Cell phones - Not the only answere for long distance calls

Many people with chemical sensitivity issues also have electrical/wireless sensitivity issues (something that we at CIIN know very little about). That is not breaking news. Yet every week I talk to someone who has those issues and is still using a cell phone. Most of those people know it is not good for them, but the cheap long distance rates and convenience overrule them.

The convenience is hard to argue with, but there is an alternative for long distance, at lease for those who have or can get a wired phone. Calling cards! There are many available, and their rates can be really good. Some go as low as 1 penny per minute (I've seen lower too). Here is just a sampling:
callingcards.com
callingcardsplus.com
centcalls.com
pennytalk.com
callingcardsonline.com
And some, if not all, of the cell phone companies offer there own too.

Obviously, some are better deals than others. It pays to make comparisons. I've used Callingcards.com off and on for 10 years or more, and it's worked pretty well. I'm not trying to recommend them, just letting you know I've gone this route successfully. There have been rare times when I could not connect via a pay phone when I've been traveling, but as I said, that's been rare. And calling regularly from your home phone should pose no problems.

Two issues to keep in mind, other than the need for access to a wired line. First, the basic rate is not the only thing to compare. Some have maintenance fees, weekly or monthly. Some have connection fees for each call. You will need to figure what works best for the calling you do – lots of short calls, lots of long calls, a mix. It will take a little study.

Second, contacting these companies is usually done via the internet, and for MCS/ES people that poses a problem. You will probably need someone to do the basic search on line, but it looks like there are customer service numbers you will be able to call. I can't guarantee this, but it should be possible to get a card/set up an account that way. That is how you can "recharge" the card too.

The reason I bring this up in this blog is that electrical sensitivity is not something a person should keep challenging by using cells phones. It seems that, like chemical sensitivity, continued exposures make things worse over time. And MCS/ES people can feel pretty damned isolated. That means the telephone link is important.

By the way, I have found over the years that people who can get their chemical sensitivities under control (this means practicing avoidance seriously) often find their electrical sensitivity gets much better. I hope this helps someone.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year — and Happy other holidays too.

P.S. For those with ES, you might find the post 'Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Search tool for antennas and towers' below helpful.

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Search tool for antennas and towers

The Wrong Cause

At CIIN, I talk to people every month who are most likely misidentifying the cause of their distress. A woman thinks her couch has somehow gotten contaminated, but it turns out her new neighbor cleans with chlorine bleach. A man thinks the sewer is venting into his house, but he has just started parking his car in his attached garage.

But the situation is usually not clear cut, and people too often latch onto the first thing that comes to their attention. And then they can find themselves working like crazy to make their life fit into the world that evolved from misidentifying the problem. It's like trying to drive a square peg into a round hole — even if you appear to be making progress, you are not fixing the problem.

My message, as poorly as it has come across here, is that if you think you have identified the cause of your trouble and no solution you come up with seems to fix it, consider the possibility that you focused on the wrong thing. Keep an open mind.

Well, I am done babbling for now. Good luck.

MCS hashtag for Twitter

In order for the MCS community to take better advantage of Twitter, we should have a hashtag to brand our messages. I have put out the tag "#ChemSensitivity" for all MCS-related tweets. By inserting this tag into each tweet, we can search all of Twitter for messages related to Multiple Chemical Sensitivities.

Here is an example from @ourtoxictimes of what this looks like:
#ChemSensitivity
(Misspelling alert! I meant HASHTAG not hahtag. Typing, another of my weaknesses. -J)

Hashtags in Twitter are a way for all writers to index their own messages without needing any central authority to be involved. It also allows a person to index a message for numerous subjects. However, Twitter etiquette says no more than 2 tags per message. I've seen tweets that are nothing but hashtags, and they become nearly meaningless.

We at CIIN are pretty new and inexperienced with Twitter, so we are not a source of help in making it work, but there are many sites with help already out there, and Twitter itself has pretty good help, I think.

A lot of MCSers do not or cannot use computers, but many of us can. Twitter and the blogs are places we can connect and pass on information, ideas and support if we just learn or start to use these social networking sources.

An MCS-friendly Drug list

The links in this post are obsolete. 
See the updated March 25, 2015 post.

