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Multiple Chemical Sensitivities: Addendum to Biologic Markers in Immunotoxicology (1992)
Commission on Life Sciences (CLS)

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. "Case Definitions for Multiple Chemical Sensitivity." Multiple Chemical Sensitivities: Addendum to Biologic Markers in Immunotoxicology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1992.

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Multiple Chemical Sensitivities: A Workshop

TABLE 1

Cause

Mechanism

Effect

Environmentally induced illness

Immunologic illness

Multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS)

 

Immunotoxicity

 

Chemically induced (or acquired) hypersusceptibility

Immune dysfunction

Multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome

Chemically acquired immune deficiency syndrome (chemical AIDS)

Immune dysregulation

Chemical hypersensitivity syndrome

 

Conditioned odor response

Universal allergy

The petro-chemical problem

Fear/anxiety

20th-century illness

 

Mass psychogenic illness

Total allergy syndrome

 

Various psychiatric disorders

Environmental allergy or illness

 

 

Cerebral allergy

 

 

Environmental maladaptation syndrome

 

 

Food and chemical sensitivity

This ease definition, intended for epidemiological use, is intentionally narrow. Cullen excludes persons who react to substances no one else in aware of on the basis that such individuals may be delusional and excludes persons who have bronchospasm, vasospasm, seizures, or 'any other reversible lesion" that can be identified and specifically treated. Clinical ecologists, however, would argue that persons with bronchospasm, vasospasm, seizures, and other illnesses excluded by Cullen may well have the chemical sensitivity problem. Each issue of the clinical ecologists' journal, Clinical Ecology, contains the following definition:

Ecologic illness is a chronic multi-system disorder, usually polysymptomatic, caused by adverse reactions to environmental incitants, modified by individual susceptibility and specific adaptation. The incitants are present in air, water, food, drugs and our habitat.

Although the patients the clinical ecologists and Cullen see are demographically divergent, the definitions of their illnesses are remarkably alike. Both describe the chemically sensitive patient in similar terms. [See Miner and Ashford, "Allergy and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) Distinguished" in this report for a discussion of sensitive populations.]

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