Health and Safety 2 1

Inhaling powdered pigeon dung is a little known fact of office life - as are the dead pigeons in ventilators. You probably do not know this, but air conditioning in office buildings is a national disgrace. It is poorly maintained and seldom cleaned - when
it works at all, that is.

This is not just unpleasant. In buildings which have bad air conditioning, 85 per cent of staff suffer extreme tiredness, 80 per cent have regular headaches and dry throats, and 60 per cent complain of more serious maladies, according to a survey by local government union Unison of the London borough of Tower Hamlets.

Tower Hamlets has acute problems, but they are, says Jean Geldart, chair of Unison's local government services group, the 'classic, constantly occurring problems of air-conditioned offices'. The most important is 'ventilation ducts are not cleaned'.

'There is all sorts of gunge in them, including dead pigeons, which affects people's circulation rates.'

Dried pigeon droppings are commonplace; so are spores and fibres from the filters themselves. These can trigger asthma attacks. Low humidity is painful for people who wear contact lenses, as it dries the eyes.

Broken, inadequate and badly maintained systems are the norm. Some consultants in the building industry think it quite possible that as many as 90 per cent of air conditioning systems are faulty.

These inefficiencies have no single cause. Paul Appleby, divisional director of the buildings, health and safety division of the Thorburn Colqhoun consultancy, says: 'It's a lot of problems: bad maintenance, over-complex designs and designs that
just don't work. Historically, maintenance has suffered from a lack of skill.'

Day-to-day running of the system is likely to be in the hands of people who have traditionally been unskilled, such as boilermen and porters. No thought is given to upgrading their skills.

Oliver Evans Palmer, the Royal Institute of British Architects' specialist practice consultant on building regulations and standards, says there is no standardisation.

'Control systems come with an infinite variety of computer chips and too many bells and whistles,' he says. 'That is assuming the systems are installed correctly in the first place, and I think often they are not.'

The real problem is that systems are designed to a budget, not to make people feel comfortable.

This is why the notorious 'sealed building' has come into existence, with windows that do not open and a fixed rate of airflow. Evans Palmer says systems 'are often designed in competition'.

'if you can have smaller ducts you can have a cheaper system. But that means reducing the variables, and a flow of air from outside is a big variable.'

Originally, air conditioning filtered the pollution from outside air and ventilated large buildings. It made sense to add heat to the air. But then developers realised they were wasting all that heat. By recirculating the air, they could save money. Poorly
designed and maintained air conditioning plays a large part in sick building syndrome. Filters that are shedding particles, humidifiers that have dried up and choked ducts are parts of the problem.

But Evans Palmer points out that the problem is also psychological. 'Look at the way home workers behave,' he says, citing the hot fug or gale of cold air different people prefer. 'There is a psychological component to sick building syndrome, and it is
that people are not in control of their environment.'

New buildings are returning to first principles. David Turrent, sustainable building consultant at the Royal Institute of British Architects, says we are 'going back to medieval concepts of thermal mass, heavy buildings that remain cool, and to designs
less than 13 metres across which allow people to stay close to windows and have natural cross-ventilation.'

But what if you are working in an older building? For a start, you could find out how to use your system. Paul Appleby says: 'One problem is that people don't know how. They need to be trained.'

This point is widely made. Consultants think it odd that a washing machine comes with an instruction manual but that people go inside the vast and complex machine that is a modern office block with no guidance at all.

On top of that is management apathy and worker ignorance. For example, it is quite common for a building to have a distinctive smell. Most people have noticed this at some time without thinking anything of it.

But, says Appleby, in a Scandinavian experiment during the Eighties: 'They sniffed buildings and discovered that the smell was much greater when the air conditioning was running.'

There could hardly be a simpler test for defective air conditioning.

Sniff your own. It could start to relieve the curse of sick building syndrome.