In the February 2012 issue of Our Toxic Times (page 6), we published 2 lists of drugs that are likely to be better tolerated by those with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS). They come from web sites aimed at sufferers of Porphyria, a metabolic illness that is considered very rare. However, research has shown that many of those with MCS also test positive for one or more of the Porphyrias. That means there is a high likelihood that drugs tolerated by Porphyria sufferers will also be tolerated by MCS sufferers. It's not a guarantee, but it's a very good place to start. And these lists are something doctors can respect and work from, if you give them a copy of the list to keep.

The more extensive list is from South Africa where Porphyria is much more common than it is in the U.S.:
www.porphyria.uct.ac.za/druginfo/drug-frameset-group.htm


The other list is from the drug company Merck, and the link we gave is no longer active. I looked around the Merck site and found the list again at:
www.merckmanuals.com/professional/endocrine_and_metabolic_disorders/porphyrias/acute_porphyrias.html

If you end up copying and pasting these links, remember to close up any spaces that may show up. There are never spaces in web addresses. Also, FYI, if you find a hyphen in the middle of a word in a web address, it probably should not be there, especially if the address does not work when you try it.

Porphyria is incurable, the same as MCS. It is manageable (as is MCS) by avoidance. There is testing for Porphyria, but only 4 of the 8 known Porphyrias can be tested for, and it's not cheap, so testing is not something to jump into without some thought.

CIIN has a lot of information on Porphyria, but it is available only to its members. Take care.

Foreign EMF resources

Electrical sensitivity is not something I'm very knowledgeable about. However, I ran into a couple web sites that look like they might be interesting. Both are out of Europe where they seem to take this condition more seriously than we do.

The first is out of Great Britain:
www.es-uk.info/news/

The second is from Sweden, but there are many links or pages that are in English:
www.org.feb.nu/index_int.htm
Once on the site, try these pages:
International Network: www.org.feb.nu/FEB/Addresses.html
International Links: www.org.feb.nu/FEB/Links.html

As you wander around the site, I'm sure you will find other pages in English, and you will find some links back to the U.S. Since this is not my area of speciality, I only scratched the surface here.

Good luck.

Search tool for antennas and towers

There is a web site that will let people look for cell phone towers and antennas. And other types of towers and antennas too. http://antennasearch.com/

This site may be of some help in locating a place to go that is more EMF-friendly. You input an address and it produces a report. So you need to have a spot in mind before this will be helpful.

If anyone has found a "big picture" source of this kind of info, please let me know. I suspect, but do not know, that a map of the country's worst and best EMF areas does not exist. If one does exist, it must be a bugger trying to keep it up to date. But if someone finds something like this, it would be good to know.

MCS and medicine — not hopeless

The conflict between MCS and medications is tricky to deal with, but it is not hopeless. While there are no lists of tolerable drugs for MCS specifically, there are a couple lists on the Internet that have been compiled for those suffering from Porphyria.

Porphyria is a metabolic illness that afflicts many MCS sufferers. It might possibly affect the majority of MCS sufferers, but since not all varieties of Porphyria can be tested for, we just don't know. But in a practical sense, that doesn't matter because the lists provide a strong tool for doctors to use in trying to accommodate those with chemical sensitivities.

The doctors were very happy to have something in hand to refer to, especially a list that not only gave drugs to avoid but ones that were most likely safe to use.

The two lists we used for Cynthia's surgery are available at: www.porphyria.uct.ac.za/druginfo/drug-frameset-group.htm and www.merck.com/media/mmpe/pdf/Table_155-4.pdf. This Merck link is no longer active. I looked around the Merck site and found the list again at:
www.merckmanuals.com/professional/endocrine_and_metabolic_disorders/porphyrias/acute_porphyrias.html

U.S newborn death rate is poor and slipping

Here are some low-lights from a new report about the death rate of newborns worldwide taken from Health Freedom Alliance:

"Babies in the United States have a higher risk of dying during their first month of life than do babies born in 40 other countries,.

United States dropped from No. 28 to No. 41 in the rankings of newborn death risk. It is now tied with Qatar, Croatia and United Arab Emirates. And behind South Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, Lithuania, Poland and Israel.

