A Question for 2019

[ During the year, Canadian public servants and politicians answered this question with a resounding “Yes!” —Editor. ]

Are public servants and politicians criminally negligent concerning preventable harm that’s being caused to persons with environmental sensitivities in health care and other sectors?

The facts suggest that, at the least, elements of the federal and Ontario governments are criminally negligent. They are hiding mistakes on problems that have been known to medicine for centuries behind a carefully cultivated stereotype born of the modern environment.

Federal and provincial officials know or ought to know that their statements and actions are contributing to preventable harm, including horrific abuse in education and social services, and unnecessary deaths in health care.

All this continues despite evidence that for a time, from 1988 to 1993, the federal health department was acting on reports from Ontario (1985), Toronto Board of Education (1985), and New Jersey (1989), with particular attention to recommendations about protecting people from being caused preventable harm in the sectors mentioned above.

There are parallels to the blood scandal, and to other situations where health officials and politicians have not been forthcoming about knowledge when they had a clear duty of care.

Twenty steps to how we got here:

1. Reptiles have sensitivities, as do insects, birds, fish and mammals. Birch trees were the first, in Eastern Ontario, to be affected by acid rain.
2. Humans have environmental sensitivities.
   1. People with sensitivities have been known to medicine forever.
   2. There are a wide range of reasons for sensitivities, not one or two specific diseases.
   3. People are sensitive to natural as well as synthetic substances.
   4. People have a wide range of consequent reactions.
   5. People have a wide range of social experiences concerning acceptance, accommodation.
   6. This has not changed for centuries.
3. Patients were helped in dealing with sensitivities, or not, in ages when medicine was more variable.
   1. The method of diagnosis was a patient interview, which included an environmental history, and sometimes removal-reintroduction testing.
   2. Patients were advised, protected in many cases.
   3. Literature dates back centuries, lots of history, long before modern chemicals.
   4. In many families, sensitivities were acknowledged and dealt with.
4. Behavioural sequelae of sensitivities have been known to medicine for centuries.
   1. Discussed by Razi, Rush, Kirkbride, and many since.
5. While some sectors remain resistant, many public, educational and health institutions have long accommodated persons with sensitivities.
6. There were attitude problems.
   1. Blame victim response common for many disabilities.
      1. Disabilities involve mental disturbance, can be overcome with Pollyanna attitude.
7. IgE mechanism discovered in 1966.
   1. It brought help for many, whose reactions were demonstrably IgE-mediated.
   2. Unfortunately, some interpreted this to mean that consumers could now be divided into people with either real or imagined allergies, the public meaning of the words “explained” and “unexplained”. Abusive parties used this as reason to dismiss people whose sensitivities were not IgE mediated.
8. There was still widespread academic medical knowledge, for instance in PEDIATRICS or The Scientist, that:
   1. People with sensitivities comprise an aggregate, not a single disease entity.
   2. Concern should not be abated just because the etiologies are poorly understood.
   3. Preventable harm may be caused to unidentified people or to people already diagnosed.
   4. It is important to identify patients who are sensitive before doing things that may injure patients with sensitivities.
   5. It is important not to ignore sensitivity when it’s indicated by other health problems.
9. In the 1970s, a group of physicians calling themselves “clinical ecologists” started imposing their ideas on the conversation, in part through patients who had been abused by other physicians. Many patients had sensitivities that were not demonstrably IgE-mediated and previously had been labelled as malingerers or worse. There were several suicides. However:
   1. Some of the clinical ecologists’ ideas and practices were irresponsible and dangerous.
   2. They alienated many in medicine and government.
   3. Patients were caught in the crossfire.
   4. Debate about “clinical ecology” (now called “environmental medicine”) shaped public discussion about sensitivities.  The discussion shifted to become about “people who have sensitivities because of the modern environment”.  This process is commonly called “stereotyping”.
   5. The stereotyping enables abuse by allowing people to pretend that sensitivities are new, that there is not a long scientific, clinical and consumer experience, that there are not attached legal, human and civil rights.
   6. Controversy about the stereotype is misused to brand the entire topic as being unresolved.
10. Before, during and since the 1970s, more informed parties in organized medicine and academia looked beyond the stereotyping. There was a continued understanding of how the debate about environmental medicine was unrelated to the duty to protect persons with sensitivities from being caused preventable harm by acts of commission against persons to whom there is a duty of care.
