'Devastating illness'

By Barbara A. Smith
Madera

(Updated Thursday, January 2, 2003, 4:41 PM)

I have lived in the Valley all my life, and as a result now have a devastating illness that most have never heard of. It's called Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS). I had probably been developing it for some years now (I thought I had "allergies"), but it only became really noticeable after a September 1998 2,000-acre agricultural stubble burn that was a few miles upwind.

I am going to have to move -- soon. Unfortunately, my options are extremely limited. I am now hypersensitive to wood smoke (as well as perfumes, clothes washed in scented laundry detergent, cleaning chemicals, new conventional construction, new carpeting, tobacco smoke, gasoline and diesel exhausts, pesticides and herbicides) that I cannot tolerate any upwind residential wood burning.

The measures I will have to take to live relatively symptom-free will cost considerably more than the $1,000 or so that the "right-to-burn" adherents should be willing to spend for an EPA-certified Class II wood stove or insert. I cannot work a regular job and have excruciating burning pains in my limbs on exposure to even slight odors of wood smoke or other chemical odors. When I move, I will be leaving my immediate family and the job I can now do.

How to improve the air here? How about requiring farmers to compost or shred their waste and banning dirty wood-burning stoves and inserts, for starters? How about the Valley air pollution district fining homeowners enough so they will stop illegally burning their yard waste? How about having more air pollution compliance officers? These measures will cost something, but there's no free lunch, and everything worth having has a price -- including clean air. Had such regulations been in force before 1998, my health might have been spared.