One of the bigger challenges in the U.S. is complications from preterm birth. The U.S. rate of preterm birth is double that of countries in Europe and Northern Africa."

There are many chemicals in our environment that can cause premature births, and ours remains a highly exposed population.

7 billion people

The world's population will hit 7,000,000,000 (7 billion) people on Halloween. When I was born, right after World War II, there were about 2.5 billion people on Earth.

What is the maximum number of people the Earth can support before things fall apart and only the very rich have any quality of life?

What kind of world are we leaving for our children? Good night.

Possible tech issues on our web site

The CIIN web site is getting a little revamp. And for technical reasons (most of which I am clueless) the site may be down at times until things are fine-tuned and running normally again.

In case you don't know yet, CIIN now has a Twitter account under @ourtoxictimes. The entries there are not earth-shaking, but we try to keep people up to date on some basic activities -- such as when the newsletter goes to press and when it's mailed out.

Also, CIIN will be closed from September 27th until October 11th. We're going to try to take a trip during part of that time -- rest up during the other part of that time.

MCS Lemons-to-Lemonade Project

This comes from Cynthia Wilson, Executive Director of the Chemical Injury Information Network.

The Lemonade Project

Many members of our [MCS] community are house-bound. Some have risen to the occasion, but how? How are people who are fully or partially house-bound able to handle it? Specifically, how do they spend their time, what projects or hobbies have been helpful, have they found ways to be productive given their situation, have they found ways to create a business or a specific project, or anything else they can think of.


Dr. Robert Mayer, author of the recent, well received book Strategies for Surviving Chemical Sensitivity, The Basics, is planning a series of articles for our monthly newsletter Our Toxic Times on how people with MCS are coping — showing the most resilient aspects of the MCS community and possibly showing others how to live successfully within the confines of the illness.

For example, a woman in the northeast, photocopies educational material and distributes it to individuals in need. She's absolutely dedicated to informing those around her. "I can't do much, but I can do this," is one of her most elegant refrains.

For those who would like to write out their stories, they may be sent to: Lemonade at CIIN, PO Box 301, White Sulphur Springs, or emailed to lemonade@ciin.org. Please provide contact information, so if Dr. Mayer has questions he can contact you. If you think you need to be interviewed (by phone or email), please send a note to CIIN or email with your contact information, the best time to contact you, and a brief description of your own lemonade.

Die-off of bats is growing

I'm sure you have heard about the die-off of honey bees, and how serious that can be for agriculture. Well there is an equally serious die-off going on, especially in the NE states. It involves bats, particularly the Little Brown Bat. And it is serious enough that those who know are worried about those and other bats becoming extinct in the NE.

Most people don't know that bats are important in pollinating crops. But most people know about bats' appetite for mosquitoes and other insects. I just read that 1 million bats (the approximate number of bats that have died from what is called white nose syndrome in the past couple years) will eat 660 metric tons of mosquitoes in 6 months; 1,200 tons in a year. And that does not count the other, crop destroying or disease carrying bugs they eat.

I'm not sure this post falls under the heading of "toxins", but I find the bat problem very interesting and scarey. And, BTW, the bat die-off has reached as far west as Oklahoma.

One last thought: How many mosquitoes are there in a pound?

Two bad old terms for MCS resurface

I cannot believe it, but some people are calling "Environmental Illness" the newest name for MCS. It's not. It's an old term from the days when no one a clue what MCS was. All people knew back then was that something in the environment made some people sick.

And on top of that, Cynthia heard someone calling MCS "Chemical Allergies." That is a truly crap term. It mixes technical inaccuracy with confusing terminology. MCS is not an allergy; it is not immune system mediated. Best current research says it is a metabolic and neurologic disorder, probably rooted in damage to the Redox System.

The Redox System is made up of several systems (or sub-systems) that deal with breaking down toxins in various parts of the body so they can be flushed out. When the body cannot break down and eliminate toxins, even very small amounts of toxic chemicals can wreak havoc and cause damage. Sound familiar?

3 Books for Sale at CIIN

Speaking of the print vs digital world, CIIN sells 3 books on its web site:

1. Dr. Mayer's book, "Strategies for Surviving Chemical Sensitivity, the basics" This is a new book that has been out less than a year, and has gotten very good feedback from our members.

