An Outbreak of Chronic Mass Psychogenic Illness at Workplace: A Case of Mental Control Over Physical State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The paper describes a Health Hazard Evaluation (HHE) of a Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI) outbreak that occurred at an office complex late in the fourth quarter of 1996 and continued well into 1997. In essence, a group of employees experienced a variety of health problems that they were totally convinced were directly related to exposure to residual organophosphate pesticide contamination. The paper describes the intriguing series of events that took place from the time of the pesticide application and the timeline analysis. It explains what the author believes were the initial factors that initiated the MPI outbreak: those that caused the chronicity of the outbreak and also its maintenance over a prolonged period of time. It illustrates the adverse effects on the outcome, by means of social pressures and economic loss. A combined team of an Occupational Medicine Specialist physician and 2 Industrial Hygienists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) conducted the HHE in February 1997, revisiting the site in April of the same year. The paper describes the author's definition of "the rainbow syndromes"(those diseases that present with subjective signs and symptoms without objective clinical findings, including laboratory findings and other building-related syndromes. Results. The results of the medical investigations undertaken were derived from a review of medical records from local hospitals and other health facilities visited by the employees and also medical evaluations conducted by the NIOSH Team. The results of the industrial hygiene investigations undertaken at the facilities were derived from surface sampling, air sampling and bulk sampling. Conclusion. The medical investigator concluded that there was no evidence to substantiate chronic organophosphate poisoning. The events did in fact indicate an outbreak of MPI and resulting anxiety that continued for a long period of time due to factors such as: workplace/socio-economic stresses; family stresses; co-morbidities; and secondary gain. The paper asserts the view that judicious and timely risk assessment and management of exposure can minimize financial loss, human anguish and distress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".