Indoor Air Related Problems Are Consistently Increasing
There is a growing public awareness and knowledge about poor indoor air quality and its alarming health effects.
Hundreds of community health studies have linked daily increases in fine particle pollution to reduced lung function, greater use of asthma medications, and increased rates of school absenteeism, emergency room visits, hospital admissions, and even tens of thousands premature death each year. Fine particle pollution is especially harmful to children, elderly and people suffering from lung and cardio vascular diseases such as asthma, COPD, artery disease and congestive heart failure. In America alone 20 million people suffer from asthma and 50 million from allergies.
In the last couple of years, scientific evidence has indicated that it is actually the indoor air that is a major health threat being seriously more polluted than the outdoor air in even the most industrialized cities. As people are known to spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, the health risk may be severe.
In conjunction with the European Respiratory Society Congress (ERS) in Stockholm in 2007 WHO published a report stating that one billion of the world’s inhabitants now have chronic lung diseases and that by 2020, these will be the world’s greatest cause of death. This applies to pulmonary infections such as tuberculosis as well as lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), plus a range of respiratory diseases such as asthma and diseases involving defective breathing regulation, like sleep apnea and sudden infant death. Whilst the incidence of many other major disease groups is declining, lung diseases are on the increase!
It is all about small particles
Small particles, below the size of 2.5 micron (PM2.5) and even more below 1 micron, are inhaled more or less deeply into our lungs and enter our blood stream bringing also other substances into our body. Today this is considered to be a major cause of heart and vascular diseases as well as different forms of cancer.
A number of different lung problems are caused by the same small size particles. During the last couple of years it has been proven that allergic and asthma reactions have become 10 -100 times more aggressive in combination with breathing such small soot particles, mostly from combustion of fossil fuels, which are the great majority of particles in the air today (see enclosed report). And it does not have to be simultaneous.
Fine, ultrafine and nano particles cause almost all the health problems from particles in the air according to scientific evidence during the last years. Not even the allergy organisations seem to be fully aware of this yet. E.g. they still consider pollen and mould spores to be major causes which is both true and false. Air cleaning of pollen is like trying to suck in basket balls into a vacuum cleaner. Pollen are huge particles but they contain allergens which come lose when pollen break apart and become ultrafine particles mostly containing allergens, i.e. proteins/albumins.
Health problems caused by mould are most probably not caused by rather large sized mould spores. It has been proven over the last 4-5 years that different kinds of mould continuously generate large quantities of ultrafine particles containing mycotoxins which are among the most potent poisons in nature. This is the major cause of mould sickness.
Thus, the smallest particles, which are everywhere in enormous numbers and which are “floating” for very long periods of time in the air, are proven to cause most of the different health problems and even more so in combination with different allergens. Reducing the concentration of such small particles in the air has a positive effect on our health. This can be accomplished by using high performance air purifiers provided however that they are in continuous operation as air quality is extremely volatile.
