In a public radio interview with Dr. Patty Ammond Md. (Ridgway) a few years back we heard this area physician (one of the more progressive and herself suffiering from a form of E.I.(environmental illness) state..."All illness is environmental".

In the ultimate extent, that's probably true...some condition (or bug) from the external environment impacts or invades our inner mechanism and our wellbeing..even our life itself...becomes threatened.

Environmental Illness ....as the term is conventionally applied today ...refers to a class of diseases not emanating from the natural environment with which for thousands (even millions) of years we have evolved ....along with our invader-detector warning systems and a quite stunning and resilient internal military component for personal defense ....our immune system. Environmental Illness describes a class of maladies caused by aberations of the natural environment which man/woman himself (herself) have caused ...chiefly by adding ingredients to or destroying indigenous parts of the natural biosphere in which we evolved ....synthetic solvents, toxic fragrances, elevated alternating current electro-magnetic fields, paints, glues, finishes, plastics ...the list is immense ...the results are disasterous.

It is often difficult to separate the causes of any particular immune disorder on the basis of its symptoms. Alopathic Medicine (that form of medicine practiced by the vast majority of american medical practitioners today) roots its treatment regimen on diagnosis of a cellular dysfunction ...such as fibro-myalgia, multiple sclerosis, etc ....or a "junk pile"/ "miscillaneous bin" (and often vacuous) description of the symptom (without even a fancy name to mask the lack of knowledge regarding its cause) such as "Chronic Fatigue", or "Attention Deficit Disorder".

What does the word "Chronic Fatigue" give to the patient who came for diagnosis and remedy in terms of finding and correcting the cause of their debilitating, daily weariness? Just about nothing. It means they are chronically fatigued ...tired all the time. They knew that before they paid for the $80 office call ...the $400 test ...and the $120 Xanex perscription, which could only dull their pain, not cure the disease. Attention Deficit Disorder means that a child (or an adult) can't sustain keeping their mind on task. That doesn't tell us anything either ...we used to call the "blonds" or airheads ...now we have a medical term which mandates another manufactured chemical at exhorbitant costs ...ironically, probably manufactured by the same corporation that made the chemicals that produced the disorder in the first place ...ones that for millenia the human body had never seen ..."Chemical Soup" in which it is now forced to swim.

Even the terms "firbro-myalgia" or "multiple sclerosis" give us traceable knowledge of the cellular dysfunction causing the deterioration and pain in a patient (damages to the mylan sheath, etc). They tell us nothing about what caused it.

In the same interview with Dr. Ammon quoted above, I asked her ...."how much sense does it make for you as an MD to diagnose a disease, perscribe a chemical bandaid to mask it and then send the patient back into the environment that created it without treating the environmental maladies as well?" Her response was "That's too complicated." The interview ended with her claim that I'd sandbagged and baited her (off air) and we haven't spoken since.

It is widely known, in E.I. circles, by those of us who have been misdiagnosed, given mind-numbing (paxil, xanex, riddilin, valium) bandaid chemical cures, or sent to see psychiatrists, that unless an E.I. suffering from legitimate maladies indeed caused by the chemical or electro-magnetic contamination of the natural environment in which our immune and metabolic systems evolved properly diagnoses and remediates the Environmental Malady which his immune system is now warning us is present, applying chemical remedies that numb those shrieking indicators and then sending us back into the toxic soup without the dash panel warning lights glowing ...telling us that the engine is out of oil ....makes us graphically sicker ...to a stage where our immune systems will, indeed, over ride the chemical numbers themselves and up the anti. The result is rampant ...epidemic ...today.

