![]() People who claim they have it say they can be intolerant to any chemicals or materials in any building. You’ve heard there is a problem and pretty quickly you can feel bad.”Īfter SBS had peaked, Hedge says he started to hear about another disorder: multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). You smell something, you don’t know what it is. “But the reaction,” he points out, “it was a genuine reaction. He found only a couple of mouldy oranges left in the desk of an employee on vacation. Hedge says everyone was worried it was a “sick building” and that their health had been affected. “The problem is, they’re not uniform.”Īn office in Montreal with 2,000 employees was on the verge of evacuation because of a bad odour. “There’s no question that there are a variety of mechanisms by which people might get sick,” Hedge says. Water was seeping under the carpet and growing mould, causing the man to become ill. In another case, a man had a tiny hole in his bed – which Hedge noted was a water bed. Hedge eventually found a cause that explained the odd timing: carbon monoxide from the morning’s arriving cars was rising into the office through elevator shafts. When the air was tested (later in the day), nothing unusual was detected. In one of his cases, people felt ill only in the mornings between 09.30 and 10.00. Hedge has had a long career of tackling building-related health problems and says the “building or people” puzzle isn’t easy to solve. ![]() In other words, no consistent pattern of all of the symptoms.” In the end, he says, they “don’t really know whether it’s the building or it’s the people”. “We didn’t find any evidence of an actual syndrome. ![]() How else to explain that women are more likely to have SBS than men? Or that employees’ wellbeing could be associated with floor plans and office arrangement, office noise or how much control they had over their environment? Hedge’s own work examined SBS questionnaire answers from thousands of workers in various buildings. There must be a psychosocial element, some research claimed. “But what began to happen was almost a kind of mass hysterical reaction.” “The spent a fortune trying to establish that relationship and they couldn’t,” Hedge says. Focus turned from fleecy fabrics to allergens, and for a short time it was believed that indoor carpeting was the culprit. No study ever returned definitive results or caught a single compound red-handed making people sick. Building-related health complaints began to rise shortly after. It has since faded out of use in the US, where I live, but continues to be studied and discussed in Nordic countries like Denmark and Finland.Īlan Hedge at the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University tells me SBS appeared in the 1970s when, to reduce energy use in response to the oil embargo, ventilation standards were lowered. Sick building syndrome was a common term in the 1980s and 1990s. Other researchers have claimed there are psychological forces at play, that SBS is related to anxiety, dissatisfaction at home or work, or other mental conditions. Speculated causes have included dust, microbes, carpets, ventilation and, like in Linda’s story, mould. ![]() A basic definition is that it’s an illness a person gets from a building they live or work in. Linda has sick building syndrome, or SBS, a controversial condition with many definitions and symptoms and even more proposed explanations. “I was so tired I really hoped the next fever would kill me. When she went to the doctor, she was told these multiple chemical sensitivities couldn’t be related to her mould exposure – she had moved, there was no way she could still be sick. She tells me she became highly sensitive to other buildings, minuscule levels of mould, and chemicals or smells. ![]() After leaving, her symptoms persisted and her health continued to deteriorate. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |