The Easy Solution
What set me on the journey to "Healthy Solutions"
Why is this newsletter focusing on healthy solutions? This month, I’m including an excerpt from my book-in-progress which tells the story of when my life changed forever as a young rookie reporter in Munich in 1997.
I had taken an assignment to visit one of Germany’s legendary environmental professors, and I was shocked to learn my family was among the victims in Germany’s biggest environmental scandal. We had no idea.
It turns out the varnish with which my father had proudly finished all the paneling, doors, and floors in our house when I was a baby, was extremely toxic. My parents still lived in the same house and had to rip out the ceilings, floors, and furniture.
Even more shocking was the realization that the manufacturers of the bestselling wood varnish knew how dangerous it was all along. It was the beginning of a lifelong journey of mine to find “Healthy Solutions” – vs. the “Easy Solution,” which was the slogan the chemical company used to market their toxic varnish. (See excerpt “Easy Solution” below.)
It’s spring, the butterflies and the bugs are out, but after reading the excerpt, you might reconsider your choice of bug spray. Read the story to find out why “natural” insecticides are anything but natural and how the US became one of the few countries that still has not banned the chemical that ruined my health. My story is a story that keeps repeating itself all over America, and actually, all over the world.
Photo: Matt Cannon/Unsplash
What else we’re reading this month:
Why the Kids got sick, the New Yorker:
A mom wonders why her 20-year-old son got a rare cancer at such a young age, but then connects the dots when more young men in the neighborhood develop the same type of cancer. After pressure from families, Pennsylvania has launched studies into whether fracking can be linked to local illnesses.
The Everyday Chemicals That Might Be Leading Us to Our Extinction, New York Times
And a story of posttraumatic growth: Hayley Arceneaux will be the youngest American to go to space, and she says surviving childhood cancer prepared her for it.
What we’re watching:
The BBC feature documentary, Thirst For Justice, on water rights in America.
Enjoy, and if you have spring in your step, take action!
All yours,
Michaela
The Easy Solution
Munich, 1997.
The epiphany arrived courtesy of a petite professor, Helmut Müller-Mohnssen, a nearly bald retired neurobiologist who spent the last two decades of his life researching the effects of pesticides. I took the assignment for a science magazine because I needed the money, but I was instantly hooked by this sophisticated scientist who explained his life-long research with so much wit and clarity. I didn’t know you could get passionate about pesticides, but I was learning that lesson now.
“Look at any insect repellent you have in your closet,” he said. Except for the few truly natural ones that use citronella oil, almost all use Permethrin. “Totally natural,” “completely safe,” “made from natural ingredients,” the labels promise.
Müller-Mohnssen was formally retired, but at the age of 69 was still as active as ever, a sun-tanned pixie perpetually in motion. His face glimmered with rogue humor. When I met him in his institute laboratory in the industrial quarter at the outskirts of Munich, he even invited me for a spin in his antique red convertible Aston Martin, a retired classic race car.
For the last fifteen years, MM, as he was playfully called by his students, had mainly researched a single group of substances: pyrethroids. To this day, these chemicals are widely sold in most common household bug sprays, pet shampoos, mosquito repellents, and agricultural pesticides. They are often marketed as “natural” or “bio” because one of their close chemical cousins is derived from chrysanthemum plants, and people believe what comes from plants is benign. If you google pyrethroids on the web, you mostly find articles that praise them as harmless, because they are easily broken down by the sun and “do not contaminate drinking water.”[1] So far, so good, so wrong.
According to MM, they are an extremely effective nerve poison, quickly paralyzing and killing insects and bugs. For the decades that they have been used, the industry claims that they have caused no harm to human beings or any other big animals. But what the industry measures in its labs, is mostly short-term exposure to frogs and rats. Mohnssen, however, was able to prove that pyrethroids and other insecticides and pesticides accumulate in our tissues and that our bodies are unable to break them down. While a dose here and there might not be deadly, the effects accumulate every time we use a bug spray, eat fruit treated with pesticides, or breathe in the vapors of a mosquito lamp.
