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Disinfectants, Fatigue, Adderall, ADHD, and Covid [1]

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Date: 2023-09-04

As I start to write this, I am struggling with how to limit the topic. Although politics is involved with the use (or not) of disinfectants, I want to bypass that and talk about me, regarding disinfectants, fatigue, Adderall, ADHD, and Covid.

In this diary I want to try to explain the connection I have between disinfectants, fatigue, and mental illness. Specifically, I want to say that the rise in some types of mental illness (ADHD diagnosis in particular, but any mental illness that is impacted by an overactive immune system) have increased as a percent of the population because of disinfectants.

I’m going to start off by saying that my immune system is sensitive to the damage that disinfectants do to my cell membranes. Apparently, my immune system is not sensitive to disinfectants per se, but rather it attacks the damage that disinfectants do to my cell membranes, thus multiplying the damage (immensely, for me, as far as I can tell). I feel most of the damage in my GI tract, but I also get it with my skin (I am sensitive to the chlorine, chloramines, and/or bleach in tap water), my lungs (similar to how swimmers get asthma from chlorinated pools, except I don’t have asthma — but a similar immune effect), and my brain through neuroinflammation. The chemical sensitivity constantly activates and drains my immune system, making me fatigued all the time and in need of stimulants like Adderall. The best treatment is lack of exposure, but exposure can only be decreased, not eliminated.

The constant drain on my immune system gives me symptoms similar to what some people with long Covid have — not the long Covid patients with organ damage but rather the ones whose immune systems are constantly activated against the virus without clearing it. The difference is that I have had this sensitivity for most or all of my life, with it being a big drain starting in puberty and starting to go down slightly in my mid 50’s, with me being 59 now. Interestingly, I never connected my poor sense of smell and taste to my immune system until Covid hit — I had the top five symptoms of Covid my entire adult life, but the smell and taste one shocked me when I recognized the connection.

I was born in 1964, and have lived through a tremendous rise in the use of disinfectants. That experience gives me as a patient (i.e., a case study) some perspective. When I was young, I’m going to say that food was not processed with many disinfectants, because I did not react to food like I do now. Water was similar to what it is now. When I hit puberty, the effect on me of disinfectants in water increased a fair amount, making me constantly tired. However, I didn’t know what was making me tired, and I think it helped make me an angry human being, with the constant fatigue also making me less mature than what I otherwise would have been.

Starting around the early 1980’s, as far as my body told me, food was disinfected a lot more. This tends to be with the same chemicals as water — bleach is a big one. However, disinfectants also include the chlorinated antimicrobials and quaternary amine antimicrobials found in antimicrobial soap and in the chemicals used to disinfect food processing equipment — I am sensitive to all of them. I call my stomach an exquisitely sensitive biochemical detector for disinfectants (ones that my immune system is sensitive to). However, I am not sensitive to alcohols (ethanol and isopropanol), hydrogen peroxide, or benzoyl peroxide — so probably not any peroxides.

The above is a story of hindsight. Doctors did not have a clue about what was affecting me. I happened to be a chemist and have made a career of it for over 30 years and counting. I was slowly able to figure out what was going on, starting with reactions to bleach, and using the early internet (1997) to find out that vitamin C is a cheap way to neutralize bleach — before that, if I used bleach on my clothes, I would break out in rashes. The key thing is that I was fatigued all the time, sleeping 10 to 12 hours a day, being tired all the rest of the time, and drinking coffee like it was water. I was hanging on in life, with every day being an exercise in being deeply humbled by life.

Starting in 2009, I got on Adderall (mixed amphetamine salts), which was a wonder drug for me. I ramped my dose up to 60 mg pretty quick, then found a doctor who, seeing that I was still essentially disabled by noon at 60 mg, boosted my dose to 90 mg, which was enough for me to make it through my work day. I later found one supplement that helped reduce my foggy brain and a medicine that increased my perceived health from about a 3 to a 7 (out of 10), but I will not say what those two items were in this diary because I think they were helpful to me as an individual.

The above few paragraphs just scratch the surface of the issue. It intersects with politics because there is no test for having a chemical sensitivity to disinfectants. I have talked to a toxicologist who said that a biotechnology-oriented test (biotech is not my specialty) could be developed by a government agency for maybe 10 million dollars, although that price tag seems low to me. The thing is, based on my lifetime income compared to my equally talented siblings, my disease has cost me about 2 million dollars in lifetime earnings to date. I do wish that the EPA and FDA would work on a test, and I think that there would be a stunning correlation between people who are sensitive to disinfectants and whether or not they have a mental illness that can be affected by an activated immune system.

Regards, and hope this helps someone.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/4/2191559/-Disinfectants-Fatigue-Adderall-ADHD-and-Covid

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