- Sick building syndrome.

- I think it's a balance with this research, right?

You wanna know more, but do you wanna know more?

- We all live in a microbial soup.

- Our homes contain hundreds of chemicals and thousands of microbes.

- Maintenance is really the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy indoor environment.

- [Narrator] "Home Diagnosis" is made possible by support from Broan-NuTone.

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(gentle music) - Can you really become allergic to your home, and could my family be in danger?

- You'll hear extreme things across the spectrum on this topic, just like anything else we don't know a whole lot about.

- But we've tried hard to ask the right questions of the right researchers to show that not only is sick building syndrome real, it's likely to get more widespread and complicated.

- It's also called environmental sensitivity or multiple chemical sensitivity, MCS, and like so many other things in the science of homes, it's both influential and invisible.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] It's the shields we build and the risks we take.

It's the disasters that will test us and what will grow from them.

It's real life, and the physics, chemistry, and microbiology of the science of homes.

- I think human beings can still detect things that the instruments cannot.

Let's take a very simple scent, something called limonene, the citrus scent, or the lemon scent.

And it turns out that limonene is one of these molecules that has what we call handedness.

There exists left-handed limonene and right-handed limonene.

We have odor receptors that are specific to either the left-handed molecule or the right-handed molecule.

So these molecules, they're identical to one another in terms of number of carbons, number of hydrogens, number of double bonds.

The only difference is the way the fingers are arranged on the glove.

I'll give you another example, the one I love.

Cat urine, okay?

This is not left-handed and right-handed, this is just a question of odor receptors.

And some people have odor receptors for some of the chemicals in cat urine that other people lack.

And so you can have two people sharing a house, and the one person says, "We've gotta clean that litter box, it stinks."

And the other person says, "No problem."

In a way, they're both right.

The person who lacks the odor receptor for the urine note in cats, you know, they don't get it.

You can use instruments to distinguish between a bad wine and an okay wine, but you cannot with an instrument distinguish between an okay wine and a superb wine.

- So, a really fast build of five months, you move into the home, and within eight months, you are bedridden.

- And I had never been bedridden before.

- But one of our dogs got very sick soon after we moved into the house.

I started getting ocular migraines and vertigo.

And none of our doctors could really figure out what was going on with us, and we never suspected anything was going on systemically in the house.

- I see these spaces, which we live, in which we work, it's like this environment that we're all very familiar with, but it's like a big uncontrolled experiment too.

And all these things happen, and it's so unexplored.

We want our homes to be sanctuaries, we want them to be safe, so we don't really wanna know that there's also kind of a seedy underside to our own homes.

We regulate drinking water, we regulate outdoor air, we regulate hazardous waste, but it's really hard to do any regulation on the indoor environment.

So, because there's so little, if any regulation at all, it becomes really hard to think about what's bad and what's good.

- We all live in a microbial soup.

Our bodies are constantly in a battle and winning that battle, because this microbial soup, we're never gonna get out of it until we die.

But for people that are immune compromised, they aren't able to fight it so well.

We don't have to try and make every environment like a clean room.

Actually, I think it would be counterproductive to try and do that because it would then cause the body's immune system to let its defenses down.

But for certain people and in certain environments, it's really important to clean very effectively.

Cleaning is something that everyone does.

Everybody thinks that they are a cleaner, and a good cleaner for the most part.

But removing unwanted matter rather than moving it around, those are two different things.

Removing unwanted matter, that's the job of professional cleaning.

It's not primarily the tools that we use that are most important to effective cleaning, it's the way we use the tools that we have.

- One of the things I noticed, especially in this front room, is, I called it the attic smell.

It just, for some reason, it felt stale, something just wasn't...

It didn't smell right.

And so the big project that I'm doing right now is, actually, I removed all the attic insulation in my house, and that's where we found lots of gaps and cracks.

And we found some rodent nests that used to exist a long time ago, but they were still there.

Well, that was where some of those smells were coming from.

It's physics, you know?

Hot air rises, cold air sinks.

And so if you have holes in either or both, air's going to move.

You know, the old can light fixtures that I had had holes all the way around it, there was just a light bulb in there, and you know, air was just coming through, so you know, that's one of the things I've done in this room, is moved over to an airtight light fixture.

I'm air sealing all the way to the top plate on the exterior of the house.

Do I still smell the attic smell?

A little bit, but not nearly as bad, and I'm only smelling it up in the attic, where it belongs.

But there are places that I haven't gotten to yet, and I might find some more places that might need a little bit more cleaning.

- Professional cleaners have felt like substandard workers.

They're not often treated very well.

Frequently, they don't have good self-perceptions.

