0
In the mid-1950s, William Petersen came to me as a patient, complaining that eating a single commercial apple would cause him to have a severe headache. Petersen was fed on apples twice in my office after having avoided this food for a week, and on both occasions was struck with searing attacks of head pain. I naturally diagnosed him as allergic to apples.
Petersen was an inquisitive man, with a determination to understand why he reacted in the way he did. He lived in a nearby state which had a large fruit-producing belt. Upon returning home, working on a hunch, he slipped into an abandoned orchard and gathered some apples from the trees. These apples had not been sprayed or cared for in years. He picked about half a peck of sound ones and took them home. Surprisingly, he was able to eat these unsprayed, untreated apples with complete abandon: he ate three or four of them at a time, every day for a week. He had no headache or any other reaction whatsoever. He then reported the result of his experiment to me.
I therefore obtained my own source of unsprayed apples and tested Petersen on these in my office. Again, he had no reaction to unsprayed apples but responded with a severe headache to any commercial variety. Petersen went on to eat apples thereafter, provided he obtained them from uncontaminated sources. He didn’t have an apple allergy at all; he had something else, something which still did not have a name.
To extend this observation, in 1953 I obtained samples of apples sprayed with several major pesticides from the horticulture department of the College of Agriculture of the University of Illinois. By using these apples, as well as completely unsprayed and untreated ones, the problem of the “multiple fruit sensitivity” was finally worked out. The majority of the patients who reacted to these fruits were usually not allergic to fruit at all. What they were susceptibile to was the chemical pollution of fruit. The unsprayed fruit could be tolerated quite well, but the commercially available varieties, such as are obtained in supermarkets and fruit stores, caused chronic health problems such as arthritis, colitis, nervousness, and depression.
This observation raised a host of questions about health and sickness, questions which struck at the basis of much of Western technology.
How safe is our present chemical environment? To what extent does it contribute to chronic illness? How much do we know about the long-term effects of such by-products of “progress” as the chemical pollutants in the air of our homes and cities, chemical additives and contaminants in our foods, water, cosmetics, and drugs?
Supposedly these environmental chemicals had been tested and found safe.
However, there were serious questions to be asked about the validity of long-term toxicity studies carried out by government or industry. If only a minority of rats responded adversely to a chemical, were these results averaged out in the final report? What about the minority of people who are similarly afflicted? Were they being similarly ignored or lost in our statistical studies? These were important questions, since even if only one or two percent of the population were made chronically ill by daily exposure to such chemicals, this would still amount to two to four million people in the United States alone, enough to keep all our physicians busy for a long time. We doctors were the ones who had to deal with the unusual reactions, yet the medical profession seemed completely unaware of the potential danger.
Many of the chemicals in common use had become “profitable ventures” by the time anyone began to suspect that they were harmful. They thus became the focal point, individually and collectively, of defensive public relations operations by giant companies.
Indeed, some of the most troublesome chemical exposures have not been adequately described, and there is still no general knowledge of their potential hazards. The chief reason for this is that these materials have become integral parts of our current existence. Since they are so common, they are not usually suspected. Not being suspected, they are not usually avoided deliberately. Thus, not being eliminated either by chance or design, certain common chemical exposures remain unsuspected causes of chronic physical and “mental” illnesses.
There is an element of addiction to some of these chemicals, as well. Even though certain chemical exposures may be suspected of causing harm, avoidance is not only inconvenient, and sometimes expensive, but, because of the addictionlike responses that may be involved, sometimes the victims do not even wish to avoid exposure to the chemicals. Thus, understanding of this problem has been obstructed both by the constant nature of the chemical exposure and the self-perpetuation of the process.
I called this the chemical susceptibility problem, instead of the chemical allergy or sensitivity problem, to avoid prolonged and pointless debates over whether such small doses could cause classic allergic reactions. Whatever their name, such reactions were real and increasingly common, as many cases were to show.
*9\110\2*
Back to top