chemicals

[Guest guest]

> I know testing of new chemicals is pretty lame in Canada and I

> suspect it's hard to keep up with in the US too. There's so much

> economic pressure to just let things through the system.

It's not unheard of for chemicals to trash your self-tolerance. First,

there was that thing with the contaminated L-tryptophan, which is why

it got outlawed for a while. That caused myalgia with eosinophilia.

I'm not sure how it worked. There was a thing in Spain ~1980 where

this contaminated sesame oil gave a few thousand people this horrible

apparantly autoimmune disease (lots of inflammation and

autoantibodies; no other explanation), often nonresolving.

The thing is, why worry much about lots of chemicals that tracely

contaminate the environment, unless it's clear that some disease is

increasing unaccountably. People say CFS is " exploding " or something,

but I notice they never mention any evidence. That's not surprising

given the lack of objective diagnosis. There is evidence for a maybe

2x increase in MS over the last 50-60 years. That could be due to

artifact or to a bunch of other things, so it doesn't worry me too

much. Then there's autism. I don't know about it but a lot of people

do think the increased dx is due to increased vigilance or evolved

definitions or something. Certainly some people disagree. Crohn's

disease in Olmsted County (where a lot of long-term epidemiology has

been done by Mayo) shows an increase around 4x since WWII. But the

confidence is pretty low, so the real change could easily be quite a

bit less, and there is the possibility of artifacts. That guy

Weinstock (the whipworm guy) claimed in some interview that Crohn's

was virtually absent circa 1900 or so. The excellent history of TB by

Dormandy (MD, PhD) states that Crohn's was basically

unstudyable until TB was cured circa 1950, because intestinal TB was

so common, so similar to Crohn's, and like all forms of TB could

occasionally lack easily demonstrable M tuberculosis or M bovis Acid

Fast Bodies. For now I'm gonna believe Dormandy. Altogether, I don't

feel like I've seen strong evidence for anything more than an

incremental, fairly equivocal, and possibly altogether artifactual

increase in immune disease incidence. But again, I haven't really

studied the autism issue, or gone out of my way to look at this sort

of thing in detail in any disease. This is just a pro tem opinion

based on what I've come across incidentally.