[00:00:00] Aaron Goodman: Welcome to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. I'm the podcast creator Aaron Goodman on February 3rd, 2023. Life changed forever in East Palestine, Ohio, in the United States Freight train derailed, including tank cars. Loaded with hazardous chemicals like vinyl chloride, butyl accolade, and benzene residue.

[00:00:28] Days later, officials carried out a controlled burn of the vinyl chloride and a towering black plume spread across the region. Drifting into homes, farms, and waterways, families returned to what they were told. Were safe homes. Many immediately fell sick, headaches, burning eyes, dizziness, coughs, fatigue, neurological issues, rashes, mood changes, and an intense sudden reactivity to everyday chemical exposures.

[00:01:01] These symptoms echo what people with multiple chemical sensitivity or MCS experience. After toxic injury, even if residents haven't heard the term MCS, the trauma and chronic illness, many now face are undeniably similar and undeniably real. To understand what has happened and why people are still suffering.

[00:01:24] We're joined by two experts with firsthand insight into both the lived. And scientific realities of this chemical disaster. First Madison Scott, a northeast Ohio native, and sociologist whose master's thesis a village evacuated documents the stories of residents, first responders, and activists. With Madison, I'll explore what people physically and emotionally endured during and after the derailment, how disbelief and denial from officials deepened, mistrust, and fractured the community.

[00:01:56] And the powerful emotional bonds that kept people rooted in place even when they feared staying. My second guest is Professor Lynn Singer, distinguished University professor at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, and a leading expert. On toxic exposures and their effects on human health. With Dr.

[00:02:19] Singer, I'll explore which chemicals residents were exposed to and the symptoms still emerging today. Cutting edge research into biological markers that could help explain MCS like reactions and long-term risks, and how communication missteps and institutional failures. Have left residents feeling abandoned.

[00:02:45] The toxic train derailment in Ohio is more than a headline. East Palestine is a community still fighting for answers for health and for justice, and their experience challenges us to rethink how we understand chemical exposure, contested illness, and what happens when the environment becomes dangerous in the place we call home.

[00:03:07] Madison, welcome and thanks for joining me. 

[00:03:10] Madison Scott: Thanks for having me. 

[00:03:11] Aaron Goodman: I do wanna briefly introduce yourself to folks please. 

[00:03:15] Madison Scott: Sure. I am Madison Scott. I started my educational journey at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I got my bachelor of science in Zoology from there and decided to take a quick shift into the world of sociology.

[00:03:31] I attended Oklahoma State University after that, where I got my master of Science in sociology. During my time there, I successfully defended my thesis on the East Palestine train derailment, and that is what I'm here to talk about today. 

[00:03:46] Aaron Goodman: Fantastic. Do you wanna take me back to the day, the moment when you first heard about the derailment.

[00:03:56] Madison Scott: It was my spring semester of my first year in grad school. I was honestly pretty far into the process of deciding what my thesis would be when this happened. Later that day, I had class with my advisor and I went to him and I said, hello. I think I need to take a little bit of a shift here. Do you think it's too late?

[00:04:19] And he said, no, it's never too late to shift into something that you actually feel like you're interested in. If this is what you want to do, this is what you're going to get to do. And from there on, I went with it and never went back. 

[00:04:33] Aaron Goodman: And how far are you from East Palestine? 

[00:04:38] Madison Scott: I'm about a quick 40 minute drive away, so I grew up around here.

[00:04:43] So when I heard that this had happened and it was so close to home, that was anxiety inducing. I have family in the area. I have friends that were living down in Cincinnati at the time, which is just down the Ohio River. So hearing something like this happening and knowing that there are chemicals involved and.

[00:05:03] Air and water quality are being called into question. That was very anxiety inducing for me. From an area so close, I was down in Oklahoma at the time, so the concern wasn't for myself, but certainly for people that I knew up here, and of course, the residents that were living right next to that derailment site.

[00:05:22] Aaron Goodman: And what kind of images were you seeing in the news? 

[00:05:25] Madison Scott: I'm sure if you're familiar with the derailment, you saw similar images of. Just fire train rail cars on fire exploding. I saw videos of the burn that they conducted that looked like an explosion. 

[00:05:41] Aaron Goodman: Do you wanna briefly describe the town of East Palestine, the number of residents?