11. Nowadays, many people and organisations are unable to think this through clearly. Debate about the stereotype provided by “environmental medicine” is a distraction from which they have not recovered. Could this be a matter of convenience?
    1. British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, UQAM, UofT, Women’s College Hospital, Health Canada, Justice Canada, the CHRC, CBC, Radio-Canada, CTV, Canadian Press, Postmedia, all trot out this debate—about a sub-group defined by the abitrarily non-inclusive ideas of environmental medicine, about the stereotype—when asked about protection issues involving long-known overall populations of persons with environmental sensitivities.
    2. Protection issues related to the overall group, including the 20% who match the stereotype, are obfuscated.
    3. Sometimes it is hard to believe that the obfuscation is not deliberate, especially where there is continuing abuse and accruing liability.
    4. Government health statisticians disappear mortality and abuse statistics for persons with sensitivities within other categories, such as “adverse drug reaction”, “suicide” or “learning (or behavioural) disabilities”.
    5. Are the universities being paid to reinforce the stereotype? Why else would they co-operate? Have they, too, caused damages in the past?  They seem willing to do so in the present.  Why would this be? Are they blinded by the stereotype?
    6. Journalists seem to be too busy to think about what they are doing. Twenty points on anything is too much, in today’s journalism workplace, to contemplate.
12. Environmentalists, and environment-oriented reporters, politicians, people who care about the planet, re-purpose the group through stereotyping to serve their fight against modern chemicals, invisibilizing the majority of people affected by sensitivities and disappearing a history, associated rights and legal obligations in the process.
13. Journalists similarly invisibilize people with sensitivities and related medical issues when doing stories about adverse drug reactions, medical devices, learning disabilities or mental health.
14. For a time, official reports, official spokespersons tried to help the public, health professionals and journalists to understand the difference between 1) long known, officially re-identified protection, duty of care issues concerning people with any kind of sensitivities, and 2) debate about the heath effects of “modern chemicals”. Few Canadians are capable of making this distinction today, even fewer in the organizations where the greatest abuses are taking place.
15. Health and Welfare Canada made efforts to address attitudes and promote protections between 1988 and 1993. These were invisibilized after the 1993 federal election. The people who were supposed to be protected are being abused, sometimes killed, instead.
16. In 1993, governing NDP politicians in Ontario were obscuring protection and duty of care issues behind debate about environmental medicine, even though Thomson had pointed out that doing so caused harm—in his 1985 Report, as DM of Labour, as Ontario DAG, while doing the SARC report—as he did several times later at the federal level and while with the National Judicial Institute. The NDP, in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, BC, and federally, continues to hide these abuses by “sticking to their story” which focuses on the stereotype to the exclusion of reality.
17. People in organizations, departments, political parties who are causing harm by imposing the stereotype become indignant when told of the consequences. It’s as if identifying a lethal mistake—when they commit it—is in itself a form of assault.  Abusers respond with ad hominem attacks instead of attending to their responsibilities under Canadian law, or out of simple decency. Otherwise decent human beings insist that they are unable to understand how they are contributing to preventable harm; they are working so hard on the stereotype.
18. The focus of public discussion continues to be on the stereotype, people who are “sick because of the modern environment”. Journalists turn a blind eye as responsible parties continue to cause preventable harm, by acts of commission, to a much larger group of people, even when having a legal duty of care. Ironically, as mentioned previously, the 20% of people with sensitivities who fit the stereotype are denied the same protections.
19. People in agencies of remedy likewise eclipse protection issues for the overall group behind a limited history provided by the stereotype. In so doing, they protect the people who appoint them from accusations of negligence and betray the people whose situations they are supposed to remedy.
20. Knowingly ignoring, invisibilizing, the people to whom one is causing preventable harm does not diminish responsibility or, where it exists, duty of care. Pretending that a subgroup represents the whole would be a form of criminal deceit, if it serves to hide criminal negligence.

Is Health Canada criminally negligent? Justice Canada?  The Ontario Ministry of Health? UofT? UQAM? Public Service labour unions?  Canadian political parties?  All have been complicit in obscuring abuse of the larger, long-existing, group behind the stereotype, in some cases where there is a duty of care and accumulating liability.

Why are journalists confining their work to the issues raised only by the stereotype?  There are much more serious issues, some to do with criminal neglect, when the stereotype is not used to disappear the broader reality.

It was something we asked in 2019.

Chris Brown
https://ages.ca/media