There aren't a lot of people that when they were seven years old said, and I know I didn't, and that's where I ended up, is in the cleaning business, they don't say, "Well, I wanna grow up to be a janitor," or, "I wanna grow up to clean people's homes."

The focus has traditionally been on cleaning for appearance, cleaning to make things smell good, as opposed to an awareness that cleaning does make a difference in terms of health.

Florence Nightingale is really kind of where it comes from, who showed that, you know what?

If we keep things clean and sanitary, then we have better health outcomes.

- So, maintenance, I love talking about maintenance.

I know no one does, but maintenance is really the difference between a healthy indoor environment and an unhealthy indoor environment.

And you know, there are no bad dogs and there are no bad systems in a lot of ways, there's just systems that need a lot of maintenance.

And the reason why maintenance is so important is that, you know, the indoor air is dirty, and stuff accumulates on indoor surfaces, and in some cases, that can lead to issues.

So, the most common trouble spots for any HVAC or ventilation system is places where there is liquid water.

So that's your air conditioning coil that condenses water out of the air.

Maybe if you have a humidifier, there are places where there's liquid water.

Those systems need a lot of attention paid to them.

And one of the things I do when I travel is I open up the HVAC cabinet and peer at the drain pan underneath the air conditioner coil, and it is shocking what you see when you do that, right?

You see this amazing, you know, usually fungal flora of some kind with all kinds of dirt and other stuff in it.

And remember, that's stuff that's coming in contact with all the air that you breathe.

And so if I could change the world in one way, I would like there to be, like, a champion for maintenance, who would get people to understand the basics of hygiene and cleanliness stuff.

It's so important in HVAC systems.

And by the way, there's not just air quality benefit, there's often usually an energy benefit from doing that as well.

(gentle music) (gentle music) - The problem of kids' exposure to chemical contaminants is really complex and really vexing.

I have kids.

They're older now.

And in fact, that's one of the reasons why I've been so concerned about chemical contaminants.

Kids have higher vulnerability to exposure.

The vulnerability comes from activities that kids should be doing, putting their hands in stuff, and putting them in their mouths and just crawling all over things and becoming dirty.

That should be good for kids because that's the way you boost your immune system.

The problem comes when the dirt has contaminants in it that should not be there.

And it's not just the dirt in the playground.

It's the dirt in the carpet, the dirt on the floor.

It's the environment, all the surfaces indoors.

Kids are exposed more and more to such a diverse array of contaminant sources.

More kids start using, for example, electronic devices earlier in their lives.

Unfortunately, that provides an opportunity for exposure of the chemicals contained in those electronic devices, to go from the device to the kid.

So there's flame retardants in the motherboard.

The plastic contains flame retardants, dyes, antioxidants, a whole suite of plastic additives.

We all try to do the right thing by recycling our electronic products.

So what we know is that, for example, the case from your computer, it's taken apart, it's separated from the wires and the motherboard and so on.

We did research to find, and very much to our surprise, the presence of flame retardants and elevated lead in some black kitchen spoons.

Oh, they were my kitchen spoons.

How could a flame retardant be in a kitchen spoon?

It can get there if it had a previous life as the casing of an electronic device.

One of the clues with the black is that when...

So, recycled plastic has this sort of mungey color to it.

So, black is used.

I mean, black is often used for marketing.

But if it's black, you don't know if it's virgin plastic or not.

There was no relationship with cost, with label, it was really quite random.

That's really also the case with kids' clothing.

We have found some kids' clothing, for example, school uniforms, to be treated with PFAS, per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, that are highly persistent chemicals.

More information is coming out on their toxicity.

Is it worth stain-proofing your kid given the potential for bad health effects coming from that stain-proofing material?

- So here are the things that I've learned about crawling through an attic.

It's very tight.

It's a lot tighter than I expected it to be.

It's itchy.

You really should be wearing a mask at all times up there just because otherwise you're coughing all day, and it's just dirty, hot.

During the summertime, my attic can get up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit, I've measured it.

To send somebody up there to do work like that, I have a lot of respect for the work that they do.

- So, urea-formaldehyde foam was introduced as a result of the energy crisis in the 1970s, and it was a way to retrofit old homes in a fairly simple way to add exterior insulation to improve their energy efficiency, while at the same time tightening their environment and reducing leaks.

The foam itself has a great R-value, and it's very stable.

If you pump a big lump of that foam into a bell jar in a laboratory and you draw out some gas every month for the next 100 years, you won't find any off-gassing from that material once it's cured, it's very, very stable.

But the problem is that when you actually put that material into a situation where it's subject to exposure to moisture and microbes, there are a number of microbes that produce enzymes that can cleave the urea and the formaldehyde, causing formaldehyde to off gas.

