Factory will poison allergy sufferers

Re: "Ajinomoto MSG plant to start operating in May".

At first, I thought this was a joke headline. MSG is mildly poisonous to over half of all foreigners. If you don't believe me, ask foreigners whether they would choose to have MSG in their food. Well over half will say an emphatic no. Thai restaurants and snack-makers are slightly poisoning tens of thousands of people every week, yet Thailand is enabling a factory to produce tonnes of the stuff. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Are you, or is someone you know, allergic to cat dander? Suppose a foreign company set up a factory in Thailand to produce tonnes of cat dander, and then blew the stuff into the air, for all to breathe. Granted, MSG is not an allergen, but it causes one or more of the following in a large percentage of foreigners: irritability, headaches, jangled brain cells, violent dreams, severe thirst and rapid pulse. It can also cause those symptoms in Thai people, but they might attribute ill feelings to other causes. Plus, Thais know to not complain about annoyances.

Ken Albertsen

Chiang Rai