[00:05:47] What kind of place is this? 

[00:05:49] Madison Scott: East Palestine is a very small, rural community. It is right on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania. It prior to the derailment, was a very tight knit community. People. We're very passionate when they would share stories pre derailment about attending events in their community, they would tell me that they used to crowdsource if there were ailing residents in town to support them because it is a somewhat low income community and a lot of people have their jobs right there in town.

[00:06:22] So some residents don't even have cars or a way to travel outside of town. A lot of people do manufacturing or factory jobs. There are a lot of people that work at the local grocery store. They don't have a big box store like Walmart or Target. So really everything there is community built and operated 

[00:06:44] Aaron Goodman: and agricultural based.

[00:06:46] Economy. 

[00:06:46] Madison Scott: Yes. A lot of people engage in agriculture there. Even people that aren't necessarily farmers themselves rely on backyard gardens or things of the sort to provide supplementary food for them. So this in that way, is well impacted a lot of families in the East Palestine area. 

[00:07:07] Aaron Goodman: When people first return home after the derailment, what kind of physical.

[00:07:15] Emotional symptoms. Did they describe 

[00:07:18] Madison Scott: dizziness, rashes, coughs. People also had red eyes, migraines, vomiting. They were also experiencing fear, stress, and a lot of pressure because East Palestine is such a self-contained community. Coming back and knowing that their health may be at stake, but also having to contend with the idea that moving away means moving away from your history, your lineage, things like that can be extremely distressing.

[00:07:46] And so a lot of people struggled with sleeping, struggled with just. Continuing their day-to-day life. 

[00:07:52] Aaron Goodman: Did you notice patterns or parallels in the stories people were sharing with you? 

[00:07:56] Madison Scott: Absolutely. Like I said, those most common symptoms, the migraines, the red eyes, the rashes, the cough, that was all tied together and they would tell me, they would say.

[00:08:06] I can smell the chemicals they're telling me. They may or may not be here, but I know that they are because I can smell them. I can feel them. Every time I step into my house, I know that they're there because I start feeling this whole host of symptoms related to it that whether they acknowledge it or whether I'm being told by a professional that that's what this is from.

[00:08:30] I know what it's from because I see it time and time again. The other thing that people were struggling with was just a denial of causation. So there were from neighbors, from medical professionals, from relatives saying that. They weren't sure that it was as bad as people were experiencing. I had one woman share that she had a family member doubt her, and she invited the family member, come stay at my house for a night and see how you feel.

[00:08:58] And this family member said, alright, let's see. And she came and visited and couldn't sleep. She was shaking. She was just so fearful because she realized that these symptoms were real and that other people were feeling them and now she was experiencing them herself. It caused an emotional reaction, and she had a very difficult night that night.

[00:09:19] Aaron Goodman: How did residents make sense of these new or worsening symptoms? Did they connect them to the chemical exposure from the derailment, the initial explosions and fires, and later on the burn that was conducted? 

[00:09:36] Madison Scott: A lot of them did make that connection and uncertainty in the early moments after the derailment led to increased exposure in a lot of people that I think helped make that connection.

[00:09:48] I had people tell me that they went down to the derailment site to take pictures of the fire, or they didn't know that there were chemicals on board. So they told their kids they could go ride their bikes down and see what was going on. So a lot of people, when something like that happens and you don't know that you're in very real.

[00:10:06] Danger of chemical exposure might want to get closer and see what's going on, which increases that exposure. So a lot of people did in the immediate aftermath say, I think that this is related to what happened here. But there was also another subset of people that either didn't experience symptoms or only experienced minor symptoms that went away shortly after that sort of started calling into question.

[00:10:33] Is this real? Are these symptoms real? Are these stories real? And it created a sort of rift in the community that will be very difficult to men 

[00:10:43] Aaron Goodman: When people sought medical help at first, how did doctors and public health officials or government agencies respond? 

[00:10:54] Madison Scott: They definitely experienced dismissal. I think the first important thing to note is, again, east Palestine is such a small rural community that the only thing that they really had access to in their community was a primary healthcare professional.

[00:11:09] This wasn't a specialist or anybody that is super familiar with treating chemical exposure and so. I think that they struggled first to keep up with the volume of people that now wanted to come see them, as well as with the subject matter. And so whether they knew that they were dismissing something serious or not, that is how patients felt there were.

