For millions of people, depression is a living hell. Traditionally associated with middle or old age, it also afflicts young people as well. Depression can ruin childhood, blight marriage, destroy careers, and wreck plans for a happy retirement. Indirectly, depression can kill, since it is responsible for many of the suicides in our country. Depression is marked by lethargy, disorientation, melancholy, and/or unresponsiveness. The depressed person is usually rational, but can lapse into paranoid or deluded thinking.

Few medical problems are as difficult to treat as depression. A number of procedures have been developed, such as electroshock therapy, psychotherapy, and drug therapy. There is no need here to dissect the successes and failures of these established methods. Each of them has had its vogue, and new drug therapies (such as lithium chloride for manic-depressive disease) come along periodically. What many of them have in common, however, is a symptomatic approach. They attempt to relieve the results of the disease, rather than discovering and eliminating the underlying environmental factors which are responsible.

The treatment of depression by the methods of clinical ecology has been successful, on the other hand, because it concentrates on discovering causative factors. As with other manifestations of allergy, the responsible exposures lie in the physical and chemical environment of the patient. This would seem to be the most obvious place to look for the source of an illness, yet most doctors never consider the actual, material surroundings at all. It is easier and more lucrative to treat symptoms.

Depression can be either a minus-three or a minus-four symptom, depending on the degree of severity. It is the end of the line for many individuals who are maladapted to their environment. Depression rarely strikes out of the blue. It is preceded, in most cases, by a prolonged period of illness, including both stimulatory reactions and lesser withdrawal reactions.

In fact, the alternation of extreme stimulatory symptoms (mania) and extreme withdrawal symptoms (depression) is well recognized in the medical literature as “manic-depressive disease.” In this illness, the patient’s mood changes from “highs” to “lows” quite rapidly. There is an ever-increasing tendency, however, for the “down” periods to crowd out the “up” periods. Depression becomes more and more the rule, while the overexcited manic phase becomes less frequent and less prolonged. While this disease is recognized in its most extreme form, doctors generally fail to see the alternation of stimulatory and withdrawal symptoms in less advanced cases.

Both depression and manic-depressive disease can be the result of environmental factors such as commonly eaten foods and chemicals. The two illnesses can occur alone but more commonly are found in conjunction with a long list of other symptoms in susceptible persons.

It has long been suspected that some persons are depressed because of reactions to nonpersonal environmental exposures. My first demonstration of this was a motion picture filmed in 19501 and reported preliminarily.2 Hydrocarbon exposures were demonstrated as causes of depression in 1956.3 Confirmation and extension of these observations of the effects of given foods in highly susceptible persons led to a scientific exhibit at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1956 and the founding of the Section on Allergy of the Nervous System of the American College of Allergists in 1957. This was called ecologic mental illness in 1959.4 Numerous subsequent reports are listed in a bibliography, which will be provided upon request, as mentioned earlier.

Others, especially Donan and associates,5,6 Speer,7 Mackamess,8,10 Mandell and Scanlon,9 and Philpott and Kalita,11 have published in this area.

It so happened that these observations of the causative demonstrable roles of foods and environmental chemicals in depression and related mental illnesses were first noted in 1950, the same year that psychotropic drugs became available to physicians. Since these mass-applicable approaches were promoted vigorously by their manufacturers, the highly individualized approaches of clinical ecology did not receive serious trials for several years until the hazards associated with psychotrophic drugs became more apparent.

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Sleep apnea is the condition in which people frequently stop breathing at night for a disturbingly long time. Each episode ends in a burst of snoring. Because this occurs many times a night, it can interfere significantly with the brain’s oxygen supply and result in morning headaches, drowsiness, and the need for many naps during the day. Ultimately, high blood pressure, heart failure, and intellectual deterioration may supervene.

This condition is due to laxity and flabbiness of tissues at the back of the throat. When the person is sleeping, this allows the tongue to fall back into the throat and cause choking. A surefire way of curing sleep apnea is to operate and create a false opening into the windpipe (tracheotomy) below the site of blockage. This, however, is disfiguring and renders the patient more than usually prone to serious chest infection.

In a safer operation, loose, redundant tissue at the back of the throat, including the tonsils and part of the soft palate, are removed, making the upper airway larger and not so prone to become blocked during sleep. A recent article in the Archives of Internal Medicine (141:990) supports this method of treating sleep apnea, citing a marked reduction in the number of episodes of sleep apnea that have been reported in adults whose enlarged tonsils were removed.

However, this is a painful operation and every effort should first be made to help the sleep apnea victim by non-operative means. One easy way of doing so is described in the Southern Medical Journal (79:1061). It points out that sleep apnea is like ordinary snoring in that it is unlikely to occur unless the victim sleeps on his back. The trick, then, is to keep the sleeper on his side and stop him from rolling onto his back. This can often be done by sewing a tennis ball onto the back of the victim’s pajama jacket.

One other point to make on the subject of sleep apnea is that sedatives and alcohol tend to aggravate the problem. Therefore avoidance of sedatives and alcohol is important if you are treating this problem.

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Symptoms: Swollen lymph nodes, rash on face, spreading to body, low-grade fever, slight loss of appetite, slight redness of throat and whites of eyes

Home care: Give aspirin or paracetamol to relieve fever. Keep your child isolated from pregnant women.

Precautions

-    Rubella, or German measles, contracted during the first three months of pregnancy presents a 50-50 chance of damage to the unborn baby. Before trying to become pregnant, a woman should be tested to find out if she is immune to rubella. If she is not immune, she should be vaccinated at least three months before trying to become pregnant.

-    A pregnant woman who has been exposed to rubella should consult an obstetrician immediately.

-    Remember that a pregnant woman, who is immune to rubella, because she had the disease earlier or has been immunized against it, will not pass rubella to her unborn child by being exposed to the disease.

-    All children should be immunized against rubella.

Rubella, or German measles, is one of the mildest contagious diseases of childhood. However, it can damage the unborn baby of a pregnant woman who contracts the disease. Women who contract rubella during the first three months of pregnancy have a 50-50 chance of delivering an infant who has cataracts, a cleft palate, heart problems, or who is permanently deaf or mentally retarded.

Rubella is caused by a specific virus and can be transmitted by direct contact with an infected person or by contact with articles contaminated by urine, stool, or secretions from the nose or throat of the infected person. The incubation period – the time it takes for symptoms to develop once a person has been exposed to rubella – is 14 to 21 days. One attack provides lifelong immunity.

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