So the instability of the foam was as a consequence of microbial exposure, which no one anticipated.

It seemed like it would be a good material.

But after multiple years of installation of this material, it became clear that people's homes were making them sick.

Ultimately, it wasn't a problem of the foam, it was a problem of how the foam performed in that particular application.

(gentle music) - 90% or more people say in the first minute of the conversation, "I had a really bad mold exposure, and now, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

So, there's often a really big underlying exposure.

Sometimes it's not that, sometimes someone was exposed to a gas leak or something really serious, they worked for a pesticide company, and so that is also partially why I've gone towards more building science.

I'm still primarily a material specifier, but you know, the house is a system.

I cannot just throw a material at you and here's the right flooring for your house without understanding the whole system, and that's really important, because people with chemical sensitivities almost always have a mold issue as well, a mold sensitivity.

Without having MCS, I wouldn't be able to do this job to this degree, I wouldn't be able to help people that are extremely sensitive, because I have to get all those samples.

I'll have a pile of every carpet sample that I can get and a pile of all the laminates and all the vinyl flooring, and just see, like, what is the odorant?

Not every chemical has an odor, but most of them do.

Then the ones that we know don't have an odor, that's when I can start to look up technical data, patents, health product declarations.

So whenever they say something's odorless, it's always... And even there's a formaldehyde chart that shows the toxicity limit for humans, and then, like, the workplace limit, and then there'll be, like, human odor threshold, and I am, like, way...

I can smell it way below that, which is helpful.

But some things really are odorless, like flame retardants.

I'm not sure anyone can claim that they can smell flame retardants.

Radon, I don't think anyone claims they can smell radon.

So health product declarations are much more important than, people always think safety data sheet.

Safety data sheet hardly tells you anything.

The health product declaration, if it's a full disclosure, it tells you everything that's in it.

- The question of how we determine what materials are suitable for what application is something that we've never really been very good at.

There are a number of standardized tests that we use to test a huge variety of performance parameters of building materials.

Their stability, chemically, is one of those.

Also, their resistance to microbial attack is another one.

In a lot of cases, those kinds of testing procedures seek to not replicate, but at least resemble a real world situation.

But in many cases, they fall short.

And that means that you may end up with a test result that doesn't necessarily predict very well the real world performance of those materials when they may be subject to, you know, the radiant heat of the sun striking a wall combined with maybe moisture effects, some exposure to microbes, things like that.

They're very complex, and they're very difficult to model in a reproducible way in a laboratory.

So, these standard tests tend to simplify those conditions to the things that scientists think matter, and sometimes their guesses aren't right.

So what this means is that you can end up with performance tests that in effect can be used by manufacturers to game the system.

So you can have your wallboard that passes ASTM 32 whatever it is, and depending on how the test is conducted, you could actually make your wallboard or your competitors' wallboard look better or worse.

There's a tremendous amount of resistance in the industry to modifying any of those test procedures in a way that prevents their misuse.

It's one of those situations that's very difficult to manage as a scientist, because the committees that set those sorts of test procedures are often dominated by industry representatives.

And when you come in as a scientist, it's very, very difficult to be able to change the conversation, to try to develop something that may be a more robust test.

- So, years ago, when we got involved with answering questions from homeowners, we went out and bought, like, seven different brands of X.

Sometimes we bought multiple branches of the same brand.

And what we found was that even the same brand but different batches were leaching starkly different amounts of chemicals.

There's an industry standard that you're going to flush the pipes for 14 days before you use them.

That's what they do for the testing.

And that's how products get into market.

But as you and I know, there's no warning label on there that says, "Don't use the water for 14 days," because the fact of the matter is the pipes are not tested for that 14 day period.

They literally, they fill up the water in the pipes and they dump it out, they don't test it, and they just keep doing it over and over.

So there's a big disconnect with how these materials are tested, what they're doing to the water, and then the products that are being used in actual homes.

- The scary part is that very often, we are used as guinea pigs because we are using certain products to figure out that it is really harmful for us, and then we replace that product with something else, which we don't know yet how harmful it is.

- Scientists have to be vigilant because it is beyond the capacity of governments to undertake that work of surveillance.

(gentle music) - Our largest dog, Diesel, started just draining from his nose at all times, sneezing.

We were referred to a specialist who did a number of tests, blood tests, swabs, and also did an MRI and found that he had a fungal infection in his sinuses.

- And they attributed it to the grass.

- They said the only thing they could think of is that he snorted something up in the grass.

- I would argue that most doctors think they're scientists.

They're aspiring scientists, they're halfway there.

But they in many cases are unqualified to deal with what I call house calls.