We have known for hundreds (maybe thousands) of years what cancer is, even breast cancer. What we don't pay much attention to is what causes it. Go talk to the surgeon who removes them ...they will shake their head ...they don't know. They have learned, however, by trial and error, to remove the "rosarie chain" of lymph nodes entombed in the malignant breast and inflamed with breast cancer ...tracing it back up the neck and down the arms until the little beads encountered are no longer toxic ...or the patient will die. The lymph nodes are one of our first lines of defense against agressors (like the known carcinogenic solvents...toluene and methylethyl ketone ...documented in the 1990's by the EPA to be found in every single commercially produced perfume/fragrance product in the U.S. ...no matter how "natural" the lable looked or whether or not it came from a health food store ...every single one of them ...100% ...and they tested hundreds. How? The chemical fragrance industry in the early 1990's funded millions of dollars in congressional lobbies and succeded in getting the entire fragrance industry removed from federal scrutiny and regulation. They can and do put anything they want in your shampoo, hair dye, skin lotion, soap and perfume. With impunity and without testing, scrutiny or recourse.

Breast cancer has increased seven fold in american women since the 1950's. Why? We will never know what environmental toxins were present in the bodies of the thousands of women who have died from it already. The obvious dismantling of the scrutinizing and protective mechanisms the vast number of americans believe our government has in place for their welfare is epidemic. The loopholes in allowing manufacturers to delecte ingredients listed on their products because they themselves determine they are inert or a trade secret form loopholes in what is printed on product lables you could (and they do) drive semi-trucks of toxic chemicals through on a daily basis.

The only scientific indicator (certainly not court-presentable proof)(but certainly warning enough for an E.I. to indicate avoidance) is that the ramp up of breast cancer exactly parrallels the environmental contamination symptomatic of "Better living through chemistry".

At the end of every decade our federal government's health department does "adipose" studies...tracing what's going on with deases. During the 1990's ...and reported in late 2000, early 2001 ...we found that cancer in all forms had become epidemic, asthma (obviously triggered by what we breathe) trippled and adult onset diabetis went up 79% ....in one decade. The asthma epidemic (definably most prevalent in children) exactly coincides with the deregulation of the fragrance industry and the widespread marketing of synthetically fragranced just-about-everything ...chemical perfumes, scented lotions, hair dyes with the stench of their solvents maked with stink-pretty, even new cars with their dash boards permanently impregnated with synthetic esthers made to mimic baby powder aroma as selling gimics (this is not a fabrication).

The conclusion, on a broader scale is obvious. The better living we got through chemistry just got worse...in fact, its been getting worse for a long time. The advent of the wholesale marketing and blanket spraying of herbacides and pesticides ...now commonly possesing not just the capacity to damage immune systems, but also to create genetic (DNA) deformations and be passed through generations (giving us now an entire generation of babies born with chemical allergies having no known prior exposures) have brought us to the brink (and hopefully the turning point) harbinging at long last, the turning point and eventual end of "Better living through chemicstry".

It is maddeningly impossible, once a human immune system has begun displaying the bizaar symptoms many of us now live with daily (and you will find described in detail in this document) to go back in our history and trace exactly what caused this immune system dysfunction. Difficult, but now, now that we have the dubious entry of chemistry and the new technologies of DNA mapping itself at our disposal ...not entirely impossible. "Tracer Technologies" now exist which are capable, ironically through the advances in chemistry and electron microscopes themselves, which can take the blood and DNA sample of an E.I. and diagnose the exact chemical substance which damaged them. Chemicals leave molecular "shadows" on the immune systems they attack. We can and do, indeed, trace them. Some people are beginning to seek legal action against the manufacturers who produce them. Some with heartening results. All, certainly, carrying with them the hope that the sources of Environmental Illness themselves will become as commonplace in our public and medical profession knowledge base as the existence of bacteria and viruses did to Pasteur and Salk ...leading to the now routine protections of pennicilin and polio vaccine. This will happen in the elimination of synthetic fragrances, toxic solvents, genetically modified food substances and elevated electromagnetic fields as well. Unfortunatly, the needless human suffering which must be endured to get us to that point is immense and we find ourselves (especially those of us already in advanced stages of Environmental Illness) dead center in the throws of it today.

