MORBUS BRODEURI

What other possibilities are there to explain the reported headaches, queasiness and even miscarriages? I would not be surprised if the following two were more important than ultrasound or anything else.

First, there has been no large scale verification of these reports, with good control experiments (employees in the same cir-cumstances, except that they are not near VDTs) and statistically significant correlations. This is difficult for small probabilities. I have recently run a computer simulation of child leukemia (with an average rate of 351 cases per 100,000 children). In a series of 1 million children I got a 35% deviation from the expected value, for groups of 100,000 simulated children I often got 2.5 times the expected value, and for 100 children three thousand times the ex-pected value. With VDTs, we do not even know what the rates are, but clearly they cannot be large enough to make evaluation easy. Miscarriages can easily cluster somewhere for random reasons; maybe near a historic fountain where they used to water horses, and maybe in a company using many VDTs. The latter is, of course, far more probable.

Second, if people have heard about some health syndrome and think they ought to get pains in their left foot, they will; I have pre-viously suggested calling this affliction morbus Brodeuri.

In the fall of 1988 the superintendent for schools in a semirural county of Georgia reported an elementary school where many children developed such symptoms as headaches, pallor, dark circles under their eyes, nausea, and vomiting. The parents at-tributed this to a gas leak and experts from the Georgia Dept. of Health and from the Atlanta Center for Disease Control were called in. They found no gas leak or any other environmental causes and on a strictly biological level they would have attributed it to a random duster of common childhood illnesses, but inves-tigation showed neither contagiousness nor spatial clustering; in-stead, it established a correlation with intense media coverage. This type of morbus Brodeuri is known in medicine as "mass sociogenic illness." But in this case, the physicians hesitated to apply it, since the complaints did not come from the affected children, but from their parents, and they proposed to describe the incident as a case of "mass sociogenic illness by proxy."

No, I did not get this out of the National Enquirer, let alone the New York Times. The details are given in the internationally respected medical journal "The Lancet" (R.M. Philen, E.A. Kil-bourne, T.W. McKinley, R.G. Parrish, "Mass sociogenic illness by proxy," The Lancet, 9 Dec. 1989, pp. 1372-6).