MCS and the Limits of Chemical Safety: Laura Vandenberg, PhD

How do regulators decide that a chemical exposure is safe—and what happens when those standards fail to protect people with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS)?

In this episode, Professor Laura Vandenberg from the University of Massachusetts Amherst explains why testing chemicals one at a time, relying on the “average” person, and assuming low doses are harmless may overlook real-world exposures and vulnerable populations.

We discuss:

• Fragrance
• Chemical mixtures
• Endocrine disruptors
• Industry influence
• And what a more precautionary approach to chemical safety could look like.

Listen now & subscribe:

https://www.chemicalsensitivitypodcast.org/1970633/episodes/19539201-mcs-and-the-limits-of-chemical-safety-laura-vandenberg-phd

Watch & subscribe on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6r3pSMPqpo

Laura Vandenberg and colleagues' 2023 paper:

A science-based agenda for health-protective chemical assessments and decisions: overview and consensus statement

Transcript

Aaron Goodman: [00:00:00] How do regulators decide how much chemical exposure is safe? And what happens when the assumptions behind those decisions don't reflect the experiences of people living with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity? This episode features a conversation with Laura Vandenberg, Associate Vice Chancellor and Vice Provost for Research and Engagement and Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Massachusetts in the US.

[00:00:34] Professor Vandenberg is an endocrinologist and developmental biologist who studies how chemicals can interfere with the body's hormone system. Her work explores why certain stages of life and certain individuals may be much more vulnerable to chemical exposures than others. Everything we put on our bodies is already a mixture of chemicals.

Laura Vandenberg: [00:00:57] Everything we're using in our homes [00:01:00] is a mixture of chemicals, which means that me as an individual, I'm living in a soup, and my soup looks a little different than your soup. So that's already a challenge, is the fact that if we test chemicals one by one, we aren't capturing sort of a normal experience for anyone except something that might happen in a controlled lab setting.

Aaron Goodman: [00:01:20] We talk about why chemical safety standards designed around the average person may leave the most susceptible people unprotected. Regulators may try to account for differences in age, genetics, and sensitivity, but Professor Vandenberg explains that these calculations often rely on assumptions that may greatly underestimate how vulnerable some people actually are.

[00:01:48] We also discuss a major limitation of traditional chemical testing. Chemicals are usually studied one at a time, even though that's not how we encounter them. [00:02:00] Personal care products, fragrances, cleaning supplies, food packaging, building materials, and indoor air can expose us to complex mixtures every day.

[00:02:10] As Professor Vandenberg puts it, each of us is living in a different chemical soup. Professor Vandenberg explains why the idea that very low exposures may be harmless does not always hold true Professor Vandenberg explains why the idea that very low exposures must be harmless does not always hold true, particularly for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which can add to or interfere with hormonal signals already operating in the body.

[00:02:45] And for some chemicals, there may not be a clear threshold below which no biological effect occurs. We discuss fragrance, chemical mixtures, vulnerable stages of life, industry [00:03:00] influence on research and regulation, and why people should not have to become chemists simply to shop for food or personal care products.

[00:03:09] Avoiding harmful exposure, she argues, should not be left entirely to individuals. It's a problem that needs to be addressed through stronger regulation. And we explore what a more precautionary system could look like, one that uses more sensitive testing, takes individual differences seriously, and protects people with MCS and others who may fall outside the so-called average population.

[00:03:39] Professor Vandenberg says we already know enough to act, and the goal may never be a perfect chemical safety system, but we can and should keep working towards something better because these decisions affect people's lives. Please check out and share a link to the podcast's new website. It's [00:04:00] listen.chemicalsensitivitypodcast.org.

[00:04:03] It's an easy way to introduce friends, family members, healthcare providers, researchers, and policymakers, and others to conversations about MCS. And please subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more, follow the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast on YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and TikTok, and you can reach me at aaron@chemicalsensitivitypodcast.org.

[00:04:28] Thanks for listening. 

Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. 

Laura Vandenberg: Yeah. Thanks for having me. 

Aaron Goodman: We were speaking before we began rolling, and you were mentioning that your research is, is really relevant for all kinds of people. And even though you don't specialize in MCS, is there anything you wanna share with listeners who, who are people with MCS and researchers, environmental health scholars, and people who are interested in MCS?