What we need is a detailed body of knowlegde concerning which substances exactly are causing which diseases and what to do to protect ourselves and our children. The ammassing of that knowledge is essentially hopeless in the shaddow of huge multi-national chemical corporation profits and their purchasing power for influence in the corridors of our increasingly "coin-operated" bastions of government...from the president and governor, through the hallways of federal and state legislators ...clear down to the legally mandated and financed malation-spraying mosquito and weed control county officials drenching your property today.

We find ourselves exactly at the same position our nation faced in the late 1800's facing the tyrany of the "Robber Barons" of railroad and petruoleum industry fame...all of whom eventually extincted themselves by greed, exploitation and irresponsibility (unfortunatly at the expense of the buffalo, the american indian and the vast welfare of the american people themselves). These chemical manufacturing intests expend between $60 and 160 million per year trying to keep a lid on Environmental Illness. Several years ago they paid an MD as touring lecturer $400,000 to tour every AMA convention in the U.S. (with booking agent and unlimited expense account) to convince doctors that E.I. didn't exist and that people claiming to be sufferers were whacko and looking for disability checks. As a result, for 10 years (and still to some extent today) those of us seeking help from conventional medicine leave with perscriptions for the "mind-numbers" and an appointment with a psychiatrist...unfortunately only to return to the homes and workplaces harboring the ingredients many of us can now skillfully identify as the environmental toxins creating the E I from which we suffer.

It is maddeningly complex to diagnose the exact ingredients (much less to effect their cure) present in our homes which cause this complex disease. On the other hand, informed and knowledgable E.I.s are extroridinarily accurate and effective "canaries" in the coal mine once they themselves have enough knowledge and experience pinpointing what their now hyper-tuned immune systems are warning them are dangerous toxins.

It is as if thousands of us have contracted a disease which has evolved a class of citizens now hyper-tuned (and increasingly informed, organized and empowered) to quickly identify dangerous levels of immune aggressors in any environment. We also constitute an entire class of citizens who no longer have any choice but to create legitimately non-toxic living environments for ourselves and lobby hard for the protections moving us all...E.I. or not ...toward healthier public spaces as well ..."fragrance free dances and hot springs spas" ...insistence on removal of high emf powerlines contaminating homes ....entire communities banning chemical herbacides and pesticides rendering public lands unusable to the citizens who pay taxes to create and maintain them (these are all specific examples currently in effect in Western Colorado...there are thousands more ...as we'll see later).

For the mean time, the best protection any of us have against exposure to damaging environmental toxins is, ironically, the E.I. themselves ...the "canary" ...the one already damaged. The reason for that is that one of the puzzling side effects of E.I., in its varying and distinct thresholds and degrees is that it produces an immune system hypervigalent and precise as a diagnostic tool to the tune of 10s, 100s even 1000s of times more sensitive than the normal (beta) immune system we all used to have. Basically, our sense of smell evolves to levels that could easily compete with a small, dumb dog. No a really fast, sharp one ...they smell 10,000 times as well as we do. But the most hypersensitive individuals known to the Smart Shelter Network (which has networked between 500 and 1000 E.I.s in regional Western Colorado) are definatly capable of smelling synthetic fragrances and toxins in laundry detergents at levels consistently 1000 times as accurate as the undamaged (yet) citizen.

Our best tool is the E.I. themselves. If we credence their disease and use them as indicators for the presence of environmental contamination, place them interms of consulting sources or power brokers in our building codes, weed control, public spaces policy generation, and utility industry regulation functions ...this alone is the best protective mechanism (also the cheapest, most readily available, and singularly most effective tool) we can find.

If your home and work space conform to The E.I. Standard ....if known and knowledgable Alpha One, preferably Alpha Two E.I.s (explanation to follow) agree its safe...without further testing or puzzle, you have the highest assurance possible that you have the highest likely protection against contracting or thresholding into this debilitating condition yourself...prevention.

