FEW people find the smell of heavy perfume or the fumes from car exhaust pleasurable, but most can live with them. For some, however, exposure to these types of things pose insurmountable problems. They’re so irritated by car exhaust, they find it impossible to go outside, or so sensitive to even small amounts of perfume, they can’t go to work.
Although these scenarios may sound farfetched, a growing number of people report such extreme sensitivities. The problem has become so common that it has even been given a name: multiple chemical sensitivity, or MCS. In a 1999 US survey of California residents, for example, nearly 16% of respondents said they were “allergic or unusually sensitive to everyday chemicals”; more than 6% had been diagnosed by a physician as having multiple chemical sensitivity.