[00:04:54] Why, why is your work relevant? 

Laura Vandenberg: That’s a great question. I'm trained as an endocrinologist and a developmental [00:05:00] biologist. And as a developmental biologist, part of what we learn is about how different phases of our life can make us incredibly vulnerable to insults that come from the environment. But we also know that there's other phases or features of people that can make them especially vulnerable to environmental insults.

[00:05:20] I find that fascinating from the perspective of developmental biology. From the perspective of endocrinology, I kind of focus that lens on chemicals that interfere with the hormone systems of the body. And so we know a lot, as endocrinologists, about phases of our life that can make us sensitive or, in some cases, ultrasensitive to disruptions to chemical agents, especially ones that mimic or block hormones.

[00:05:49] I think what I study is actually super relevant to all of us. At some point, we were all babies. At some point, we hope that we'll all be old, and we're gonna go through every phase that's in between. But also because we [00:06:00] don't understand why some people are hypersensitive to endocrine disruptors or other environmental agents, but we know that they are, and we can produce the same sort of effect in the lab, and I'm happy to talk more about that.

Aaron Goodman: [00:06:14] I really look forward to that. Your work really focuses on safety assessments, right? And, and you write that safety assessments when it comes to chemicals are based on the average person. And I wonder, what would it mean to design chemical policies around susceptible, and you used the word vulnerable, populations, including people with multiple chemical sensitivity?

Laura Vandenberg: [00:06:39] I think a lot of things in life fall along the bell curve. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle of that bell curve. That's what I sort of mean by the average person. But if you're going to protect the average person or people who fall in the middle of the bell curve, you're always leaving people at both ends of that curve out of how you're thinking [00:07:00] about things.

[00:07:00] Now, for people who are really fast at metabolizing chemicals, they're on the other side of the curve. That's not such a big deal for them. But for people who, for whatever reason, are on the vulnerable end of that curve, that could be because of life stage, it could be because of a genetic factor, it could be because of something that happened early on in their life that changed their organ development, changed their epigenetic profile, any of those things, then we are not thinking about how to protect those people.

[00:07:29] And there's a whole bunch of reasons why, but on the most basic level, sometimes it's because we don't have an easy way to identify those people. So you might be in the 2% when it comes to exposures to radiation. I might be the 2% when it comes to exposures to estrogenic chemicals, and we don't really have an easy way of figuring that out.

[00:07:53] And in some cases, it could even be more complicated than that. You could be on the 2% for estrogenic chemicals that look [00:08:00] like a PCB. I could be on the 2% for estrogenic chemicals that look like BPA. Our biology is so complicated that it's hard to create a safety system, an umbrella system that protects everybody You mentioned epigenetic profile, and I just have to ask, can you tell me what that- Like, what is that?

[00:08:20] Yeah, what does that mean? So at, at the simplest level, every cell of our body has the same DNA, but every cell of our body isn't the same, right? My hair cells look different than the cells of my eyeball, and that's because different genes get turned on or off, and sometimes that's a permanent on and off, and sometimes it's a transient on or off.

[00:08:40] So the idea of epigenetics is how genes can get turned on or off, and in some cases, that pattern of turning things on and off can, um, can be more permanent than we realize, meaning passed on to generation after generation after generation, leading to [00:09:00] changes that are inherited like their DNA, but that's not happening at the level of DNA.

Aaron Goodman: [00:09:06] You mentioned genetics, chemical insults, and chemical regulators, policymakers, industry. They're not really thinking about this, are they? 

Laura Vandenberg: Well, let me tell you how they're thinking about it and why my work suggests that it's not enough. So when we're trying to identify what's the level of a chemical that people are allowed to be exposed to, there's basic tests that are done in a lab, usually involving lab animals, but now more and more using cell-based approaches that are intended to mimic an animal or a human's response.

[00:09:42] And from those tests, they can determine what is the dose at which they no longer see harm. You know, that's an answer, but that answer is not considered protective enough. So the regulator who's looking at the evidence that comes from those tests will take that dose, and they'll [00:10:00] divide it by a certain number, usually 10, to say, "Well, your genetics are different from my genetics, so let's protect you."