There is, and probably will never be, such a thing as a cure for E.I. Thousands of practitioners proffering cures will not agree.But myriad case studies (many done by Smart Shelter itself) testify to the fact that immune damage (certainly genetic damage) is a one-way street. You will not find a chemical that can fix what chemicals broke. E.I. is for life. It is a distinct threshold phenomenon, often onsetting in graphic episodes to suddenly increased levels of discomfort and disability. It's only known and dependable cure is prevention. It is cumulative. All of us are accumulating the toxins simply by swimming in the profit-driven chemiccal soup. No one is ummune. Those who think they haven't got it need to add the word "yet" to their thinking and vocabulary. In the long run, 100 % diagnosis of incidence in our population is inevitable unless we curtail the chemicalization (and emf proliferation) creating it. There are reputable entities (the Germans especially) who maintain we are already there...and Smart Shelter's diagnostic criterion and shirt-sleeve case studies have produced strong suspicion, especially in the light of increasingly accurate diagnostic tools, that they may be very definatly right.

No amount of moaning, shrieking or fingerpointing will give us much more than informed warning ...which it certainly has to date. The "choir" of chirping E.I.s of the 90's is now a full blown chorus Carnagie Hall could not house. But the weapons of effect are the solutions and the widespread public education. If you're reading this ...you've started enabling the last ingredient. The rest of what you will find published here in The EI Standard is composed of solutions ...formulas, research, ingredients, building techniques and actions any of us would be well advised to take and incorporate as safeguards, whether you are already any E.I. seeking a safer environment enabling you to ramp down the effects of your disease ...or a wise citizen capable of foresight and preventive action not yet having secumbed to this malady and credencing (as all wise souls must) that "you "will become one of "us" unless you embrace the warning and enact the E.I. Standard in your own life as the only weapon against thresholding ...prevention.

The economic destruction and cost of this industy induced (and definatly now known to have been inflicted with their informed knowledge with deliberate deciept) epidemic will (probably in the nearer future) result in the largest class action law suit in world history...one that will easily make what has happened to the tobacco industry (which did the same thing...include carcinogenic ingredients clandestinesly in cigarrettes to induce addiction for profit) look like a warm up act. The industry is fully aware both of their coverup and the longrange disasterous consequences they face. That is why the millions of dollars annualy they spend to lobby and buy regulation and legislation are being done with such vicious tenacity. These are the kneejerk panic reactions of what will become an embattled and soon extincted industry. Unfortunatily, just like the union wars of the early 1900s for workplace safety and humane working hours ended in the wholesale murder of women and children by industry thugs ...just like the strike breakers and brutal midnight beatings adversaries of the keroseen and railroad industry endured prior to sanity and fairness in our transportation and fuel industries ...the path ahead will not promise to be short or pretty.

Multi-national corporate capitalism ...the wholesale purchase of three piece suits, half million dollar mortgaged homes and hundred thousand dollar suvs as price tags and hooks in the mouths of compromised corporate ladder climbers have given us this legacy. Production, marketing and profits ...stockholder dividends ...at whatever the price, personal or social ...to whoever must be damaged ...unborn fetus, teenager or the elderly. Just like the fear tactic that echoed through the halls of Phillip Morris when one of their ex-executives turned states evidence over to the successful prosecution to the tune of a few billion dollars in penalties to an industry now safely back on its feet, consistently re-addicting teenagers and fueled by $2.50 per pack prices taking needed food out of the mouths of low-income family children raised by nicotene addicted parents. The cement that glues the chemical industry together, the mortar that pastes millions of barrels of herbacides onto traincars headed for your city parkways and bikepaths, the spray adhesive your teenagers are inhaling from paper bags in the schoolyard ...all emanate from halls of industry not by any stretch of the imagination capable of responsible self-regulation and certainly powerful and experienced in dismantling all the tax-payer financed regulation we need or needed to prevent this from happening in the first place.

The price of democracy is constant vigalence. Vigalence is certainly assured once an E.I. ramps up into Alpha One or Alpha Two thresholds. But the price of progress is sweat...sometimes suffering ...which in the instance of E.I. certainly abounds in abundance. The motivation for progress is invariably pain ...something we also find we do not lack. But the solution is solutions....and solutions is what you will find contained in The EI Standard.