Shocking Statistics on Asthma in US


How Our Buildings Are Making Us Sick

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                                                                        [http://blogs-images.forbes.com/amywestervelt/files/2012/08/AsthmaReport_6-Prevalence-171x300.jpg](http://blogs-images.forbes.com/amywestervelt/files/2012/08/AsthmaReport_6-Prevalence.jpeg)As  a culture, Americans spend 90 percent of our time indoors, and in the  majority of cases the air quality inside is far worse than it is  outside. The largely terrible indoor air quality is attributed to the  offgassing of chemicals from various building materials–paint, carpet,  countertops, dry wall, you name it and chances are it’s got some sort of  toxic ingredient. The thing is, in many cases those chemicals are  mandated by either building codes or performance codes. Curtains need to  be covered in flame retardant to prevent fire spread, for example, and  certain other materials have chemicals added to them in order to make  them more flexible, more rigid, or more rugged.

Today, architecture firm Perkins + Will released a report looking at just one aspect of this dilemma: asthmagens in the built environment. The report compiles the bulk of the peer-reviewed research available on the subject, and the result is a single document that illustrates the problem, the gaps in the research, and the potential solutions. The report concludes with a list of 374 known asthmagens, identified by government agencies, third-party regulatory agencies, and academic sources. It’s all part of the firm’s Transparency Project, which aims to push the building materials market toward more transparency, and the design and construction industry toward constructing healthier buildings.
“It’s a largely opaque market,” says Peter Syrett, senior designer for Perkins + Will, and lead author of the report. “When we buy a product from Home Depot, or build anything, there’s no way for a consumer to know what a product is made of unless the manufacturer tells you, and only a handful of them do.”
According to the American Lung Association, there are 23 million Americans currently suffering from asthma, 7.1 million of them children, whose developing lungs are particularly susceptible to asthma triggers. An estimated 300 million people suffer from asthma worldwide, and the Global Initiative for Asthma expects there to be an additional 100 million people with asthma by 2025. Not surprisingly, in the United States, asthma sufferers are often in low-income communities near major pollution sources, such as freeways or factories. The Center for Disease Control puts the annual cost of asthma at approximately $19.7 billion, including $10 billion in direct healthcare costs. The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project attributes 13 million outpatient doctor visits per year to asthma, along with two million trips to the emergency room.
Obviously not all of that is linked to asthmagens in building materials, but the Perkins + Will report suggest that, given the amount of time Americans spend indoors, it bears taking a closer look at the link between the two. “This indoor lifestyle is still relatively new for humans,” Syrett says. “There’s a long road ahead in terms of understanding the health impacts of that from various angles. On the building materials side, we have this tendency if we go into a room that smells funny because it’s off-gassing chemicals to say, ‘Oh it’s just a chemical smell, no biggie,’ but it might be a real problem.”
While Syrett says he doesn’t imagine manufacturers being required by law to label their products any time soon, he does expect the market to begin going that direction of its own accord.
“The largest drivers in the industry are big customers – Kaiser, for example, or some of the big hotel chains,” Syrett says. “These are people who are buying hundreds of thousands of feet of carpet, not just a few hundred, so if they say they want to know what’s in it, the manufacturer will do it. A lot of companies–Google is another example–are big building owners who want to transform the market so it’s easier for them to build the buildings that they want. They want more healthy building products to choose from.”
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