[00:11:35] Thoughts of is there some sort of collusion? Is there some sort of corruption going on here between government officials, medical professionals, and et cetera? And while that's not something that I can sit here and say did or didn't happen, the fact that even came to mind as a real possibility I feel like speaks to the dismissal and the sort of.

[00:12:00] Fear that they were having, that the people that they trusted were not looking out for their best interest. 

[00:12:07] Aaron Goodman: Do you want to talk a little bit about this notion of contested illness and what it looked like and felt like for the residents you spoke with? 

[00:12:16] Madison Scott: Yes, of course. Contested illness, all that means is.

[00:12:21] With most diseases, most illnesses, there is an A to B correlation. You are exposed to somebody that has COVID-19. You get diagnosed with it. That makes sense. You are exposed to an allergen. You have an allergic reaction. That makes sense. When you have something like contested illness, it's not as easy to draw a direct connection between event and outcome.

[00:12:48] A lot of times with contested illness, there is a reason for that. There may be somebody behind an exposure that may not want you to draw that connection because there are liability problems of course, and so contested illness just means that you have some sort of illness that the cause is either uncertain or disputed.

[00:13:10] And that is exactly what a lot of residents here were experiencing. They obviously were experiencing. Symptoms of illness that they were connecting back to this derailment. But for whatever reason, medical professionals, government officials were hesitant to admit that this was a direct cause. It is difficult to draw that line for sure.

[00:13:34] Environmental justice gets at the idea that these sort of exposures, these sort of situations often happen in communities that are either minority based or low income communities, and East Palestine certainly fits into that low income category. Communities that are low income or minority based are more often chosen as the site for high exposure factories and such.

[00:14:01] And while this one wasn't on purpose, this was an accidental release of chemicals. At least in the beginning, it still happened to this low income community, and it fits as a case of environmental justice for that reason. It all sort of ties into the reaction. They're a low income community. They may not be able to afford to file any sort of civil or criminal suit against the people responsible.

[00:14:28] And so this all sort of ties together to create a situation in which the residents feel taken advantage of. They feel not listened to. They feel like they got the short end of the stick. 

[00:14:42] Aaron Goodman: And on that note, when official explanations didn't align with what people were experiencing in their own bodies and minds, how did they find validation?

[00:14:52] Did community members begin to rely on each other and believe each other instead of relying on official narratives? 

[00:15:00] Madison Scott: Some of them certainly did. There were community organizations that cropped up from this, groups of residents, that had fears for themselves and for their children that were still living in the community, coming together and doing research.

[00:15:15] There were community organizations that hosted environmental film fests where they previewed. A whole documentary about what had happened in East Palestinian, Ohio. There were community members that were creating databases of every news article, every comment made by a public official about what happened in their community.

[00:15:36] There were also residents that were going to Columbus, Ohio, to the State House. They were going to DC trying to get a seat at the table with anybody that had some sort of power to make a difference. On the other hand, there were also community members that used this as the proof that they needed, that this was all some sort of ruse, that it wasn't really happening and that the best thing that they could do to move forward is forget about it, pretend it never happened, get the economy back to normal.

[00:16:08] Aaron Goodman: Do you wanna talk a little bit about if people in the community had any awareness about multiple chemical sensitivity? 

[00:16:17] Madison Scott: I think in the direct aftermath, many probably did not, but this community research that popped up over time, it really was a wonderful case of citizen science. It's unfortunate that it came down to that because it really was not necessarily by choice, but.

[00:16:36] By necessity that the community members came together and created these organizations to try to find answers. So I know that in the aftermath, there have been residents that have considered this a very real possibility and are even probably likely to have developed some sort of MCS in the aftermath. I was conducting interviews a year after the derailment and still having residents turn on their cameras to show me that their eyes were still swollen shut, or that they now had a rash all over their arm that had just popped up overnight, that they felt was still connected to the derailment and extended exposure to these chemicals in the air.

[00:17:19] Aaron Goodman: What do you think this incident, this disaster in East Palestine can teach us? About how society responds when environmental exposure leads to illness, especially illnesses that are invisible, not entirely invisible, but sometimes often invisible, complex or hard to quote unquote prove. 

