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SICK BUILDING SYNDROME
source: www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/
hpguide.html
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Modern buildings clearly have a problem in providing a healthy or even appropriate indoor environment…
The term ‘sick building syndrome’ (SBS), first employed in the 1970s, describes a situation in which reported symptoms among a population of building occupants can be temporally associated with their presence in that building. Typically, though not always, the structure is an office building.- SBS should be suspected when a substantial proportion of those spending extended time in a building (as in daily employment) report or experience acute on-site discomfort;
- typical complaints may include eye and/or nasopharyngeal irritation, rhinitis or nasal congestion, inability to concentrate, and general malaise-complaints suggestive of a host of common ailments, some ubiquitous and easily communicable;
- the key factors are commonality of symptoms and absence of symptoms among building occupants when the individuals are not in the building.
If is important, however, to distinguish SBS from problems of building related illness… - the latter term is reserved for situations in which signs and symptoms of diagnosable illness are identified and can be attributed directly to specific airborne building contaminants. Legionnaires' Disease and hypersensitivity pneumonitis, for example, are building related illnesses.
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