News

Poisoned by our chemical culture

Local couple struggles with environmental illness

By ANDREW MEFFERD

Silver Spring resident Deb Sossen suffers from a modern illness. It's so new, there's no consensus on what to call it, but it is usually described as multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) or environmental illness.

Both of these names describe the condition when patients are harmed by a chemical in their environment. Since this could include any number of sources, the responsible chemical may not be known to patients and their doctors.

Regardless of what the illness is called or the specific cause, industrial chemicals can devastate the lives of those who are sensitive to them.

Environmental illness is a recent phenomenon because the amount of synthetic chemicals in mass production rose dramatically around the middle of the last century and continues today.

"Pesticides prevent us from forming a meaningful life," said Sossen's partner Erick Solberg. "We have to leave the house and stay with friends every six weeks during the summer when pest spraying takes place. We are at the mercy of people's social programming- that chemical pesticides only affect weeds and pests. They don't understand them as biological agents with effects on the nervous and endocrine system."

Acute environmental illness can occur when one comes in contact with a single large dose of a pesticide, herbicide or other industrial chemical that results in illness. Whether or not anyone is reactive to a particular chemical is a complex combination of previous exposure, genetic predisposition and overall health.

Chronic exposure to toxic chemicals, or one large dose, may permanently make a patient abnormally sensitive to a wide range of synthetic chemicals. The chronic environmental illness/MCS condition may cause chemicals that the patient previously tolerated to cause a reaction even in minute amounts.

Sossen first got sick in 1984 after a car crash in Rockville. In addition to injuries from the crash, in the following weeks she had trouble speaking in complete sentences. Her logical thinking was impaired and she suffered from digestion problems and stomach pains.

Until the crash, Sossen had been healthy, living in Silver Spring since she was born at George Washington University Hospital in 1959. But the symptoms disrupted Sossen's daily activities so that she had to put her music therapy major at the University of Maryland on hold indefinitely. As it became clear that she was suffering from more than just the effects of the crash, getting better became the first priority.

After spending a lot of time and money on medical tests, doctors still didn't know what was wrong with her. "Everyone said there was something wrong with me, but they didn't know what," said Sossen.

Eventually blood tests turned up a large number of sensitivities that were making Sossen ill. The car crash had weakened her immune system to the point that small amounts of chemicals commonly used for air fresheners, preservatives, solvents, pest control, and many other industrial chemicals were destroying Sossen's health.

She is now very susceptible to a wide range of reactions, which are most aggravated during or after exposure to chemicals. Sossen's symptoms include inflamed, painful and infected sinuses and airways when her tissues react to airborne chemicals. Topical chemicals can give her a wide range of rashes and abnormalities of the nerves and blood vessels to her skin.

Pesticides or other chemicals' effects on her central nervous system and brain may make her feel fatigued or irritable, interfere with her memory, make her feel spacy, and make it difficult to concentrate. Her bodily systems that are involved in ingesting and processing chemicals- like her respiratory and digestive system- easily become inflamed and painful.

Doctor Grace Ziem is a Maryland physician who confirmed that cases of illness due to chemical exposure are not a rarity anymore. "Among my patients are hundreds who are chronically ill from chemical exposure, with pesticide exposure the most common," said Ziem.

After she became a medical doctor, Ziem got a doctorate in public health from Harvard. She wanted to look at why so many people were getting sick from chemicals that were supposed to improve their lives from a societal as well as medical perspective.

Now Ziem specializes in diagnosing and treating patients suffering from illnesses caused by synthetic chemicals. The majority of her patients were exposed at work, while the rest were exposed at home or elsewhere to a spill, leak, accident, or unknown exposure.

"Air fresheners don't make the air fresh," said Ziem. "They're nice smelling petrochemicals and they prohibit access to those with migraines, asthma and other respiratory problems. We need to apply the Americans with Disabilities Act to include people with chemical sensitivities and prevent more from becoming victims. We've accommodated other handicaps and it's time to accommodate this one."

After finding the root of her illness, Sossen registered herself with the Department of Agriculture's pesticide sensitive list. People on this list are supposed to be notified when there is chemical application near their homes, but the system doesn't always work, and it can't account for all the chemicals available over the counter.

Not long after the car accident, in the winter of 1985, Sossen was living with Solberg in a basement apartment. It was wintertime and there was snow on the ground. At around the same time that an organophosphate roach killer was sprayed in the kitchens of every apartment in the complex they were living in, chlordane was injected into the ground nearby to prepare it for new construction.

Shortly after the chlordane injection, the weather warmed and snow started to melt. Since they didn't know about the pesticides in the ground, Solberg cleaned up melt water that ran in through their sliding door without protective clothing.

Solberg, who was driving a cab at the time, started feeling ill until he blacked out behind the wheel in the early spring of 1986 and had an accident.

"My body broke down because of being overexposed," said Solberg. So in addition to his body's sensitivity to the chemicals, he was also dealing with spinal and sinus problems resulting from the accident. The effects of the pesticides worsened Sossen's condition further.

Chlordane is an effective pesticide because it disrupts the endocrine system of animals. The Environmental Protection Agency lists the chemical in the top ten percent of the most toxic chemicals to human health. The EPA says that one of the most common ways for people to become overexposed to this chemical is by breathing or touching the soil near homes treated for termites with Chlordane.

Organophosphates like the one in the roach killer used to treat Sossen and Solberg's kitchen are responsible for thousands of acute poisonings every year in the United States. In June 2000 the EPA removed many organophosphates from over the counter products because they were found to be more hazardous than previously thought.

But by that point, Sossen and Solberg's health was already impacted to the point where they both had to go on disability benefits.

In the meantime, they have moved around a lot, trying to find a place to live where they can establish a home base and get well, and maybe even go back to school. It has not been easy, though. The property management company that serves as their landlord is trying to evict them from their rented Silver Spring home because of complaints from their neighbors when they object to cosmetic chemical applications.

"What Sossen is fighting for really is the right not to be poisoned," said Jay Feldman, the executive director of Beyond Pesticides, a clearinghouse of information and advocacy for alternatives to chemical pesticides. "The regulatory system has failed people like Sossen and others who are sick and are vulnerable to other illnesses because of exposure to chemicals. The EPA has not thoroughly studied many chemicals that are in wide use."

Feldman thinks the only way to keep more people from being needlessly poisoned in the long and short term is to do more research on the thousands of chemicals on the market and regulate them more carefully.

"Asking people to change their behavior so they don't cause poisoning is difficult. Whenever people say you can't do something that's legal, people tend to get defensive," said Feldman. "That's why government legislation is necessary, because it says though someone may think they're operating safely, it's not for those involuntarily exposed."

For the time being, Sossen and Solberg are trying to stay healthy while keeping a roof over their heads. They are trying to appeal the eviction, because they added a page of exemptions to their lease when they rented their current house at the end of 1999 dealing specifically with their special needs due to chemical sensitivities.