[00:10:07] And they might say, "Well, an exposure is likely to happen to children, and children are more vulnerable than adults, so we'll divide by 10 again." And they might say something like, "Well, animals aren't people, and so let's be especially precautious and divide by 10 again." That's the number that they'll come up with that's considered...

[00:10:25] It's not a safe dose per se, but it's a dose at which they're not predicting that there'll be serious harm. The problem with what I just described is this. Do I actually know that you're 10 times more sensitive than I am? What if you're 100 times or 1,000 times more sensitive? Do we know that children are 10 times more sensitive than adults?

[00:10:45] What if they're 1,000 times or 100,000 times more sensitive? So there's a lot of assumptions that are made in the ways that we, number one, test chemicals, and then number two, use the results of those tests to try to protect people. [00:11:00] And this is again where I'm saying we think about-- Regulators do think about vulnerability.

[00:11:05] They do think children are more vulnerable than adults, but they make assumptions about how vulnerable are they, and those assumptions, when we actually go back and look at data, are often wrong

Aaron Goodman: [00:11:19] Current risk assessments typically evaluate one chemical at a time. And how does this approach fail people with MCS who often react to mixtures of fragrances, solvents, cleaning products, and other everyday exposures? Your question has two parts to it that I think are really important. First of all, we don't experience the world as single chemicals ever, anything, right?

Laura Vandenberg: [00:11:47] So everything we put on our bodies is already a mixture of chemicals. Everything we're using in our homes is a mixture of chemicals, which means that me as an individual, I'm living in a soup, and my soup [00:12:00] looks a little different than your soup. So that's already a challenge is the fact that if we test chemicals one by one, we aren't capturing sort of a normal experience for anyone except something that might happen in a controlled lab setting.

[00:12:14] The second thing is that what we're starting to realize, and the evidence for this has really built up over a period of more than a decade, probably two decades now, is that chemicals and mixtures can act in ways that you can't necessarily predict from studying them one at a time. Now, there's really good studies that are starting to get to, if you look at a complex mixture, there's a couple of those chemicals that drive the effect.

[00:12:41] But you have to study the whole mixture in order to identify which are those chemicals. And if you took out the bad actors, new bad actors become the ones that drive, not because they become more toxic, but because removing the most toxic, then, you know, if you're second place, you're suddenly first place, and if you're third place, you're suddenly second place.[00:13:00] 

[00:13:00] And this is a real challenge with thinking about how chemicals act in mixtures, which we're trying to understand, but also how to regulate chemicals as they're acting in mixtures.

Aaron Goodman: [00:13:14] When we are out in the world, the moment we step out of our homes, we're exposed to a whole range of chemicals. I hear you saying that regulators aren't really looking at this, this flood of exposures and the cumulative daily contact with chemicals that affect people with MCS. 

Laura Vandenberg: Yeah, that's right. You've already brought up the concept of fragrance.

[00:13:38] The companies don't need to disclose what's in a fragrance because it's considered a proprietary, confidential business information. And so what we can do as individuals is to try to avoid personally purchasing things that have fragrance and, and making choices. We also know there's been some really interesting studies on [00:14:00] people that are put into settings where they try to reduce their chemical exposures by altering their behaviors.

[00:14:06] Some are very successful. So a great example, if you can take people who have plastic drinking water bottles, the reusable hard plastic ones that used to be made with BPA are now often made with BPA replacement chemicals that may not actually be any better for you. If you take those away from people and you give them something else to drink all of their cold beverages out of, their exposure levels will go down, which is great.

[00:14:33] Like, it's an easy thing you can do, and you buy one less thing. Everybody wins if you buy less and you reduce your chemical burden. But other studies where they took people out of their home setting and put them in a lab setting, and they cooked for them, and they controlled what they were touching, so they weren't touching receipts.

[00:14:51] They saw their exposures to a lot of chemicals come down, which is great, but some exposures went up. And the reason why is that even the most [00:15:00] educated people, people like me, scientists who are designing studies, don't know all of the ways in which a food has been packaged or has been processed. And there are some of these examples where the spices, as one study had shown, were packaged in a particular way, and it led to exposures that went way up during the intervention phase.

[00:15:20] This is why I think it's so important that when I'm talking to the general public, I'm telling them, "Look, this shouldn't be on you to try to avoid chemicals. This is a societal problem. We need to do things differently so that people don't have to be a chemist every time they go into the grocery store or, or, you know, the, the pharmacy in order to buy their personal care products.

