Today we’re going to talk about indoor air quality.
Poor indoor air quality is a very real threat to our health these days. In Canada, we spend over 90% of our time indoors, and you’d think we might be more particular about the quality of the air we breathe. But alas, we’ll put more effort into making sure the toppings on our pizza are correct than ensuring our supply of the resource we consume the most is clean. Ok, that was a bit wordy but you get my drift.
The threats come from 2 main sources;
1) Chemicals
2) Bioaerosols
First, lets talk about chemicals. There are many chemicals that are universally found these days in homes. Probably the most common is formaldehyde, otherwise known as embalming fluid. It’s a preservative used in bascially anything manufactured to – you guessed it – preserve it. Insects and rodents will not knaw at anything covered in formaldehyde…cuz they know it’s poison. Did I mention it’s a potent carcinogen?
There are many others, including benzene (manufacturing residue), ammonia (cleaning supplies), fluorine residues (teflon) and many others. Most are known carcinogens, and the ones that aren’t usually just don’t have enough research to prove it.
Next comes the biologicals. I could go into much detail here, but for a really excellent and informative 17 page read, go to this indoor air quality report by the American Society for Microbiology. It’s actually 20 pages, but 3 of those pages are the cover, etc…
