The You Docs Nail the Causes of Poor IAQ but Don't Mention Indoor Air Filtration in their Proposed Solution
By Joe Castner - VP Marketing
You have probably heard of The You Docs – Dr. Mehmet Oz (The Doctor Oz Show) and Dr. Mike Roizen. They publish a very popular syndicated column and they recently published their take on the city-by-city air pollution expose (www.stateoftheair.org).
I follow the good doctors regularly for lots of reasons, not the least of which is they often address indoor air pollution and what people can do about it.
This particular column was called “Clean Up the Air In Your Castle” and I saw it in the Boise Statesman. It's well written and chocked full of IAQ insights. I’ll point out a few:
- Indoor levels of the pollutants formaldehyde, styrene and chloroform can be 2 to 50 times higher than outdoors.
- Cigarette smoke is still the number one cause of indoor air pollution, and it has been linked to lung, cervical and other cancers, heart disease, asthma attacks, wrinkles, and erectile dysfunction.
- Avoid using air fresheners and spray-on cleaners. They write, “regularly breathing in a volatile organic compound called 1,4 DCB found in room deodorizers (toilet-bowl freshening blocks, too) could reduce your lung function by 4%”.
- 1 in 7 asthma attacks may be triggered by cleaning sprays.
- Chemicals used in dry-cleaning (trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene or PERC), have been linked to kidney and nervous system damage, as well as cancer.
- Unhealthy levels of OZONE are emitted from home-office electronics such as laser printers and copy machines.
To read their entire article, please click here.
While they recommend frequent ventilation (open the windows and let the fresh air in and the bad air out) which is always a good idea, they don’t mention the benefits that people would derive from affordable, practical and effective high-efficiency air filtration systems, such as AspenAir. There are times (and places) when it isn’t reasonable nor practical to throw open your windows. With the rising costs of energy, I wouldn’t recommend anyone letting their expensively heated or cooled air out too often. And let’s be honest… people aren’t likely to soon give up their cleaning products and home offices. People need to know that today it’s possible to remove the stuff from indoor air that makes us sick, and to actually lower your heating and cooling bills in the process.
I’m going to see what I can do to educate and inform Drs. Oz and Roizen of the many benefits of AspenAir in hopes that someday they’ll write a column recommending it to their readers.
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