Things you can do:
. How does the system work? Most systems have zones: find out if you can get your zone to work in the way your colleagues want it to.
. Don't be fobbed off by management. They have usually contracted out the servicing and system management, and
know no more than you do.
. Befriend the engineer. The engineer or buildings resources executive, or whatever his title is, can tell you what is happening - and you may be able to understand the manual better than he can.
. Sniff your building. That distinctive smell usually indicates poor ventilation - and you may not like what is blocking the air flow.
. You may think these are all things your employer should be doing, but air conditioning that is not actually gassing the staff is
not at all high up their agenda.

It's up to you to instigate reform.

Spinach, the vegetable loved by Popeye, could prove to be a cure for certain forms of blindness.

Doctors now believe that an eye-drop containing a protein taken from spinach could be soon avail-able to treat the millions of people suffering from age-related macular degeneration of the eye and retina pigmentosis.

Age-related macular degeneration is a common eye disease also associated with ageing that gradually destroys sharp central vision. The macula is made up of millions of light-sensing cells in the middle of the retina. When these cells degenerate, vision is impaired and if the disease progresses quickly, blindness follows.

Retina pigmentosis is a genetic disease, which affects about one per-son in 4,000. Sufferers develop night blindness, then tunnel vision and finally loose their colour and day vision in the Western world it is the most common cause of blindness in people under the age of 70. The cause is unknown.

Scientists working for the US government discovered that the protein, known as Photosystem One, was able to generate electrical energy. That energy can trigger light receiving cells to function, enabling the retina to "see" images again. A team of surgeons working at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California with Dr Eli Greenbaum, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has already established that light-receiving cells in the eyes of the blind can be triggered to work again.

When pinhead electrodes were implanted in blind people they were able to see images and patterns. Now the Doheny team believes that the spinach protein is capable of setting off a chemical reaction that will stimulate the eye cells. "We have found that the protein from the spinach is able to make up to one volt and sustain that over a long period," said Dr Greenbaum. "Although the neural wiring from the eye to the brain is intact in diseases such as macular degeneration, the cells at the front of their eyes lack photoreceptor activity to transmit the information that makes images. We believe that Photosystem One can start that process again.

We have established the mechanism that could help so many people who are blind or semi-blind to see again." Dr Greenbaum is planning experiments with rats and mice next year and, if successful, human clinical trials in about two years.

Electromagnetic fields from computers to mobiles are making us sick. 65 Million years ago, a big one may have wiped out the dinosaurs. Today you can't move around the workplace without bumping into dozens of them. No, not asteroids - or articles about them - but electromagnetic fields. From computers to mobile phones, printers to fluorescent tubes, they are everywhere. New research suggests they are seriously damaging our immune system and undermining our working performance. Electromagnetism is generated by anything electrical and there has been speculation for some time that new workplace technologies such as computer VDUs and mobile phones could be exposing us to too much. Even cabling produces an electromagnetic field 10-times stronger than that found in our natural environment and how much cabling have you got under your desk?

Concern was eased in the 1990s with the widespread adoption by the computer industry of the Swedish so-called 'MPR' standards which set reduced emission levels for VDUs. Pregnant women were allowed near terminals again and those often useless protective shields consigned to the bin.

However, MPR standards are based on what is technically possible, not what is healthy. And they do not apply to mobile phones, which have magnetic fields 3063 times stronger than computers. Result: worries about electromagnetic (EM) fields are back.

The National Radiological Protection Board still believes the evidence for a link between EM fields and health problems such as cancer is 'weak' but, according to its scientific spokesperson Dr Michael Clark, this is partly because 'no persuasive biological mechanism has been established for such an effect'. Research to be published in the US later this month, but carried out in a small independent laboratory in South Wales by Roger and Tamara Coghill, may do just that. The Coghills have been studying EM fields since 1985. Their latest research tested the relationship between lymphocytes - immune system cells in the blood - and EM fields.

The experiment has created quite a stir in the biological world and four research laboratories are now trying to replicate it Coghill believes it may be as significant as the discovery of blood circulation by William Harvey in 1628. Its significance for the rest of us is that electromagnetic fields interfere with each other and, if our own EM fields are as important as Coghill believes, the effect on us of interference from other fields such as computers, mobiles or other electrical items, could be more serious. Since greatest interference occurs between fields of similar frequency, any emissions of similar frequency to brainwaves - about 12Hz when we are concentrating - are of particular concern.

Professor Derek Clements-Croome's research at the University of Reading last year clearly demonstrated that there is a problem here. Researchers used an antenna-like device which neutralised VDU emissions of a similar frequency to those from the brain and reduced typical sick building syndrome symptoms by a third. Environmental stress consultant John Jukes, who took part in the Reading research and has found similar results in 10 other studies, believes that most workplace stress is actually physiological in origin. 'My research suggests that 80 per cent of stress is environmental,' he says. 'Only about 20 per cent is the psychological stuff resulting from deadlines, problems with colleagues and so on. The thing is deadlines come and go and the body can cope with that. It's the unremitting environmental effects, one of which is electromagnetism, that it struggles with.'

Behind the statistics are real people. 'After the research was published I had hundreds of letters from people of all ages and occupations describing how they believed their computers had affected them,' says Clements-Croome. As well as the usual flu-like symptoms, headaches and tiredness, they told of serious conditions like fibromyalgia, shrivelled arteries, chronic fatigue syndrome and even death.

Many more of us are experiencing similar reactions, according to Dr Jean Munro of the Breakspear Hospital in Hemel Hempstead, who specialises in environmentally related illness. 'I must have seen more than 500 very sick patients who are hyper-sensitive to electromagnetism and lots more who are more moderately affected,' she says. 'Just as our bodies have evolved to respond to light, sound or heat, they have evolved to respond to the earth's magnetic field. The increasing number of man-made fields is creating an electromagnetic smog which interferes with this and which I believe is very damaging to us all in the long term.'

Munro's views are not based on new age theories but on clinical observation. 'We put patients into a screened room, expose them to different ambient levels of electromagnetism and see which trigger their symptoms - asthma, fainting, sweating, raised pulse and so on. It's very similar to testing we do for food allergies.' An interesting comparison because it's not so long ago that allergy testing was considered cranky. Now it is mainstream medical practice. Munro's treatment uses frequency neutralising devices as in the Reading research.

When the NRPB, the power utilities, the computer industry and employers in general say they want to see more research before taking action, what they reallymean is that they want to see a simple causal explanation demonstrated time and agaln. It is not going to happen like that. Not everybody is affected by EM fields in the same way, those who do have symptoms have a bewildering variety of them and, in the average office, there are a host ofother variables such as lighting, building design and air quality to be taken into account. What is clear is that something is going on in places with high levels of EM fields. Traditionally, these have been near power lines where the association with childhood leukaemia is accepted, albeit reluctantly, even by the NRPB but increasingly these places are offices and, with the growth of the personal computer and mobile phone, our homes.

That is why electromagnetic smog, as Dr Jean Munro calls it, is becoming such a concern. Researching this article I came across unexplained clusters of deaths in two different workplaces and a third non-fatal cluster of healthy young men keeling over with apparent heart attacks. The businesses involved do not want to talk about it. It is just as well the scientists do.

As an alternative to the standard tablets from chemists try my grandmother's advice to aid relief from heartburn or indigestion:
A quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in a cup of warm water.

Long, lazy holidays devoid of mental exertion lead to dramatic,
if temporary, losses of intelligence and sluggish performance on return to work,
a German psychologist has found.

A 3-week beach holiday would lead to a 20-point fall in IQ, says Dr Siegfried Lehrl, of Erlangen University. It can take up to 4 days to recover former performance levels when back at work.

The ideal holiday should be neither all action or all sloth, he said.

One in 10 children under 16 uses a for more than 45 minutes despite believing that it could be a health hazard.

The finding comes just a year after a Government report recommended tha the widespread use of mobile phones by children for non-essential calls should be discouraged.

Tony Sherborne, an education researcher as Sheffiled Hallam University, surveyed 1,000 school children. He found that 9 out of 10 aged between 11 and 15 owned a mobile phone, compared with 7 out of 10 adults.

