Home Is Where The Toxins Are

The Invisible Hazards of Modern Living

Before last year, few Americans knew radon from ragweed. Even fewer suspected the invisible gaseous element posed a radioactive health hazard for about as many Americans as those who suffer from hay fever. But, some experts on toxicity think the threat of radon fumes seeping into homes may produce an indirect and unexpected benefit: a heightened public awareness that every day hundreds of chemical toxins contaminate the typical American home.

"Radon did hit a nerve," says Debra Lynn Dadd, a self-described "nontoxologist" whose 1986 book The Nontoxic Home (Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc, $9.95) was among the first of the recent publishing rush to reach a growing market of homeowners eager for practical advice on household toxins. "Radon brought the problem into people's homes as opposed to it being 'out there'...There is real concern where there wasn't before [that] the toxins found in everybody's home are an equal sort of danger."

Dr. Phyllis Saifer, a Berkeley, Calif., allergist and president of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, attributes this "growing sophistication" to grass-roots activism as much as to a medical community that, at times, has been reluctant to recognize household chemicals as a chronic health threat.

"I went on a radio talk show recently," says the author of Detox (Ballantine, 1986, $3.95). "I was impressed with the audience concern about chemicals in the house. There is awareness of the formaldehyde problem from new draperies and carpetsƒof the respiratory problems cooking and heating with natural gas can cause people who are indoors a great deal. There are so many grass-roots outfits that are tuned in to pesticide abuse, and a lot of art teachers now are concerned about using toxic art supplies in the schools."

Like many of those callers, Debra Dadd is plagued by toxic exposure. She remembers growing up sick. While other adolescents agonized over acne, she endured fatigue, severe headaches, binge eating. Doctors found nothing wrong. Every three years she'd get so sick she would be bedridden. Doctors would hospitalize her for testing and after a few weeks she'd get better. But once back at her Concord, Calif., home, the symptoms returned.

In 1978, Dadd was 24 and spending a lot of time inside her house teaching piano lessons. Her mother had died of cancer. And the mysterious illness that increasingly disabled her was diagnosed as an immune system breakdown caused by low tolerance to toxic chemical exposure. "At that time, there was no such thing as household toxins, nothing like that," she says. "I was having all these symptoms and there was no data."

After antigen treatments proved ineffective, Dadd set out to uncover the source of her exposure: "If you've got toxic chemicals bombarding your immune system...you need to get away from the poison." That's when it hit home that the poison was her home. "My mother had always been oriented toward everything being clean, and modern, and new, and improved," says Dadd. "If there was a toxic product, it was in our hose. Most people who are living the standard American life style are living that way, too."

In almost 10 years since, Dadd has scoured every inch of her house for traces of toxicity. Like a coal mine canary whose demise forewarns deadly air, her acute chemical sensitivity signals hidden toxic trouble that for others might cause less severe reactions like headaches, flu-like symptoms, irritability and depression. But over decades of exposure? Dadd points out that 30 years ago, no one knew asbestos caused chronic lung disease and cancer, or that vinyl chloride from plastics was carcinogenic and mutagenic.

Dadd's reports on uncovering household chemicals read like the diary of a human toxic dump. "In 1980, I was fainting when I would take a shower," she says. "In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency finally came out with a study that says when you run hot shower water, it gives off chloroform fumes," a suspected carcinogen known to depress the nervous system. Subsequently, she found out she was sleeping "in a cloud of formaldehyde" contained in her permanent press bed sheets that could cause tiredness, insomnia, headaches, coughing, skin rash. Her mattress was made of flame-retardant polyurethane foam that can cause bronchitis, coughing and skin and eye irritation. Her toothpaste contained the carcinogenic saccharin. Her furniture polish spewed forth phenol, a suspected carcinogen that can irritate the skin. And her gas appliances, even when working properly, gave off combustion by-products that could include deadly carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen cyanide and nitric oxide, which can cause eye, nose and throat irritation, dizziness, nausea and worse.

"There was one week in my life when I removed everything from the house, starting with the cleaning products," says Dadd. She blames America's overdose of toxins on careless chemical-minded manufacturers, misleading labeling of products, and the trend toward energy efficiency in new homes that seals in toxins while blocking out fresh air. It took Dadd three years of rummaging out the replacing toxins with safe products to recover completely.

Besides two books, since 1985, Dadd has published her findings in a bimonthly newsletter, Everything Natural. Printed with "low-odor" vegetable ink on recycled, chemical-free paper, its contents reflect heightened public sensitivity to toxic America. In recent issues: A San Francisco woman told of swabbing her kitchen with hot chili oil rather than pesticides to fight ant infestation; a Salt Lake city reader pleaded for the whereabouts of formaldehyde-free toilet paper; and a Richardson, Tex., reader reported using washable quilt throws to prevent her upholstery from retaining the scent of perfumed friends.

"I'd say that about 50 percent of the public has some semblance of chemical sensitivity, if only to cigarette smoke or perfume," confirms Dr. Saifer. "Once they have those sensitivities, I would assume that they are what we call 'chemical sensitive.' They may be susceptible to food additives, chlorine in the water, newsprint, natural gas, car exhaust and gasoline fumes, too. Modern living, in other words. Some people are just more likely to have trouble with it. And, with too much, everybody is likely to get into toxic trouble."

Yet despite the apparent logic of reducing unnecessary chemical exposure, many of the grass-roots efforts to accomplish that are often considered controversial.

