#Millions of Americans believe they are allergic to modern life

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So-called “sensitives” feel sick when around certain chemicals, experiencing symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, muscle aches and migraines.
Shutterstock / Koldunov Alexey

Brian Welsh was a respiratory therapist living in Muskegon, Michigan, when, in the space of a few years, his life began to fall apart. It started when he developed an allergic reaction to certain foods. Soon it seemed like everything around him caused him pain and nausea: perfumes, paint, cellphone radiation. By 2014, his wife had divorced him, his friends shunned him, his job let him go.

Welsh is one of 50 million Americans living with a mysterious sickness called environmental illness (EI), chronicled in Oliver Broudy’s new book “The Sensitives: The Rise of Environmental Illness and the Search for America’s Last Pure Place” (Simon & Schuster), out July 14.

According to Broudy, Welsh and other “sensitives” have powerful, debilitating symptoms — including fatigue, brain fog, muscle aches and migraines — resulting from chemical exposure. The most mundane household items could trigger these flare-ups, from deodorant to garbage bags to Wi-Fi routers to canned foods.

As a result, “sensitives” often go to extreme lengths to avoid such noxious chemicals. They’ll hang pieces of mail on a clothesline to “off-gas” the contaminants before opening them, yank out their own teeth to avoid the dentist, wallpaper their house with tinfoil to keep dampness at bay and thus prevent mold, and go “nine years without clean sheets” rather than use laundry detergent, according to Broudy. One woman, afraid of the chemicals used to sanitize waiting rooms, “convinced her gynecologist to conduct his examination in the backseat of her car.” Others went to live in the woods or mountains; or in Snowflake, Arizona, where an EI community has sprung up due to its clean air.

Broudy told The Post that when he began researching his book in 2016, “sensitives” were largely seen as freaks. It didn’t help that neither the American Medical Association nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classified it as an actual illness. (They still don’t recognize it and dismiss it as largely psychological.)

Yet Broudy saw something sane in their approach to the world. And not just because rates of synthetic chemicals were skyrocketing (we’re exposed to about 85,000 different ones a day) along with cancer rates, autism, obesity and genital birth defects.

“Most of us are short on imagination — we can’t imagine an illness that we can’t understand,” he said. So we dismiss people like “sensitives” because it’s easier than dealing with that kind of medical and environmental uncertainty.

Now, of course, the idea of airing out your mail before opening it or avoiding doctors offices seems completely normal — even wise. The coronavirus pandemic has made many of us obsessive compulsive — leaving packages unopened on our porch for days, wearing masks out in public, washing our hands constantly. It’s much easier to understand the sensitives when we live in fear of a virus that could be carried by anything or anyone and might make us sick or even die.

“What COVID has done is given us a sharp taste of what uncertainty feels like,” said Broudy. Those worried about COVID now have to engage in “a whole series of guesswork about what is safe and what isn’t, and about what the government is not going to be able to tell you about this disease and how it works . . . The CDC guidelines are always changing. What we’re seeing is the inability of institutions to imagine something unprecedented and their inability to handle it.”

“That’s the lesson of EI,” he added. “[Sensitives] have been dealing with this for years. They are well-prepared for it.”

Even so, some — like Welsh — can’t hack the daily uncertainties of their condition. After years of trying all sorts of alternative treatments, including acupuncture, chiropractors and even a fecal transplant, Welsh finally fled society as much as he could, retreating to the wilderness of Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, where he lives alone in a spacious tent with cooking supplies and chairs. Though he is active online and even recently ventured two hours away to get his haircut, he says he feels most at peace among the pine trees, with the Grand Canyon on the horizon.

“I’m sick of running,” he tells Broudy in the book. “I can’t just run from everything in my entire life.”