[00:15:43] We need to think about this at the level of regulation instead of saying it's an individual's responsibility to avoid."

Aaron Goodman: [00:15:53] People with MCS frequently report symptoms that are triggered by low-level exposures that regulators consider [00:16:00] acceptable. I wonder if researchers and policymakers should listen to people with MCS more when they're evaluating chemical safety, 'cause right now we don't feel heard, as you mentioned.

Laura Vandenberg: [00:16:12] Yeah. Feels like a problem that we have to solve. Yes. I think it's a really important question because I think the broader issue is also we make assumptions, we meaning society, and how, and societies that regulate chemicals make assumptions that if we go down to low enough levels of exposure, there will be no harm.

[00:16:34] That really is based on a classical understanding of toxic chemicals. And so if you think about, like, a vat of poison, so no one would purposefully choose to drink a vat of poison, but you might think, "Okay, if there's a single drop of this poison in the lake that we're drinking from, am I okay with that?

[00:16:56] Okay, am I okay with 10 drops? Am I okay with a bucket?" And then [00:17:00] that, this is really what regulation is intended to help us think about, is we can acknowledge something as toxic, but we try to figure out what's the level at which we're no longer worried about that toxic chemical. When it comes to endocrine disruptors, as endocrinologists, we have really recognized that it's possible there is no safe level of exposure to some of these chemicals.

[00:17:23] That was previously recognized for carcinogens in food, that if something's carcinogenic, it should not be in food. And if you think about it, the scientific rationale for those two situations is actually the same. In the case of a carcinogen, if all that it takes is a single piece of damage to a single DNA strand, and that's enough to set off a cascade of negative effects, well, then a single damage is enough, right?

[00:17:50] A single molecule is enough to cause that damage. With endocrine disruptors, we're talking about chemicals that are not acting on a blank slate. They're acting on [00:18:00] my body that already has hormones in it. So you're taking a signal that's already, you know, think about a speaker. It's making sound, and now you're adding something to it.

[00:18:09] That's either gonna make the sound louder, or it's gonna make it diminish. It's not a blank slate. And so getting back to your... I think some of these assumptions which are around the idea that we can get to a level, and it's called a threshold, where below that threshold everything is fine, it doesn't appear to be the case, at least for endocrine disruptors.

[00:18:28] And it doesn't appear to be the case for carcinogens, because even the smallest amount of a carcinogen can cause damage during a vulnerable stage of the cell's life or cell, you know, DNA replication. I think for your listeners, many of whom are really being affected by a condition that may make them more vulnerable than the general population, that sense of, "Oh, below this level everything should be fine," there's a reason why it resonates with you that it, that isn't true.

[00:18:57] And it's probably not true for the general [00:19:00] population. It's just harder to detect that sig- signal of the pain that it's causing, the damage that it's causing if you're working on a background that hasn't already been triggered by something And I think a lot of people aren't aware of the impacts. You know, maybe people have headaches or feel fatigue, but they might not attribute that to exposure to chemicals.

Aaron Goodman: [00:19:21] You mentioned fragrance earlier. Do you have any more thoughts on regulation and harm when it comes to fragrance? Because I think it's Almost always at the top of our list of we know that we're being harmed. I can assume that other people who don't have MCS are also being harmed by fragrance. Fragrance, I mean, it's such a wide [00:19:42] label, but it's causing harm, isn't it? And should it be better regulated? 

Laura Vandenberg:  It's the challenge is that the term fragrance is sort of like saying plastic or building material, right? It, it, it's a catch-all term, and so you can't say that, yes, absolutely, if you see the term fragrance, [00:20:00] it means that parabens are there.

[00:20:01] It might not mean that. But what we do know is a lot of the chemicals that get included under that catchphrase of a fragrance are known to be endocrine disruptors. And in some cases, the argument has been made, and, and I'm gonna say something that sounds logical, but it's not actually logical. A lot of the chemicals that can be used as fragrance are natural because they're found out in the world and the environment.

[00:20:26] My response to that, that's a logical fallacy. Because something's natural, it means that it won't harm you. Rattlesnake poison is natural, but you wouldn't choose to inject it into your body, right? So, um, I think that what's critically important is that when we're talking about chemicals, and fragrance is a mixture of chemicals, inside that mixture is likely to be something that is causing a reaction, a physiological reaction in the bodies of people.

