Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T.
Breakthroughs

THORNTON Wilder, an American playwright best known for his play Our House, once said: “When you’re safe at home you wish you were having an adventure.”

Home is a universal symbol of safety and protection. But being so universal does not mean that all homes are bastions of safety and haven of peace, not only from violence, but also from indoor pollution.

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Studies show that 65 percent of their time people spend inside their houses, and 25 percent in some other indoor environment.

Transit takes from five to seven percent of the time, and that leaves less than five percent spent outdoors.

We have the unfounded presumption that the home air is safest from the pollution outside. But think again; our home can be smoking bomb of disease-producing pollution.

Frying chicken at the stove, spraying ants with insecticide, taking a hot shower, plugging in a room freshener, or using detergent in your dishwashing — all these release chemicals that swirl around rooms like invisible poisons attacking your body.

Four doctors from the American College of Medical Toxicology submitted a report to the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The report indicated that less than two feet above ground (the breathing zone of a baby) can be more contaminated than at four to sic feet (the breathing zone of adults); and more lethal with heavy metal pollutants, such as mercury and pesticides, because these chemicals rarely rise above two feet when suspend in air. This is true even when the window is open for ventilation.

A study by Richard Corsi, associate profession in the Texas Institute for the Indoor Environment at the University of Texas in Austin. found wood products such as particleboard, plywood and fiberboard contain adhesives that emit hydrocarbons such as formaldehyde.

The American General Accounting Office issued a statement that called indoor air pollution as “one of the most serious environmental risks to human health.”

In 2003, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine tested 2,500 people who don’t work with chemicals, and found 167 industrial chemicals per volunteer. And 53 of these chemicals can cause cancer and other health problems affecting the nervous, reproductive, hormonal, and the cardiovascular and immune systems.

But a few believe that pollution is actually a wasted resource.

American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, renowned for the so-called “geodesic dome,” observed:

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.”

We are ignorant, too, on how to collect and then use it. And certainly that’s the challenge posed by pollution, be it indoor or outdoor. Any solution you can think of?

(E-mail: zim_breakthroughs@yahoo.com; Blog: http://breakthroughstoday.blogspot.com/)