Although most children use their cellphone for less than 15 minutes a day, nearly a quarter used it for more, he said. More than 1 in 20 spent more than an hour a day on a mobile phone.

Mr Sherborne said the findings were worrying. Many teenagers appeared to be ignoring the message that phone use could be harmful for them, even though the majority believed the research into safety.

Re: Guardian article above, 12-May-2000, Tim Radford

Dear Guardian Letters,

If companies are confident that the use of mobile phones poses no or insignificant health dangers to their users then they should be confident enough to include a life-long health safety guarantee statement with their product and pledge to offer appropriate financial compensation should the user develop brain tumours or cancers in ten or more years time. Such an action would clarify the current confusion for all concerned and help consumers make rational buying and usage decisions.

Such forward thinking was not done in the tobacco and asbestos industries, and it was only when potential commercial damage was realised and when human tragedies emerged that the Government did something to warn us about BSE.

Mobile phone users may well be OK in their later years and all this current fuss rather unnecessary. But if their life is prematurely finished by the direct radiation effects of years of mobile phone use then who would we blame on their behalf? And how much do you compensate for a deterioration in or loss of life?

Yours sincerely John Thorpe

Beware of office bug as the little mite follows you out of the house PLUSH furnishings designed to provide the 90's office worker with maximum comfort are making people ill. Scientists have discovered that house mites are colonising congenial soft office carpets and padded chair seats, bringing with them occupational health risks.

The mites can cause allergic reactions in humans, including asthma, hay fever and ear, nose and throat irritations.

And scientists at the Government-funded Building Research Institute believe their presence in offices could be a major cause of the mystery workplace illness known as sick building syndrome, thought to affect millions of people.

Most theories on the syndrome's causes have concentrated on ventilation systems and indoor air quality with some experts also implicating noise pollution and artificial lighting.

However, tests conducted by the institute found that the presence of house mites increased complaints of sickness among a 2,400-strong workforce by 25 per cent. The mites cause allergic reactions when their faeces enters the atmosphere in minute dust particles.

Dr Gary Raw, who is co-ordinating the research, said the findings were a 'new and potentially important development' in tackling sick building syndrome.

'House mites are a very well known allergen but they have always been thought to be a domestic problem,' he said. 'We have now found them in office chair covers and carpets which could be more significant for people's health. People are always moving around on their chairs and every time they do so they will create a cloud around them of whatever is in the seat.'

Institute researchers found up to 200 house mites per gram of dust in furnishings in the test building, although most samples contained fewer than 100 mites - the average concentration found in infested domestic furnishings.

Normal carpet and chair seat cleaning with vacuum cleaners and shampoo did not affect the mites, but when steam cleaning was used on a sample of furnishings the mite population dropped dramatically.

As a result, office workers in that part of the building reported a significant drop in previous health problems, including dry eyes, stuffy nose, dry throat, lethargy and dry skin There was no corresponding improvement in a parallel control group.

Dr Law said the early results showed that more intensive office cleaning of soft furnishings would produce environmental and health benefits. 'People undoubtedly felt better after the steam cleaning which killed the mites, so regular steam cleaning should help a building's environment.'

He also suggested that people sensitive to allergens could consider switching from padded to wooden or plastic chairs. An initial questionnaire issued to 537 employees at the test building revealed high levels of sick building syndrome symptoms occuring among every worker at least twice a year.

The World Health Organisation estimates that about 30 percent of modern' office buildings suffer from the syndrome.

Oxford-based Skin Research And Technology have finally proved the folklore about the benefits of bathing in the sea. In the recovery process it was found that dermatitis patients bathed in seawater made faster progress than those bathed in ordinary water. The main healers in seawater are salt and potassium chloride. They seal the damaged skin, allow it to mend and improve the elasticity and outer appearance of the skin. The same compounds could ease eczema, psoriasis and spots. Trials of bathing for one hour in the Dead Sea each day resulted in 88% success in people with psoriasis. Also, it has been suggested that putting Dead Sea mud on joints and spine has a healing effect on arthritus, rhuematism and bone inflammation.