[00:17:41] Madison Scott: The lesson right now is a little scary, frankly, it is that these people are dismissed and told that.

[00:17:49] This isn't real what you're feeling. It must be from something else. I think what we should take away though is that it doesn't have to be that way. There are medical professionals, there are people that believe them and there are people that are there to help them. And I think that until we get to a point where it is widely accepted and widely understood, we need those sort of people, those medical professionals that are using their grant funding, using their status as a researcher to come in and do that work.

[00:18:25] In 2023, there was data released that suggested that there are approximately 15,000 accidental or illegal acute chemical releases per year in the United States, and that data came from the CDC. So understanding that and knowing how common this really is, it, it is scary to know that we are not at that place yet.

[00:18:48] But I do believe with work and with researchers coming in and dedicating their lives to this sort of thing, we could hopefully get to a spot where we understand these illnesses and we recognize this happened. Now these symptoms are occurring and they're common symptoms of the chemicals that were released here.

[00:19:10] Maybe it's okay to admit that is what it's from. 

[00:19:13] Aaron Goodman: Is there anything else you might like to share with listeners? The MCS community, physicians, researchers, policymakers 

[00:19:21] Madison Scott: for the people struggling. Keep up the hard work. It is not your job. To educate people whatsoever. It should not fall on you, but unfortunately at the place we are, it does.

[00:19:35] And for that, I apologize, but I also commend you for the work that you're putting in for policy makers, for people in charge. It's definitely something to look into. M-C-S-I-I don't feel is a widely known or understood sort of. Affliction. It flies under the radar because like you said, it is invisible.

[00:19:58] It's something that you can't see. And because it is contested, it can be easy to just say, oh, we don't know for sure. So why look at it when there are diseases that you can tell very clearly A to B, this is how it happened. So I feel like looking into this and really trying to understand it is.

[00:20:20] Incredibly important for anybody that has power over. Chemical exposure over health, over wellness. Anybody who's writing policy about trains, about the standards that they have to meet, even cars or buses, anything that creates some sort of chemical output, people need to be aware of what they could be doing to the residents that they are supposed to be there to help.

[00:20:51] Aaron Goodman: Thank you Madison. Professor Singer, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. 

[00:20:56] Lynn Singer, PhD: Thank you for having me. 

[00:20:58] Aaron Goodman: Before we dive into your research, would you like to briefly introduce yourself to listeners? 

[00:21:03] Lynn Singer, PhD: Sure. I have a PhD in. Psychology. I'm a pediatric psychologist and my work in research has been on high risk conditions of infancy and effects on the families.

[00:21:17] And over time I began to work on studies of prenatal drug exposures in infants and long-term development. And out of that I became even more aware of the environmental hazards that can occur 

[00:21:31] Aaron Goodman: and you happen to live and work in Ohio. Right. Yeah. And do you want to take us back to the day, the moment when the rail disaster happened, and locate us perhaps where you were in proximity to the disaster and what you heard and what went through your mind?

[00:21:54] Lynn Singer, PhD: So I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, which is. 50, 80 miles away from the disaster. The railroads go right through our university, and I live quite close to the university, and in fact, I can see the trains on the rail track right from my window. It was quite a shock to hear about all of these cars being derailed. It was well known that the chemicals that were being released were dangerous.

[00:22:22] Then seeing the smoke and the burning of the chemicals, and hearing then about the need for evacuation of the residents. I hadn't really thought much about. The chemicals going through our streets on a daily basis and what might happen should a railroad derail. In our country, there's about 30,000 chemical and oil spills annually.

[00:22:46] We transport a billion tons of hazardous materials and there's frequent derailment. Derailment is not that unusual. Mm-hmm. So this is something that is a concern for everyone. 

[00:23:00] Aaron Goodman: How did residents first experience the disaster? 

[00:23:04] Lynn Singer, PhD: It was actually really traumatic for families, for the residents. Uh, east Palestine was the epicenter.

[00:23:12] It literally, the train goes right through the city, so it was right there and it's of. Fairly small rural town near the Pennsylvania border, so here it is in the winter, and I can imagine children were already asleep, but some people are out the train derailed and they were clearly carrying these hazardous chemicals, many that were known to cause cancer, and they were clearly dangerous.