[00:20:53] When it comes to an endocrine disruptor, as an adult female who's not having a baby, [00:21:00] I may not have the kind of reaction that leads to a disease. But the same person six years earlier who's having a baby, who's pregnant, could have a reaction that's unintended that could affect the health of their offspring.

[00:21:15] And so we have to keep in mind, again, just as I was saying, thinking about individualized responses. If we aren't thinking about the most vulnerable person who could be exposed to something, and whether that's a person with a sensitivity condition or a person who is pregnant, and really it's the fetus that might be the most vulnerable.

[00:21:35] If we aren't thinking in that way, then we aren't thinking about the real effects of these chemicals, and we should be. This is what I spend all of my time thinking about. 

Aaron Goodman: I wonder what role industry plays in regulation of chemicals. How much influence is there? How much conflict of interest is there?

Laura Vandenberg: [00:21:52] It's a great question. I think it's critically important to remember that there's different kinds of industry. So when we're talking [00:22:00] about the companies that actually sell you the products, they would like you to stay alive and keep buying their products. So they actually, in my experience, care a whole lot more about is this actually safe.

[00:22:12] If our understanding of its safety has changed, then maybe we should change what we're selling in our stores. And if our customer base is not happy with this, then they're going to shift their practice. So I think it's important to keep separate the, like- sneaker maker and the soap maker from the companies that actually make the chemicals that are used for those purposes.

[00:22:37] What we have seen is that in many cases, the storefronts that sell stuff, they want to make the best choices for their consumers. The people who make products want to make products that make money, and if the market shifts away from something that's incredibly smelly or contains a chemical that got a whole bunch of attention on the nightly news, they'll shift away from it.[00:23:00] 

[00:23:00] The actual chemical manufacturers, they will do a lot in order to try to convince their customers, which is not you and me, it's the sneaker makers and the soap makers, that the chemical itself is safe. We have been watching the tactics that those industries have used and have seen that in many cases, they overlap the same tactics the tobacco industry used for decades.

[00:23:27] It's easy as a young person to think, "Oh, everybody always knew that smoking was bad for you," but it's not the case. There were huge investments in campaigns to convince people and medical professionals and the legal system that tobacco wasn't really all that bad. And looking back now, it seems very foolish to think that could have been convincing.

[00:23:50] But they created their own science, and they ran their own studies, and they paid people to say that there wasn't enough evidence. And scientists like me [00:24:00] even unintentionally added to that by saying, "Well, we need to know more. Of course, we need to know more. I'm a scientist. You can never know everything.

[00:24:06] I'm always interested in knowing more." But that allowed the tobacco industry to continue to sell their product, in many cases, with insufficient regulation. We've seen the exact same thing with chemical manufacturers, that the manufacturers themselves can create their own studies and create evidence and hire so-called experts in order to make a certain case.

[00:24:30] They will hide information that goes against their bottom line, but they also will manufacture doubt. So they will do what they can in order to protect their product. 

Aaron Goodman: I wonder what a truly precautionary approach to chemical safety and regulation might look like if it were to take people with MCS into consideration so we could be safer, safe in homes, workplaces, schools, and [00:25:00] public spaces.

Laura Vandenberg: [00:25:01] That's a lovely question. Vulnerable populations are always on my radar. And, and so I think, you know, I'll frame my thoughts from that perspective of people who are at a life stage or have physiological vulnerabilities. So I think there's two things. One is when we're thinking about how we take data, evidence from studies, and then calculate what is the safe level of exposure, we need to actually know the difference in your sensitivity compared to mine, assuming that mine is more in the middle of that bell curve.

[00:25:34] And, and if you're not 10 times more sensitive, if you're 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 times more sensitive, that needs to be accounted for in how we calculate what's a so-called safe dose But I also think we need to change how we test chemicals. And by that what I mean is, so I study endocrine disruptors, and [00:26:00] we know a lot about the endocrine system.

[00:26:02] The testing that we do, which again is using animals or using cell-based replacements for animals and human models, it is often looking at endpoints that are not sensitive. Even if you can find a mouse that is a sensitive mouse. If what you're doing is weighing an organ and then trying to figure out what that means for disease, that sounds really stupid, and it is stupid.

