklyn, I definitely experienced exacerbations and got even more debilitated. And, you know, being exposed just to cologne, or if I was out around traffic, or somebody smoking a cigarette, then it would make me disintegrate and have the disorientation, and the trouble breathing and the great pain, joint pain.

Spelling is hard; numbers are hard. I have dyslexia sometimes now. I always check and double check. I would write an envelope, and it would be returned because I mixed up my numbers. I never had a problem with numbers before. I did calculus and differential equations. If somebody asks me numbers or to spell something, it’s really hard. Sometimes it helps me, I used a little sign language before, so I usually spell out just to help me get something physical to help me get the numbers or letters out. Sorry, I’m getting fatigued, so I’m trying to just ride the waves and hold my energy together.

Alison Johnson: Believe it or not, that was Jenn on one of her good days. We had also filmed her the day after a doctor’s appointment. Jenn told us that exposure to several air fresheners and diesel fumes in the private ambulance that transported her had caused this temporary but sharp decline in her condition.

Bill Meggs: Funding for research in chemical sensitivity in this country does not measure up to the size of the health problem, the public health problem that it is. Japan does a much better job than we do in studying this problem and making funds available for serious researchers. There are commercial interests, the manufacturers of consumer products that pollute the air we breathe and the Worker’s Comp insurance companies and others that perceive that if we knew more about this problem they would be liable for people’s suffering, and frankly, they don’t want it studied.

Alison Johnson: Newspaper reporters often refer to MCS, multiple chemical sensitivity, as a rare condition, but this is hardly the case. In 2004, the Archives of Environmental Health published a national prevalence study by Stan Caress and Anne Steinemann. These researchers reported that in their national random phone survey 2.5 percent of the respondents said that they had been diagnosed with MCS. This result suggests that over seven million Americans may be suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity.

The End

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