[00:23:39] To health. So within a few hours, the governor of of Ohio ordered the evacuation within a mile radius, and others were told shelter in place. But within a few days, they expanded the evacuation zone because there were concerns starting to be raised. There was concern then that the temperatures were rising and that the chemicals could explode, and that was when a decision was made.

[00:24:07] To have this controlled burn. So then the governor ordered even a more expansive group of people to evacuate. I believe that there's a quote that the governor actually said, you need to leave. This is a matter of life and death. So this is a tremendously traumatic event for people no matter what happens in terms of their health.

[00:24:32] Aaron Goodman: And do you want to share which chemicals were released in the initial and then in the burn, 

[00:24:38] Lynn Singer, PhD: there were about 15 chemicals that were identified from the burn. They were released. Into the air, into the soil and the water. Probably vinyl chloride was the most extensive and one that we know a great deal about in terms of how hazardous it is.

[00:24:58] Butyl, acrylates, phosgene and hydrogen chloride, for example. These chemicals were spilled, then burned, and then off the burning. You get byproducts, like dioxins that we know are also hazardous. The phosgene comes from the burning. So there was the direct chemical spills, but then all of these byproducts that were.

[00:25:22] Extremely hazardous from the burn. There was a study done by the National Atmosphere Deposition Program, and they found that the burn itself released chemicals that expanded over 16 state areas, so it affected over 16 states with the epicenter being in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. 

[00:25:46] Aaron Goodman: So potentially millions upon millions of people, 

[00:25:50] Lynn Singer, PhD: right?

[00:25:51] In some way or another? 

[00:25:52] Aaron Goodman: Yes. And which symptoms did residents and first responders report in the days following the disaster? 

[00:26:00] Lynn Singer, PhD: So. The first surveys, there's something called an ACE survey that was done through the CDC 

[00:26:08] Aaron Goodman: Center for Disease Control, right? 

[00:26:10] Lynn Singer, PhD: Mm-hmm. Right. And members of that team that were actually conducting the survey themselves reported symptoms of sore throats, headaches, coughing, nausea.

[00:26:24] Immediately just from taking the survey from residents, these symptoms were also all reported by residents who were returning to their homes. And they also included things like rashes, nosebleeds, skin irritations, trouble breathing, anxiety. And the thing is that all of these symptoms are known to be consistent with these chemicals.

[00:26:49] Were released. So it's, it wasn't an inconsistent finding. Resonances had the symptoms that we already know would be related to these hazardous chemicals. Mm-hmm. 

[00:27:01] Aaron Goodman: When you say the symptoms are known, known by whom? 

[00:27:05] Lynn Singer, PhD: Alright, so let's just take vinyl chloride, which is the most. Studied. However, the studies that we have of vinyl chloride are primarily from occupational studies.

[00:27:19] We don't really have studies of exposure that might occur for people such as happened in East Palestine. There's studies of healthy adults usually who are exposed to these. Chemicals in very controlled conditions. They're already connected to things like cancers, various liver diseases, heart disease, reproductive disorders.

[00:27:45] For example, phosgene, which was released from the burn. It was used in chemical warfare. It's highly toxic, so. We can't predict specifically what will happen. 'cause everyone is different in terms of their own vulnerability. It makes the long-term outcomes difficult to predict. But we do know that these are.

[00:28:11] Bad for people. Mm-hmm. And that even under controlled conditions, people develop both sensitivities so that they can't work there anymore or long-term. They may develop cancers and other serious illnesses. Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:26] Aaron Goodman: Yeah. Under controlled conditions, people develop sensitivity to chemicals. Yes. And I believe you're referring to people who.

[00:28:34] Are involved in the production of chemicals? Correct. And when you talk about sensitization to chemicals, 

[00:28:42] Lynn Singer, PhD: what does that mean? Well, in this case, it means symptoms like rashes. I mean, we know of these symptoms. They're rashes, they're breathing difficulties, they're fatigue. So the symptoms become such that they can't work there anymore.

[00:28:59] Aaron Goodman: And those symptoms all fall under the umbrella of multiple chemical sensitivity. Is sensitization to chemicals? Fairly well known in the research world, I would say 

[00:29:08] Lynn Singer, PhD: yes. 

[00:29:09] Aaron Goodman: Mm-hmm. 