[00:26:28] So the, the amount of change that you would have to inflict upon an ovary in order to change the weight of the ovary is so severe that we're missing out on critically important changes that are happening in the body, and that's true for virtually every organ of the body. I'm not an immunologist and I'm not a toxicologist, I'm an endocrinologist.

[00:26:51] But my guess would be that if you talked to, to an immunologist or a immunotoxicologist, they would probably say [00:27:00] something similar. That the tests that we use to evaluate allergy response or immune response, they're insufficient the way that we're, we're trying to determine what is, what is a trigger. I think for, for the patient population that you're particularly interested in protecting, allergy may be the secondary effect to something that's actually happening upstream to those individuals.

[00:27:25] And if we don't understand that first thing, studying the second thing is gonna be insufficient, and I fear that's one of the cases of what's happening. 

Aaron Goodman: I'm glad you made the distinction between allergy and trigger because there's different mechanisms and we know MC- we know MCS isn't classified as an allergy, but it is a trigger.

Laura Vandenberg: [00:27:43] Yeah, and, and some of the downstream things may look the same. Um, although I'm not sure I know people who have allergies and get migraines, as an example. What motivates you to continue doing this work? And is your level of concern, does it [00:28:00] grow over time? I'm thinking of the number of chemicals that are produced every year.

[00:28:04] I hear it's in the order of tens of thousands, and we know just by being in the world that there's a lot more fragrance and chemicals floating around. 

Aaron Goodman: What role does that play in your motivation? 

Across the globe, there's something like 300,000 chemicals that are thought to be allowed in consumer products.

Laura Vandenberg: [00:28:22] That's a number that is mind-blowing to me, and it really creates a bar for safety we could never meet, not in, in I don't know how many generations of lifetimes would it take to study that many chemicals well. So I mean, the problem is immense, and even if we think just about the chemicals that we know are in food, there's probably 10,000 chemicals in, used and allowed in food.

[00:28:44] That is a tremendous number of chemicals. That bothers me on a fundamental level. And another thing that bothers me on a human level is the idea that we are creating chemicals that will not break down in the environment, that will be here [00:29:00] long after humans walk the planet, and I think it suggests a lack of humility.

[00:29:04] It's, you know, a lot of hubris to create something that the world, that the, the ecosystems around us can't protect itself from and can't break down. I am motivated though in believing in the

[00:29:23] intelligence and creativity of a species that can do amazing things, that we can identify ways to protect people, the most vulnerable among us. And I continue to do this work. I've been doing this now more than 20 years. I continue to do the work because I am gosh darn stubborn, which everyone who knows me will tell you is the case, because I know we have not done enough.

[00:29:53] We know enough to know that we should have done something a long time ago, and they are right. But we are humans. It's [00:30:00] sort of the same flaw I see in saying to the next generation, "Oh, look, we messed things up really badly. It'll be your job to fix it." No, I'm still here. It is still my job to help fix this.

[00:30:11] I think there's a lot I can do, I can still do. Sometimes we let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need to constantly be working towards better. We're never gonna get to perfect. We need to be working towards better. And I, I love this conversation we've had today 'cause it really, it helps me remember why I want to do this because, because we're talking about people's lives, and that matters.

Aaron Goodman: [00:30:33] You've been listening to the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast. I'm the host and podcast creator Aaron Goodman. The Chemical Sensitivity Podcast is by and for the MCS community. The podcast is generously supported by the Marilyn Brockman Hoffman Foundation and listeners like you. If you wish to support the podcast, please visit listen.chemicalsensitivitypodcast.org.

[00:30:59] Your [00:31:00] support will help us continue making the podcast available and creating greater awareness about MCS. And to learn more about the Chemical Sensitivity Podcast, you can follow the podcast on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, and TikTok, and you can reach me at aaron@chemicalsensitivitypodcast.org.

[00:31:17] Thanks for listening. The Chemical Sensitivity Podcast and its associated website are the work of Aaron Goodman, made possible with funds from the Marilyn Brockman Hoffman Foundation, supporting efforts to educate and inform physicians, scientists, and the public about multiple chemical sensitivity. The content, opinions, findings, statements, and recommendations expressed in this Chemical Sensitivity Podcast and associated website do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of its sponsors