A group of at least 12 teenage girls in upstate New York have been beset by a host of mysterious Tourrette s-like symptoms. Multiple tests by experts have found that these bizarre symptoms, which include involuntary tics and verbal outbursts, have no apparent toxic or infectious origin, leading health experts to believe that they are most likely of psychological origin. But some involved refuse to accept that there is no connection between the girls symptoms and a lurking environmental toxin.
Among those who don t agree with the expert consensus is Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist made famous by the 2000 film starring Julia Roberts, in which she discovered that a pollutant was supposedly the cause of a multitude of ailments in Hinkley, California. Brokovich subsequently became an icon of the environmentalist movement, even though her allegations were based on junk science, as ACSH has discussed in a recent publication on chemophobia. The environmental icon is now examining whether a train accident in 1970 which resulted in the release of cyanide and trichloroethene, an industrial solvent, near the affected girls high school could be playing a role in the girls symptoms. She remains suspicious," despite the experts findings.
But ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom finds this line of inquiry entirely implausible. She s implicating trichloroethene, which evaporates more quickly than water. This spill occurred 40 years ago ÂÂ there is no way that there could be any trichloroethene remaining, nor could it have caused these symptoms to appear in these girls within a few weeks of each other, he says. A cyanide spill makes just as little sense, he adds. The symptoms are all wrong.
State and local officials, along with the neurologist treating most of the girls, have diagnosed the girls (and one boy) as suffering from a case of mass psychogenic illness, also known as mass hysteria. The diagnosis is not meant to diminish their difficulties their symptoms are certainly real it just means that the cause is psychological.
Unfortunately, ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross observes, this expert consensus won t stop people from trying to blame environmental toxins. Even when we have a psychologist, a neurologist, toxicologists, and an epidemiologist all in agreement about the particular cause of a disorder, as soon as Erin Brokovich appears on the scene, people will still believe that toxins are responsible, he says. They ll ignore whatever the EPA, local authorities, and medical experts say.