[00:29:10] Lynn Singer, PhD: Yes. I'm not a chemist, but as I read about the various, uh, substances, it will say. Sensitization, dermal risk reactivity, et cetera.

[00:29:23] Mm-hmm. Are responses to these chemicals. 

[00:29:25] Aaron Goodman: Yeah. And when you go into the fine print of chemicals, they're listed in tables, aren't they? Sometimes. 

[00:29:30] Lynn Singer, PhD: Yes. 

[00:29:31] Aaron Goodman: Mm-hmm. And those are often the chemical companies which deny connection between their products and health outcomes. 

[00:29:39] Lynn Singer, PhD: Sure. 

[00:29:40] Aaron Goodman: And so when we look at Ohio, what kind of health challenges are people continuing to deal with?

[00:29:47] Lynn Singer, PhD: The National Institute of Health has funded several, what we call R 20 ones, small studies studies to explore the issues, and those studies are just becoming available, for example. Carnegie Mellon University was one of the groups that went and did air testing at various stages. After the derailment, there was a great deal of governmental remediation, cleaning the soil, trying to clear the waters, trying to make things be cleaned up from the toxins that were identified.

[00:30:24] Toxicants, they found that there were still hotspots. Even after remediation, we're just identifying really now what might be occurring. One of the studies they looked at people who were within a mile of. The epicenter and they found evidence of chronic low grade inflammation in the blood of people We're kind of just identifying these things and for example, aquiline was detected in urines, which is another.

[00:30:56] Aquiline is one of the other hazardous chemicals. Vinyl chloride was, if you looked at the reg standard population, was about 5% in CD. C. Data and was occurring at a rate of 74% in the East Palestine residents. So people are just coming out with some of these studies now. There were signs already in the blood of tissues trying to repair chronic inflammation.

[00:31:26] Was is another. Side effect or thing that we think about in terms of chemical. And this was, mm-hmm. This was five months later. Mm-hmm. So you could see that the body was responding. We, we don't know yet what will happen long term. Mm-hmm. There is a California study which discussed the idea that these were mixed toxicants mm-hmm.

[00:31:46] And related the symptoms as similar to that found in the Gulf War. Illnesses. 

[00:31:53] Aaron Goodman: Mm-hmm. 

[00:31:53] Lynn Singer, PhD: Which was another mixture of toxicants that soldiers were exposed to. And that finding, because you think about the mitochondrial damage, we know that at a very basic DNA level, there may be damage to the mitochondria. So we are just finding these people are still experiencing these kinds of issues and problems, for example.

[00:32:15] Mm-hmm. We recruit our subjects from county fairs. Mm-hmm. And this past. It's summer. Here it is. Two years later. I heard from one family about. Mm-hmm. The fact that their daughter raises piglets and. That summer, she had more congenital abnormalities in the piglets than she had ever seen, or another person that came and talked about the fact that they produced mushrooms and that their crop was terrible.

[00:32:46] And when they went to kind of have the soil looked at, they found that the soil was filled. Toxicants that prevented the mushrooms from growing people who talked about cancers already, maybe they already had cancer and it's worsened. Mm-hmm. So we're just beginning to identify what the long-term outcomes might be.

[00:33:06] Aaron Goodman: Yeah. And you've written professor about studies that measure biological markers of exposure. 

[00:33:13] Madison Scott: Right. 

[00:33:13] Aaron Goodman: And something called somatic mutation. Great. How could this research help us understand the long-term risks of these chemical exposures and possibly connection to MCS? 

[00:33:28] Lynn Singer, PhD: Yes. I think this is very exciting research.

[00:33:31] This is research done by my colleague at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Fred Schumacher. The fact is that it's very difficult to quantify the chemicals that mixtures that were released in the derailment. Okay? How do we identify what you might have been exposed to in these weeks over time, and what that did to you because the, there.

[00:33:56] Pass through very quickly in the urine, or they may not show up in the blood after a few weeks. But one of the things that Dr. Schumacher is looking at, it's called somatic mutation rate, and he's looking at that as something that could potentially measure the impact of these chemical exposures. We now have genomic technologies, which we can.

[00:34:21] Which can allow us to look at biological changes that reflect damage to the body's cells and tissues. Mm-hmm. For example, you're constantly accumulating mutations in your body, so that's part of aging. If you have too many mutations, usually they can be fixed pretty quickly by the body. Over time, over aging, those.