2. Cynthia's book on chemical injury, "Chemical Exposure and Human Health" which is probably the best work on chemical health issues ever written by a lay person. It is no longer in print, but CIIN has gotten a few used, good condition copies.

3. The workbook from the San Francisco workshop on a case definition for Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. At 730 pages, this is the best collection of papers on MCS, and our supply is limited. It was the starting point for the doctors and researchers who came to San Francisco.

CIIN is now on Twitter

We just signed up to have Chemical Injury Information Network on Twitter at
http://twitter.com/ourtoxictimes

CIIN has been slowly entering the digital world because it is so prevalent and wide-ranging. The drawback, of course, is that so many of the chemically injured cannot participate on the internet, either due to the chemical smells from the plastics and resins in computers, or because of electrical sensitivity which often accompanies MCS.

We have no intentions to ever do away with the print version of our monthly newsletter Our Toxic Times. In spite of its cost and labor-intensive requirements, the paper version is our mainstay and our connection to our members. It's not going away.

So there you go. If you have access to Twitter, please check us out.

Apps I like

For no apparent reason, I want to take note of a few small applications I like. Bear in mind that I am still using Windows XP. Here they are in no particular order:

PrintKey 2000 - It makes the usually useless PrintScreen key really handy for copying whatever is on your screen.

Agent Ransack - A very fast search tool for finding files on your computer. It blows the doors off of Windows built-in search feature.

eCleaner - For copying text out of e-mails and other places, and getting rid of all the extra crap that gets copied like indent marks, formatting marks, and headers.

UK's Kalender - A very functional but not overly tricked out calendar program.

I've also used these (except the Kalender)on Vista machines without problems. In some ways, Vista and Windows 7 seem to have usable alternatives built in.

"green" is not MCS-friendly

The "Green" building movement and green products in general do NOT address the needs and concerns of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.

Green building and green consumer products are a good change from the toxic way we had been doing things,and it may save a lot of people from the living hell of MCS. However, those who suffer from MCS will find themselves disappointed and likely hurt by confusing "green" with MCS-friendly. Don't do it.

There are many good sources of MCS-friendly products if you take the time to look for them. One source of such sellers is the monthly newsletter Our Toxic Times published (since 1990) by the Chemical Injury Information Network.

Danish MCS rant in OTT

Coming in the December 2010 issue of Our Toxic Times is a good rant about Multiple Chemical Sensitivities and how a Danish organization that was intended to research the connections between MCS and chemicals has taken a turn against there even being such a connection.

The article goes well beyond Denmark's problem. It also talks about the chemical industry's created replacement name for MCS, Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance (IEI). A name that is intended to separate the word "chemicals" from the illness, and was not and is not promoted or approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), despite some claims to the contrary.

The article is very readable and well thought out.

Surviving Chemical Sensitivity book now at N.E.E.D.S.

The book by Dr. Robert Mayer "Strategies for Surviving Chemical Sensitivity - the Basics" is now also for sale at N.E.E.D.S. as well as at ciin.org.

Our feedback on the book has been nearly 100% positive. the one not-so-positive comment was a little odd: "It's just basic stuff." Considering the book's title, why would you expect anything else?

I'll say it again, if you or someone you know is suffering from MCS, especially someone relatively new to MCS, this book is a must.

A hotel suitable for MCS

Sometimes we find good news. Here is part of a message from one of our members about finding a hotel in Seattle that she could stay in:

"I thought I would pass this on. The Washington Toxics Coalition recommended the Hyatt at Olive 8 in Seattle (Tel: 206-695-1234) as a possible non-toxic hotel room. They are environmentally friendly, with sustainable designs, saving measures and healthy products. From a search of the hotel, I found that their housekeeping staff uses chemical-free cleaners. When I called, they said they use cleaners, but would be willing to make accommodations. From calling CIIN today, I got the tip to ask for this, which I greatly appreciated. They are more than willing to steam clean the room and use only chemical-free products."

No guarantees, of course, but if it works for one chemically sensitive person, the odds look good for it working for more of us. And it indicates that asking for these kinds of accommodations is getting less weird in the eyes of the "normal" public.