And since in our lifetime, or really on any given day, we are not only dealing with one insecticide, or one household cleaning ingredient, the effect of thousands of chemicals interacting with each other is unknown. “With thousands of chemicals whose long-term effects have hardly been studied, we are basically participating in the biggest involuntary lab test under field conditions,” MM said.
*
I looked at the long list of symptoms of pesticide exposure Mohnssen had identified: Headaches. Migraines. Allergies. Fatigue. Depression. Difficulty concentrating. Memory loss. Cancer. Skin rashes. Eczema. Reduced intellectual performance, visual disturbances, tinnitus, hypotonia. Fainting spells. Personality changes. Memory disorder. Opportunistic infections, especially candida. Relapsing respiratory and gastrointestinal infections. Autoimmune disorders. Chronic fatigue. And so on. And so on.
Between me, my mom, my dad, my grandma, and my grandfather, we ticked every symptom. Every single one. The list was so diverse, it was hard to see the throughline. Who doesn’t have headaches? Who doesn’t suffer from allergies nowadays? But in the sum total, as a family, we fit the profile to a T.
My mom had spent weeks in the hospital, trying to figure out what caused this painful rash all over her arms and down her back. Her back was so itchy she would have ripped off her skin if she could. She has also had several near-fainting spells, similar to the one I had in my new office. When my parents recently went for a weekend trip to Spain, she ate some fruit from the breakfast buffet and collapsed after her third mouthful. My dad called 911, and when questioned how a few pieces of melons and strawberries could cause such an attack at seven in the morning, the hotel manager later admitted to my dad his staff had sprayed the buffet with an insecticide to ward off the ants. But the emergency doctor only diagnosed blood pressure issues, same as with me after my office breakdown. Nobody at the E.R. thought to check for chemical poisoning. In all fairness, it isn’t easy to check for because you kind of need to know which chemical you are looking for.
Mohnssen served as an expert in court after one of the most successful chemical companies, Desowag, was sued over its use of Permethrin in one of its products. Desowag also produced Xyladecor, and in Mohnssen’s list of problematic products, the name Xyladecor rang oddly familiar to me. I’d seen cans with that label in my parents’ garage back home. We tease my mom endlessly about the fact that she never throws anything away. My parents still live in the house where my dad was born, and while the house is modest, it has a garage, an attic, and an unfinished basement. Everything that is no longer of immediate use, including my childhood toys, my first skis, my mom’s old kitchen, granny’s old sowing machines, it all gets shoved into the basement or the attic. “For rough times,” my mother likes to say. “Who knows when we might need them again?”
As soon as I got home from MM’s lab, I called my dad, and he immediately knew. “Oh yes,” he said, “we used Xyladecor when we renovated the house in 1970 just before you were born. Wood ceilings, wood floors, wood window frames, wood door frames, all of it. We probably went through at least a dozen cans. It was the most effective varnish on the market.” He still had a dried can of the stuff in his garage.
“Ugh, dad,” was all I could say. “Look it up!”
The potion worked so fabulously because it contained lindane, Pentachlorophenol (PCP), Dichlofluanid, and other powerful insecticides and pesticides. By the time its most dangerous ingredients were recognized as carcinogens and banned from indoor use in 1978, innumerable homes had been contaminated.
I sent my parents the research from Cornell University:
PCP is a very toxic compound, and is labeled with a DANGER signal word. PCP causes lung, liver, kidney damage and contact dermatitis in humans. Extended periods of exposure to PCP results in persistent chloracne and damage to the nervous system. About two dozen fatalities due to accidental exposure to PCP in the industry have been reported. Autopsies revealed changes in the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs, and liver.
Animal experiments suggest that chronic exposure to pure Pentachlorophenol may affect reproduction, induce birth defects, and cause skin diseases. In humans, …abdominal pain, nausea, fever, and respiratory irritation result from PCP exposure. Inhalation of PCP at occupational levels causes eye, skin, and throat irritation, while high levels may affect the circulatory system and cause heart failure. Survivors of toxic exposures may suffer visual and central nervous system damage.[2]
And: PCP can cause persistent fatigue. So can lead, mercury, Formaldehyde, and all the other shit they poured into the glossy varnishes.
