PLEASE CONSIDER TAKING ACTION BY GOING TO THE ASEQ WEBSITE AND JOINING THEIR CAMPAIGN.
The Ontario Environmental Health Advocates Group invites you to download the 2nd edition of Putting the Chemicals Back in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, attached here and posted on October 25, 2022.
We have written the report Putting the Chemicals Back in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity in order to refute what we believe are the erroneous and dangerous conclusions of the 850-page literature review and definitional paper on MCS – Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome: An integrative approach to identifying the pathophysiological mechanisms – released in French in June 2021 by the National Public Health Institute of Quebec. The INSPQ release included a short “Key Messages and Summary” in English.
Along with concerns raised by other advocate groups, especially L’Association pour la santé environnementale du Québec / Environmental Health Association of Québec, our extensive research-based report warns that the INSPQ report represents a clear and present danger not only to people living with MCS – including more than 1.1 million Canadians – but to those with other chronic, complex diseases such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME – also known as ME/CFS, and formerly as chronic fatigue syndrome, the language of the INSQP report) and fibromyalgia (FM) – people for whom we advocate.
The INSPQ report concludes that MCS is a psychogenic anxiety disorder; then it places the other conditions for which we advocate in this same basket. Their biophysical causes and mechanisms are dismissed. Further, the INSPQ reports claims MCS has nothing to do with chemicals, and that these are harmless at so-called “normal”concentrations. We strongly disagree with the key conclusions of the INSPQ report and we support those advocates who have called to have the report withdrawn.
We released the first edition of Putting the Chemicals Back in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity at the end of June 2022. The years 2021 and 2022 were good ones in MCS and ME studies, advancing understanding in a number of important ways. We decided to use the new research, as well as important literature from the past 20 years that had been omitted or unengaged by the INSPQ authors to demonstrate the errors in the INSPQ conclusions. We aimed to show the complex biophysical, not psychiatric nature of the conditions, and, with respect to MCS, to emphasize its toxicological element. We also wanted to address, in a limited way, the socio-political dimensions of the fight to win recognition and care, especially in Canada. And we wanted both to counter the INSPQ report and to give others a resource to do the same, whether they are dealing with this report or its all-too-common theses, as they may arise in other settings.
However, we ended up preparing a second edition over the summer months because of an important article we discovered, co-authored by the distinguished neuroscientist Marie-Ève Tremblay, along with Herbert Renz-Polster, Dorothee Bienzle and Joachim E. Fischer. Dr. Tremblay, importantly, is also one of the three principal authors of the INSPQ report. This article, “The Pathobiology of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: The Case for Neuroglial Failure” was published in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience in May, 2022. Strikingly and contrary to the INSPQ report’s framing of ME, this article presents a detailed hypothesis supporting ME’s biological, including likely immunological, origin and mechanisms – a view that aligns with our own. The article’s approach contradicts the key conclusion of the INSPQ report that ME is an anxiety disorder. In our 2nd edition, then, we show how the approach of this article is similar to the one we take to ME and also to MCS. As we do, the article also brings long-COVID into consideration as belonging in the same fold as ME, an important issue in these times.
We think the contradiction between this article and the INSPQ report is important to underline and discuss, for it raises fundamental questions about the validity of the main conclusions of the INSQP report. Because the implications of these conclusions – for clinical programs, disability rights, public health policy and research directions – are both negative and dangerous as they stand, we hope that the approach in the Frontiers article will help lay to rest the psychogenic approach that lies behind them.
You can learn more about our report, about us, and find many other resources pertaining to the 12-year process in Ontario to gain recognition, health care and disability rights for MCS, ME and FM, by visiting our website. If you already have a copy of the 1st edition, we invite you to replace it with the 2nd, attached here. And do please distribute this new report to all those you think would benefit from having it. We will be sending it to policy-makers in Quebec, Ontario and Ottawa.
You may also be interested in the substantive MCS literature review released in May 2021 by Alberta Health, Multiple chemical sensitivity : Literature review and state of the science, which tends toward our approach to MCS, and against that of the INSPQ.
PLEASE CONSIDER TAKING ACTION BY GOING TO THE ASEQ WEBSITE AND JOINING THEIR CAMPAIGN.
Toronto
Nov. 11, 2022
NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: [email protected].
