In 9 years of chronic illness, no doctor or researcher ever checked my living environment.

My name is Scott Daniska. In 2017, a week before I was set to leave my job in an oligosynthesis production lab to start a PhD in Biology, an exposure to an extremely toxic chemical used as rocket fuel called hydrazine robbed me of my life, and I have suffered with severe chronic illness ever since.

For four years I looked for the answer in the places everyone told me to look. I ran hundreds of tests. I read thousands of papers. I worked through every theory the patient community had on offer — B12 deficiency, craniocervical instability, microclots, mitochondrial disease, mast cell activation, genetics. Each one was either absent in my case or failed to respond to treatment. I filled two binders with results that came back normal.

What I had missed was sitting in the room with me. In 2021 I moved into an apartment that made me measurably worse, and for the first time the pattern was clean enough to see: I felt one way inside and another way outside. A mold test explained part of it. A mask fixed that part and did nothing for the rest, which turned out to be the varnish on the bedroom floor. When I moved again, a new building produced a new and entirely different set of symptoms.

That was the observation that reorganized everything. The symptom profile I had spent four years trying to explain as one disease was several exposures stacked on top of each other — some chronic, some acute, some transient. I had not been able to see it because there was never a single trigger to isolate.

My Mission

For the last 9 years I have struggled and suffered more than I ever thought possible for a human being. I had to accept losing more and more of my life each day: my apartment, my life savings, my career, my friends… even small things I took for granted, like playing video games, going on walks, or just having somewhere to sleep at night. Year after year, I used to lie in bed at night unable to fall asleep, trying to figure out what was causing my illness. Now I fall straight to sleep every night, because at least I know why I'm sick. Even if I don't have the strength and fortitude to change my own situation, I wanted to compile everything I've learned so that the millions of other people who have just become sick, or have been sick for decades without any answers, can finally have some peace of mind and not be put through the rigors of our health care system, which often leaves people much worse off than when they started.

I no longer have any affiliations, I'm not interested in boasting about my reputation, and I'm not selling any "magic protocols" or making money in any way. I want all of this information to be free to access, because no one should take advantage of the torturous and dire circumstances of people living with a chronic illness. It's time their health and well-being became a priority, because a person's health is everything. As a society and as fellow human beings, we all need to sacrifice a little of the time we spend watching sports and playing video games, and a little of the money we spend on jewelry and luxury cars, and share responsibility for the health and well-being of everyone, because if the situations were reversed, you would want the same thing. No one with a chronic illness asked for this. No one planned for this. But this is not an unknowable, untreatable entity. By listening to and learning from the experiences of those who have suffered, we can find the tools we need to make a difference.

I have spent many years trying to get this information in front of the right people: people who could test it, fund it, advocate for it, and provide the right support and resources. I have contacted congressional offices, reporters, podcasts, medical conferences, ME/CFS advocacy organizations and individual researchers. Rarely do they reply, and when they do, the responsibility is deferred to someone else, or there is no interest in devoting the time to even listen. By sharing this information in the format I think is the most complete and easiest to absorb, I hope it will reach enough people that it can no longer be overlooked, and will finally be acted upon. I wholly believe that the information on this website is what so many millions of people, many of whom have died or withered away in bed for years, have prayed for day and night. I am sorry all of you have had to suffer so much for so long, but I hope I've done you justice, and that this is the beginning of the end of your suffering.

What I think is happening

For years I searched for answers in the places I was told to look: genetics, immune dysfunction, infection, mitochondria. More than a hundred doctors later, none of them had ever asked about the air I was breathing or the building I was living in. The answers I eventually found were environmental, and I found them on my own. Environmental causes are routinely overlooked in this field. Reports like mine tend to be dismissed as coincidence or written off as allergy or mast cell problems, and the research that would test them is rarely funded or done.

The model has three phases (H1). In the first, something damages the epithelial barrier — a chemical exposure, a virus such as SARS-CoV-2, or an underlying connective tissue disorder. The barrier is what normally keeps airborne contaminants out of the body. Once it is compromised, ordinary indoor air becomes a source of continuous injury, and the damage outpaces repair.

In the second phase, insoluble nanoparticles enter through that opened barrier. I focus on titanium dioxide, because it is hard, abrasive, cleared from the body extremely slowly, and far more common than people realize — matte white paint is high in it, which means it is on the walls of most modern buildings. I do not think these particles are poisoning anyone. I think they are doing mechanical damage: tearing connective tissue and making blood vessels leaky.

In the third phase, fibrous material — microplastics, wood pulp fibers and similar debris — clogs the interstitial spaces and lymphatics the body relies on to clear waste and deliver oxygen, the same way a clump of hair clogs a sink drain.

If that is right, then a great deal of what looks like dysfunction in ME/CFS is better described as damage. That distinction matters. A dysfunctional system can be corrected with the right drug. A damaged one has to be protected long enough to repair, and cannot be while the exposure continues.

If you are a farmer and your plants are sick and dying, you do not conclude that they have a genetic, mitochondrial, psychosomatic disorder. You ask whether they are getting enough food, water and light. Why is it that with plants we accept that everything is environmental, and with people it never is?

Watch instead

A 33-minute video overview of the environmental model of ME/CFS and Long COVID.

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