[00:34:48] End up being more and more problematic, and they are factors in developing certain diseases, for example, cancer or autoimmune diseases. Mm-hmm. So these somatic mutation rate is something that differentiates you from chronological aging, your real age versus your biological. Age, your chronological age so that you may be healthier, your tissues may be healthier, they may be detoxifying chemicals more quickly.

[00:35:18] You may not have an inflammation, low inflammatory status. Mm-hmm. So this somatic you. Mutation rate has been shown to be responsive. For example, kids who had chemotherapy, you could show that the chemical exposures were affecting the somatic mutation rate, and he's using that as a potential measure. That will be a biomarker.

[00:35:44] For this exposure to the body. 

[00:35:47] Aaron Goodman: I'm really glad to hear you say that because a lot of us long for a day when we can get a test that will show biological markers, 

[00:35:57] Lynn Singer, PhD: right? 

[00:35:57] Aaron Goodman: So we'll be believed when we go to clinicians when. Yes, they've able to measure it easily and because, as you say, it passes through the body quickly.

[00:36:06] Our symptoms can be attributed to multiple things. Often we're told we have psychological disorder, anxiety, et cetera, but we know, we know, and actually 

[00:36:15] Lynn Singer, PhD: anxiety is. Somewhat chemically related. We are a bunch of chemicals and anxiety is also one of the symptoms related often to medical illnesses. It's not separate necessarily.

[00:36:29] Aaron Goodman: In your paper you write about the anxiety that was created just because of the trauma of the event, 

[00:36:34] Lynn Singer, PhD: right? 

[00:36:35] Aaron Goodman: But how do you kind of parse this, right? How, what do you know about what is anxiety caused by chemical exposure and anxiety caused by distress? 

[00:36:46] Lynn Singer, PhD: I, I think the mistake is thinking that anxiety is something totally separate from a biological mechanism.

[00:36:54] It's part of. Your body, your anxiety, it's not, there is no mind body dichotomy. It's all one. So that's what makes it more difficult. People have separated those out and say, oh, it's either psychological or it's not. That's not the case. For example, with children, there are studies that show that exposure to chemicals independent of, of the traumatic event.

[00:37:19] Relate to psychological symptoms, behavioral symptoms. 

[00:37:23] Aaron Goodman: Is there a message that you might like to share with listeners? People with multiple chemical sensitivity as well as researchers and physicians and policymakers. 

[00:37:34] Lynn Singer, PhD: We need more research about everything in terms of chemicals. I don't think we have realized the proliferation of manmade chemicals and the extent of exposures.

[00:37:47] There's been more and more recognition of the impact of these exposures, and we haven't even talked about the reproductive health because it wasn't until, I'd say 75 years ago, we believed that the placenta stopped everything from mm-hmm. Uh. Hurting the baby. Mm-hmm. That's not true. Once we started understanding that chemicals, toxins, drugs went right from the environment into the baby, that the placenta didn't stop, that we started being able to understand that it could have effects.

[00:38:22] Mm. So. Science is to me the answer in the long run, and it takes a lot of people, a lot of different scientists working together in an atmosphere that's not political to come to the answers. I would really like to emphasize the differential impact of chemicals on children, which was how I got involved in this.

[00:38:47] Yeah, they are not little adults. Every chemical has a greater impact on children who are more vulnerable, and there are also more vulnerable populations in general. People with chronic diseases, we may have genetic predispositions or alleles that. Make us more susceptible to chemicals. So we haven't really discovered all of these things and we've become more and more knowledgeable about how chemicals affect children.

[00:39:20] And recently there was a call to really start. Regulating the chemicals that we are producing and changing our laws. Unfortunately, you have to show that a chemical's deleterious before there's any kind of change with the chemical. 

[00:39:40] Aaron Goodman: You've been listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. I'm the host and podcast creator, Aaron Goodman.

[00:39:46] The Chemical Sensitivity Podcast is by and for the MCS community. The podcast is generously supported by the Marilyn Brockman Hoffman Foundation and listeners like you. If you wish to support the podcast, please visit chemical sensitivity podcast.org. Your support will help us continue making the podcast available and creating greater awareness about MCS to learn more about the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast.

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