In essence, the last mile of actual treatment and care doesn't occur in the clinic, it doesn't occur in an office building, it occurs in the home.

The exposures that we have in our homes and workplaces are often considered secondary or tertiary to other things.

And so it's a blind spot, I think, unfortunately, for many physicians that wanna have a quick and easy, you know, this causes this, and my experience with indoor air quality is that it's rarely that simple.

- When we think about moisture in the indoor environment, the first thing that people think about is water content.

How much water is actually there?

That's not actually the most relevant example.

And I think about a sailor at sea, extremely parched, surrounded by the ocean.

You or I can't go take a cup, scoop it up of ocean water, and drink it, because it's too salty.

This is the same situation for microbes in the indoor environment, where there might be water there, but it's not available, they can't drink it, because it's bound to salt or it's bound to another compound in the indoor environment.

But the presence of water can also have a large impact on indoor chemistry.

(gentle music) - Water's everywhere.

And when you mix chemicals that are water soluble with water, you get a lot of chemistry, and that chemistry can change the air we breathe.

And the air we breathe the most is really the air in our homes.

So some surfaces can absorb water because they're porous, so the water can sneak inside of the surface, but a surface like glass, like a window, it can't really soak things up, but the water can adsorb, with AD, onto that glass, and things can still interact.

Now, the surfaces that act more like sponges are like carpet or painted drywall.

They soak up a lot more water and they soak up a lot more chemicals than a surface like glass would do.

So, there's more chemistry that can happen.

They're reacting inside of it, and also on the surface.

- There are some reasons to be afraid of water in your home.

I grew up on the West Coast, so things are totally different on the West Coast and on the East Coast, actually.

It's probably influenced the questions I ask about science, right?

Where I live and what I see as I go about my life.

If you live in a really humid place, you can have a situation where your home is so moist that the water becomes a problem.

There's probably a sweet spot between maybe 30 and 60% humidity.

- At about 80% relative humidity, you start to have growth, and we start to see that growth in our carpets and in different materials.

- Carpets are not fundamentally bad to have in your house.

I think they actually have a lot of benefits in terms of comfort, injury prevention, sound reduction.

It does mean that you need to properly maintain a carpet and think about where you're putting it.

You might reconsider putting a carpet in a bedroom of someone who does have allergies or asthma, and you also wanna keep it out of areas that might be exposed to higher moisture levels, such as a bathroom, where you're gonna have elevated moisture over repeated periods of time.

- Humidification can be an important cause of moisture problems, right?

So, you're adding moisture to the air, it comes in contact with some cold surface because of air leakage in the building, and you get condensation and microbial growth.

And so humidification is one of those things where having someone who's a trained professional there, who can really assess how to do the humidification well, how to get that integrated into your other systems, how to make sure you don't have a moisture problem.

It turns out that's a pretty tall order in a lot of cases, so I gave up on humidification in my own home.

Even though I don't like the dry air, I just felt like given the age of the home and everything else, I couldn't humidify in a way that was not gonna cause more problems.

- Our homes contain hundreds of chemicals and thousands of microbes, and these are mixed together in different environments, such as within the dust.

And you think about what that environment might look like, and you imagine these must interact.

We did a study where we actually looked specifically at the interaction between phthalates in dust and microbes.

Phthalates are chemicals of public health importance because they're endocrine disruptors.

They act like hormones, and they can affect our health.

They tend to leach out of plastics.

And what we found is that within this unique environment, you can actually get microbial degradation of the phthalates if your moisture is sufficiently high.

Before anyone says, "Hey, this is great, let's increase the relative humidity and remove the phthalates from my home," you need to know that there's two major problems with that.

One is you're gonna get mold growth, which we know is harmful and is associated with human health effects.

Secondly, the degradation products, the compounds that result from this degradation, are actually more harmful than the parent compounds.

So, exposure to these compounds is also associated with known health effects.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg.

As I said, with hundreds of chemicals and thousands of microbes present, we're really just beginning to understand what a lot of these interactions look like between chemicals and microbes in the home.

- As always, it could be easy to get lost in the swamp of scientific details, so let's recap the easy things that you can do right now.

- Follow the basic rules of HOMEChem.

Don't keep bad stuff at home, keep it dry, and clean the air.

- And share the show with your friends and family if you feel like it could help them at home too.

- You can meditate on all of that and more at homediagnosis.tv.

Join us next time.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] "Home Diagnosis" is made possible by support from Broan-NuTone.

Better air.

Better life.

By the GOT MOLD?

Test Kit.

Real science, real simple.

By AirCycler, Retrotec, Rockwool, and RenewAire.

By generous support from these underwriters and by viewers like you.