Last September, nationally syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers published a letter from a couple who told their child's hyperactive behavior disappeared when they started using a diet-management strategy that avoids foods containing synthetic chemical additives--artificial color and flavoring, and commonly used preservatives. The strategy was devised by the late Dr. Ben Feingold, a California physician, who began promoting the approach in the early '70s. It is based on patient response rather than on scientific testing. Landers' column read like an endorsement; the Feingold Association's national headquarters in Alexandria was swamped with 30,000 requests for information. Four months later, Landers backpedaled with another column quoting medical authorities that called the Feingold diet faddish and unscientific.

"Putting a petroleum derivative into baby vitamins seems strange to me," counter Jane Hersey, director of the Feingold Association of the United States, who raised a daughter on a strict Feingold diet for 12 years. "We agree that what we are doing is not based on carefully controlled studies. We want the research done more than anyone."

But it has been estimated that more than 200,000 American families applying at least some features of the Feingold strategies to their diets--many in conjunction with other medical treatments; some as a last resort--aren't waiting for scientific verification. "I think had I not found out about Dr. Feingold's theory, my daughter Dawn would have been institutionalized by now," says Annapolis resident Patricia Frederick.

When Dawn Fredrick was 2 1/2, she had yet to settle into a normal sleeping pattern, was always irritable and often destructive. "She drove us crazy," says Frederick, 42, who says she spent more than $3,000 on medical bills trying to diagnose Dawn's condition. Frederick says doctors prescribed her Valium and sleeping pills and told her to put her two daughters into day care. After two weeks, the day-care director called to say they couldn't handle Dawn anymore.

Eventually, an allergist frustrated by Dawn's unresponsiveness to treatment suggested the Feingold diet. "In three days, we had a 100 percent turnaround," says Fredrick, who became a Feingold volunteer and now edits the regional newsletter. "She slept through the night, walked instead of ran, no more destruction, no more irritability...She's turning 13 this month and is an honor student."

Frederick calls the Feingold diet an example of "conscientious awareness" in a toxin-filled world where you have got to watch out for yourself. But Dr. Irving Selikoff, professor emeritus at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, balks at the suggest that Americans are saturated with risky toxins.

"That idea is not exactly right--we don't live in a chemical bath," says Selikoff, who was among the first researchers to recognize the asbestos risk. "Is it true we have additives in our food? Yes. Is it true we have asbestos areas in our home? Yes. Is it true 10 percent of our homes have significant radon? Yes. And is it true most disease that we have in the United States is chronic? Yes.

"But there is a dose-response relationship: a lot of agent, a lot of disease; a little agent, a little disease. We're dealing with low-dose exposure, we hope. We wouldn't live in a place that smells and has vapors all around it."

But Selikoff also cautions that research now indicates that interaction of toxic chemicals can multiply their harmful effects. "So people are saying "be careful" and that's true. They are raising fair questions. Unfortunately, the answers are not in yet. The research has not been done."

Dr. Selikoff also reports that lower toxic doses may cause disease that take longer to appear. "They may take so long that they are beyond the normal American life span." He says. "So if we can't get rid of every single molecule, and we can't eliminate every toxic chemical in our lives--and we can't--at least we can control them, minimize this and minimize that. There is no reason for panicking, no reason for throwing up your hands that everything is hopeless, if we do what has to be done..."

Debra Dadd has done just that. She moved to Inverness, Calif., north of San Francisco, at the end of 45 minutes of windy road, on the coast, under redwood trees. She installed a $700 water filter for drinking, a $45 filter in the showerhead to stop chloroform, and air filters throughout her house. She searches full-time for healthy alternatives. Her worst recent illness: a case of the sniffles.

Toward A Nontoxic Household

• "The best place to start," says Dadd, "is to replace the cleaning products" --ammonia, oven cleaners, furniture polish, disinfectant. Natural products are cheaper and just as effective, says Dadd. She tells of a hospital that experimented with replacing its disinfectants (containing cresol, phenol, ethanol, formaldehyde) with a solution of 1/2 cup borax dissolved in 1 gallon of hot water: "The bacteriologist reported that it satisfied all hospital germicidal requirements".
• The days of assuming tap water is clean are gone, says Dadd. Of 700 contaminants the EPA has identified in America's drinking water, 22 are known carcinogens, she reports. One recent EPA study determined that nearly a fifth of the U.S. public that drinks water from municipal systems consumes unsafe lead levels. "Bottled water is too unreliable," says Dadd. "I think that home water filtration needs to be as common an appliance as having a refrigerator...And if you go down to the hardware store and buy one for $39, it's not going to do the job."
• Many antiperspirants contain aerosol propellants, ammonia, alcohol, formaldehyde and the active ingredient that stops wetness, aluminum chlorohydrate. "What works best is just baking soda," says Dadd.
• Although warning labels on mothballs state "avoid prolonged breathing of vapor,"that is exactly what their use requires, says Dadd. She prefers natural repellents such as dried lavender or cedar chips.

Information Resources

• Everything Natural, Debra Dadd's bimonthly newsletter on living better without toxins. $18 a year. Also available are her special reports on water purification systems and air filters. P. O. Box 390, Inverness, Calif. 94937; (415) 663-1685.
• American's for Safe Food, a project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, seeks revision of federal laws to require full disclosure of toxins used in the processing, manufacture and packaging of food and will provide an information packet on request, 1501 16th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036.
• The Feingold Association of the Washington Area Inc. offers a complimentary issue of its newsletter, Fine Print, and a brochure on diet management. P. O. Box 10085, Alexandria, VA 22310; (703) 524-5566. The Feingold Association of the United States also provides a complimentary new-letter and an introductory "mini food list"--20 brand-name, no-additive alternatives, P. O. Box 6550, Alexandria, VA 22306; (703) 768-3287.
• The National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides is a non-profit clearing house for information on pesticide safety and alternative pest management. 530 Seventh St. SE, Washington, DC 20003; (203) 543-5450.

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