About 6% of Ontarians, more than 800,000 people over the age of 12 in 2020, suffered from ES/MCS (environmental sensitivities/multiple chemical sensitivity), ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) and FM (fibromyalgia). These already large numbers, which represent only those who had been diagnosed with these conditions at time have been steadily on the rise for decades.
Now many cases of Long COVID – found in many cases to be clinically indistinguishable from ME/CFS – have developed, and more are on their way. So, another huge cohort of people with a debilitating, chronic complex illness have joined their ranks.
An unknown but significant number of children are also affected.
Medical research and clinical experience in other places is providing ever-greater insight for all three conditions. We have also learned a great deal about the diseases that so frequently co-occur with them – for example, mold and mycotoxin illness, Lyme disease and its co-infections, electromagnetic hypersensitivity and mast cell activation syndrome.
Yet, shamefully, Ontario has no capacity whatsoever within its health care system to provide care to people living with these often painful and debilitating conditions.
Our major community consultation and needs identification study, conducted in 2012-2013 for Ontario’s Ministry of Health, found only a ‘void in care with a few tiny islands of support.’
This site is dedicated to providing a historical perspective, relevant documentation and key links to internet resources for everyone seeking to raise raising awareness about these conditions and to advocate for the creation of care capacity, notably through a leading-edge, patient-centred health care delivery system for people with these chronic, complex and environmentally-associated conditions.
The blueprint for such a system has been developed. You can find it on this site, developed and validated in several key reports from study processes commissioned by Ontario’s Ministry of health. We invite you to explore the site and learn what has been developed and submitted prior to 2022. What you will not yet find are any reports of long-promised but long-ignored implementation. That has yet to be won. If you want to join the fight, visit CareNow Ontario (previously MEAO).
We also issue a special invitation to visit, download and read the second edition of our major new research report, Putting the Chemicals Back into Chemical Sensitivity, written to refute the claim that these conditions – particularly but not only MCS – are anxiety disorders. This belief has recently been embodied in the conclusions of a major literature review released by the Quebec National Institute of Public Health. Our new substantive report disputes and refutes it, and provides readers with a rich offering of new research on MCS and ME.
