THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF ALLERGIES: INDOOR AIR POLLUTION
It may have occurred to the reader that air pollution plays a role in the problem of chemical susceptibility. This is true, but not in the way most people suspect. For while it is true that outdoor, or ambient, air pollution is a significant source of exposure, a far greater threat is posed by the presence of indoor, or domiciliary, air pollution.
Indoor air pollution? The term itself is unfamiliar and strange to most people, who tend to think of air pollution solely in terms of smog. Yet the home itself generates combustion products or is directly exposed to them, and many household products give off noxious fumes.
Indoor air pollution is particularly dangerous because exposure to it is so constant. Outdoor air pollution comes and goes; indoor pollution is ever-present, and thus its effects generally remain well hidden. In this it obviously resembles food allergy: as has been explained, allergy to uncommonly eaten foods is readily detected; the real danger comes from allergy to the ordinary foods which we take for granted.
My involvement with the problem of indoor air pollution dates from my earliest chemical-susceptibility cases. In the case of Nora Barnes, for instance, pine paneling and other pine products were implicated as a source of chronic illness. In Ellen Sanders’ case, natural gas and pesticide spray resulted in asthma, arthritis, and a host of other complaints. Removal of these pollutants has resulted in her enjoying reasonably good health over a twenty-five-year period.
I first discussed the topic of indoor air pollution in a series of articles published in 1961 and then in my book, Human Ecology and Susceptibility to the Chemical Environment (1962). Shortly afterward, the topic became a matter of public debate. In 1962, the government called a conference on air pollution, the first of its kind, in Washington, D.C. As often happens with such conferences, the program and speakers’ list were announced first, and then the public was invited to attend. Out of a three-day program, only one-and-a-half hours were allocated for open discussion. During the discussion, I rose to say how astounded I was that no reference had been made, in three days of speeches, to indoor air pollution as a separate topic. In my clinical experience, I added, indoor air pollution was eight to ten times more important as a source of chronic illness in susceptible people than ambient air pollution. Outdoor air pollution, I told the gathering, tended to be intermittent and variable, while indoor air pollution was constant. This very constancy made it a source of chronic disease. And of the various materials found in the home, the gas kitchen range, I said, was easily the worst offender. This left some of the experts without words, but on the far side of the room a gentleman rose and confirmed what I had said, adding some telling details of his own. He introduced himself as Francis Silver. He was an engineer from West Virginia, and later became a member of the Society for Clinical Ecology. We had never met before, but he and I had come to almost identical conclusions about the danger of indoor air pollution, as the result of very different experience—he as an engineer of buildings and I as a clinician studying the effects of such buildings on individual health.
In the following years, there were two conferences devoted solely to the topic of indoor air pollution. In general, these were productive, and I spoke at both.
Since the early 1950s, the extent of the problem of indoor air pollution has continued to grow larger. At the present time, it represents a major source of chronic illness among susceptible individuals in the United States. This can be best understood by considering the kinds of exposures which most frequently result in such chronic health problems.
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