“Happy New Year” is a message brought to you by dozens of “start your diet” ads in every modern form of media. TV, radio, print and social media advertisers will endlessly pitch ways to slim down and get healthy by buying their programs.
We are keenly aware of the health risks of a bad diet. On the other hand, we are often less aware that we have people with debilitating and often undiagnosed illnesses such as CIRS and MCS due to environmental illness. We are exposed to air borne contaminants that cause cancer, respiratory disease, asthma and countless other afflictions.
We look to the New Year for a fresh start and better times. Why not include our indoor air quality in that time of renewal?
Functional Medicine has evolved to help diagnose environmental illness, but we need to avoid those exposures in our homes. “Avoidance” is now considered an important medical treatment. The problem is that we need to know what to avoid in this world of more and more pollutants in everyday household items.
Indoor air health risks include dust, mold, bacteria, volatile compounds from fragrances and cleaners, formaldehyde, pet dander, dust mites, radon, carbon monoxide and a host of other exposures. Our energy saving technologies have reduced the fresh air in our homes while at the same time manufacturers have added toxins to thousands of consumer and construction products.
We often don’t realize that common house dust is home to mold, dust mites, bacteria, pollen and allergens. Accumulated dust just sneaks up on you day by day, year by year. It hides in carpet, cabinets, books and your furniture. When a person is ill, it’s more difficult to do regular cleaning which makes a bad dust and particle problem worse.
The process of professionally cleaning a home is referred to as “deep cleaning” and is an important tool in mold remediation and reducing many environmental toxics including lead. It should be done using containment, specialized exhaust equipment, air filtration and personal protection for the people performing that work.
Many mold remediation firms shortcut proper treatment and simply spray or fog using toxic chemicals without first cleaning mold and allergens from surfaces. Failing to clean and remove the existing contamination is a primary cause of continued environmental illness after failed remediations.
Secrets to Reducing Dust, Mold and Allergens
VOC’s and Other Indoor Air Toxins You Actually Buy and Bring Home
We live in a world of chemicals. Some are products to clean, some to make things smell, some to make things work better and others to make our homes look pretty. Many of these thousands of chemicals can make some of us very ill.
Synthetic fragrances are in almost every cleaning or laundry product, air fresheners or personal care product. They are often added to packaging to entice consumers to select a product. The organic chemicals are not tested for their effect on people or listed on the packages. Select any product that has an odor and look up the MSDS for that product. In almost all instances internet search will reveal a list of chemicals you will not be able to pronounce or know how they will affect your health.
Furniture, cabinets, flooring and plastic materials usually have chemicals that off-gas in the home. Everything from plastic children’s toys to artificial Christmas trees can be a source of lead dust. Many cosmetics and personal care products have been found to have asbestos and almost all have VOCs.
Secrets to Reducing VOC Contamination
Walk through your home and check for water leaks and mold. These can sneak up on any homeowner. A tiny leak can cause a big mold problem over time. The earlier leaks are found, the less damage they cause and the easier they are to correct.
The most susceptible areas for mold in the home include finished basements, crawl spaces, areas with dirt floors, interior french drains, attics, areas with any leaks and areas that are not heated in cold weather. Homes with foam insulation systems and energy star construction are also extremely likely to harbor hidden mold. Professional mold assessments are a good idea if you have any of these conditions and any family members with health issues.
Improve Your Home's Environment in the New Year
These suggestions will make you feel better in your home. It is your castle and should be the very best it can be. Take a couple of weekends and pick from the list of chores that can make your home healthier.
Two of the most significant impact items on environmental health today are new products and tighter building envelopes.
For a great example of what can happen in every day indoor air, review the MSDS for your favorite air freshener. It will be a page long list of organic chemicals that are plugged into an outlet and heated. The heat breaks down those chemicals into more chemicals.
We also deal with leftover chemicals from prior occupants of a building. These can range from the accidental spill to left over contamination from drug activity in a home. The source of indoor pollution can be spills, burying of toxic materials or pesticide on farmland that happened decades before the building was constructed.
There are also a host of toxins produced from poorly vented or unvented furnaces, hot water tanks or other fossil fueled appliances.
Another major potential impact on indoor health is EMF (electromagnetic radiation). Cell phones, electronic devices and microwave devices in everything from cooking to communication systems may affect our heath.
The Bottom Line in Environmental Assessments
The solution to Sick Building Syndrome is a process. It begins with a history of the building, its occupants and the very ground the building sets on. The former site of an old dump or factory could be a plan of multi-million-dollar homes today.
The next step is evaluating the construction materials and methods of the building with consideration of materials that may have been brought into the building envelope.
In the case of possible communicable biological contagions in the building, those need identified and the exposure risks and methods of transmission evaluated and included in the testing and remediation plan.
All these steps are critical to developing a plan to correct the contamination if possible. In some cases, the best advice for an individual would be to avoid a building, but a medical practitioner needs the information provided n the assessment to make that recommendation.
The final steps in the process are to remediate when possible and test the building when work is complete to assure success of the process.
In summary, investigate, discover, verify by testing, remediate and confirm success of remediation or disinfection work to provide a healthy environment for building occupants.
The bad news is that many of the building products and contents are made of oil processed in one way or another. Manufacturing complex chemicals is a complicated process. An improper mix, wrong temperature, impurities in a reagent, too long in a vat and the reactions can result is toxin production. In other cases, the produced materials and chemicals are not stable or break down chemically over time. Substitute materials can be used as solvents or as the products themselves and create indoor air toxins.
There are countless cleaners and pesticides that people and businesses will store that can spill or off-gas. A change of janitorial service in an adjacent office can introduce toxic chemical cleaners that are used to reduce labor costs that result in toxic fumes. In this scenario, unknowingly the improper mix of incompatible chemicals can create a toxic environment.
Those considerations are considered, and a testing plan developed and implemented to identify and verify the type, location and quantity of a contaminant. The factors that may allow the recurrence of a contamination need identified and avoiding those factors incorporated in any remediation.
The driveway slopes down-hill from the street to the garage door.
Mold is leaking under the garage door and across the floor to the drywall covered wall between the house and the garage.
The homeowners paid a contractor to cut out the driveway and install a drain and grid along the door to catch the driveway water. The drain stops short of the edge of the garage door opening, and the end is the low spot. The water leaks under the door in the area where the drain is not installed
Another contractor was paid to install a sump pump drain basin into the garage floor. They cut a hole in the lid of the sump to collect water leaking under the door and across the garage floor.
That water is not going into the hole in the drain. The garage floor slopes from the corner of the garage with the sump toward the drywall covered wall.
THE DRYWALL IS GETTING WET AND THERE IS MOLD
What we have here are two contractors that are not considering that the flow of water is from high area to low area. The use of common sense and a level would have given the customer, (the homeowner) value for the money spent in that they would not be having mold issues that someone else will need paid to correct.
Understanding the downward flow of water should be a consideration of a contractor before the flow of money from homeowner to contractor occurs.
Avoiding Environmental Hazards, Our Health and “Figuring it Out”Click Here to Download a PDF Copy of this Article about Environmental Hazards.pdf
“Avoidance” is the overlooked treatment for health problems. By that, we simply mean getting away from things that negatively affect our health. Avoidance is actually a listed treatment in many physician treatment guidelines. However, the task of figuring out what to avoid “is complicated.”
We have gotten aware enough to understand the importance of “avoidance” when it comes to colds and flu. We have seen the world explode with recognition about avoiding diseases such as Ebola. We don’t often think about things like asthma triggers, chemical problems and carcinogens.
Our health care providers understand the role of our environment in our health, but can’t follow us around as we go through our daily lives. The fact is that becoming a part of each patient’s daily activities is not practical.
Why We Often Can’t Figure it out for Ourselves
Reactions to health and environmental problems occur in time delay. If we are exposed to carbon monoxide, mold, pet allergens or any other trigger, we do not usually react right away. It may be 6 hours, or it may be a day or even weeks before we react. Our brains are wired to react immediately to problems. We touch the hot stove we are immediately burned. We cut our fingers, it hurts. Reacting to time delay environmental effects is difficult.
Everyone can react differently. The best example that I have is that some children can eat a single peanut and become deadly ill. Most children could live on peanut butter and jelly. This can be confusing to the person that is not getting ill from an exposure.
Individual health histories make each of us different in our reactions. There are medications and illnesses that make us more sensitive to certain exposures. As an example, there is one common mold that can affect organ transplant patients on immune-suppressant drugs, and be of little consequence to most other persons.
Time of exposure can differ. One family member that is in an affected part of the home longer than the rest of the family can have more serious reactions. We use the words “time loading” to describe this factor. As an example, many municipal water systems actually have arsenic in their water. Our bodies can handle those small exposures. However, if I give you multiple exposures from several sources, you can become very ill. More exposure over more time can make one person ill, and not affect other family members.
We are affected by the sum total of our exposures. Homes, cars, schools, workplaces, grocery stores, places of worship are a part of most of our lives and one of those exposures can increase sensitivity to other exposures. As an example, medical facilities are a common source of exposure to environmental hazards.
We just do not know what substances are hazards. Who would think that a new foam mattress or a new furnace installation could cause us health problems? Well, these and many other common materials can be a source of problems. The wasp nest blocking the gas dryer vent could make us sick. The new interior french drain is often a source of mold and can allow gases previously trapped under the home to vent into the air we breathe.
We often don’t do anything about what could be affecting our health. Many times people will not have a home checked or hazardous items repaired for their own heath concerns. It is common for the action to come from concern for a child, spouse or a pet that has become ill.
Sometimes our solutions to environmental concerns make us sicker. Examples would be some of the fragrance “plug ins.” They can have formaldehyde as a vehicle to help the odor go into the air and often contain a class of chemicals called esters that can be irritants. One anti odor product that was being inhaled by a client contained Ethyl Alcohol, which can damage the nervous system when inhaled. Another example is the ozone generating air cleaners. These can damage lung tissue.