My parents were surprisingly open to my discovery, relieved they might finally find an answer to my mom’s chronic health issues while worried about the consequences.
We immediately made appointments with an environmental doctor to get blood tests. Our insurance did not pay for these tests, but we needed to know for sure. Improbably, the tests still found very high concentrations of the chemicals in our blood and cells more than two decades after the initial exposure. We learned that they gas out over decades, and we had breathed them in every single day. We also tested the dust and the wood in the house: extremely high concentrations of Pentachlorophenol in particular. It’s especially gnarly because it’s odorless. You can’t smell it. It works its toxic magic undetected.
My parents hired a contractor to rip out the contaminated wood, including the door and window frames, the ceilings, the floors. They tore through their savings account and threw away all our furniture. But we can’t rip the damage as easily from our bodies. Most of the chemicals get stored in our fatty tissue where they will probably stay until we’re dead.
In my newspaper archive, I found articles about the scandal from 1993 (the court case finally ended in 1996). The court found evidence that the company knew how toxic their product was, ignored the growing number of complaint letters that reached their headquarters, and decided it was more important to boost their sales. Instead of changing the recipe, they splurged on a marketing campaign. After twelve years in court, after twelve years of stalling and maneuvering and arguing, after 2300 criminal complaints, Germany’s biggest environmental lawsuit was settled out of court in 1996: Two company executives had to pay 100,000 Deutschmark each, less than $50.000. The money went to the state. The victims got nothing. The lawyers estimated more than 100,000 victims got harmed as we did, or worse. The low end of the estimated damages starts at $50 million. If one counts the impact on the health of the clients, all the hours we couldn’t work, all the jobs we couldn’t do, all the days we spent in bed or in the hospital, the consumer activists believe the damages to be at least a billion dollars.
Many lost their houses that became uninhabitable. Several bore miscarriages. Others developed cancer. The courts left it up to the victims, individually, to get compensation from the corporation for the lost houses, the sick babies, the damaged livers – an impossible task that assumed our money and lawyers could match the money and lawyers of an international corporation now owned by Bayer. Yes, Bayer, the company that bought the Glyphosate-monster Montesanto for $63 billion in 2018. Those guys. Sure, our lower-middle-class family from our little Bavarian village launch a legal challenge against them.
How much do you charge for your husband’s liver cancer? What’s your wife’s fertility worth?
How could I put a price tag on a decade of bronchitis, innumerable migraines, a couple of hospital stays, and the shitty last two years of confusion and inflammation?
And then the kicker: After they settled the court case, the company execs simply sent the remaining cans to Asia. To Indonesia, to be exact. To make the shipment more sellable, they changed the labeling and removed the PCP. No, they didn’t remove the PCP from the content; they only removed it from the labels. And nobody stopped them. After twelve years in court, they were still allowed to send their toxic shit elsewhere and ruin more lives on the other side of the planet. Unbelievable but true. They eventually had to change the formula to keep selling it in Europe. It is still one of the most popular products today. PCP was finally banned in the Stockholm Convention in 2015, and most European countries signed the ban. Guess who hasn’t signed the ban? The US hasn’t, to this day.
Which brings me to the question: Who do you trust?
Not the chemical companies, sure. And when you’re a 20-year-old dad barely out of school who is working day and night to renovate his childhood home to make it safe for his wife and new baby, you chose the product that is cheap and effective that everybody in your neighborhood is using: Xyladecor – “the easy solution.” Yes, that really was their marketing slogan.
[1]http://www.idph.state.il.us/envhealth/factsheets/pyrethroid.htm
[2]http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/metiram-propoxur/pentachlorophenol-ext.html[ii]http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/metiram-propoxur/pentachlorophenol-ext.html