Indoor toxins may be worse for you than outdoor smog
Homes may be hazardous to your health.
Frying chicken at the stove, spraying ants with insecticide, taking a hot shower, plugging in a room freshener, or sudsing the rug with detergent -- all these release chemicals that swirl around rooms like invisible dust devils.
Household products, furnishings and cosmetics release vapors and particles that people can inhale or absorb through the skin. Then there are the pollutants that are tracked into the house from outside or allowed to waft through open windows that add to the hazard. Plunking down on a sofa, vacuuming the rug or making the bed stirs up the chemical-laden dust.
Frying chicken at the stove, spraying ants with insecticide, taking a hot shower, plugging in a room freshener, or sudsing the rug with detergent -- all these release chemicals that swirl around rooms like invisible dust devils.
Household products, furnishings and cosmetics release vapors and particles that people can inhale or absorb through the skin. Then there are the pollutants that are tracked into the house from outside or allowed to waft through open windows that add to the hazard. Plunking down on a sofa, vacuuming the rug or making the bed stirs up the chemical-laden dust.
All of this sounds like a scary scenario out of a horror movie, or a paranoid's nightmare of modern industrialized society.
But the nation's best researchers on indoor air pollution are cautioning consumers that levels in houses are many times higher than those from the outdoors, even when compared to city air where trucks and factories belch pollution. And, they add, they can rise to concentrations that would trigger inspections in the workplace.
"We spend so much time indoors, yet spend so little time thinking about the quality of our indoor air," said Richard Corsi, associate professor in the Texas Institute for the Indoor Environment at the University of Texas in Austin.
"We know a lot more about the effects of occupational exposure to high concentrations of chemicals than we do about the effects of chemicals in our homes," said Corsi, author of dozens of studies on airborne contaminants.
People spend 65 percent of their time in their houses, and 25 percent in some other indoor environment. Transit takes from 5 to 7 percent of the time, and usually less than 5 percent is spent outdoors, studies show.
Yet, scientists are stymied in predicting health effects. They lack studies on the amount of exposure that people actually get and what the exposure may do to people's health.
This month and next, six health and environmental groups are releasing reports on toxic chemicals in the environment: flame retardants in dust, phthalates in cosmetics, pesticides in the human body and the chemical dangers posed to the growing child.
