Two years after a study on sick building syndrome in India, were still wheezing in the workplace
The two horsemen of the summer heat and pollution, are bearing down on you hard. The best thing to do under the circumstances is to dive into your fully-airconditioned office and stay there, right? Cool and safe from the great polluted outdoors?
Heres a statistic that should make you sweat: the carbondioxide level inside your office could be 10 times higher than it is outside. And consider this: your nice, airtight office that doesnt let the heat in also doesnt let multiple invisible pollutants out.
For offices, sick building syndrome is the equivalent of the flu among humans and the computer virus among IBMs and Macs. And while it seems to be spreading in India, medical treatment for the afflicted buildings seems to be hard to come by.
Two years ago, at the height of summer, an interesting survey was conducted in the capital. The Indian chapter of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration & Airconditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) conducted a survey on 288 public spaces hotels, hospitals, corporate offices, health clubs and others in New Delhi. ISHRAE, as the Indian chapter is called, compared the level of carbondioxide both inside and outside the establishments.
CO2 itself, incidentally, is not a polluter but CO2 levels are used as a surrogate index for the levels of indoor pollutants since it indicates the ventilation rate inside the buildings under the Ashrae standards.
The findings were startling. In 99 per cent of the cases, the CO2 level was found to be much higher inside than outside sometimes more than two and a half times higher! In 233 of the buildings checked, CO2 levels were higher than the permissible level of 1,000 ppm (parts per million).
Deepak Pahwa, managing director of Arctic India Engineering, which co-sponsored the project, says: As far as we are aware, less than 10 per cent have taken steps to improve indoor air quality (IAQ) since then.
Sick building syndrome, defined broadly as living in poor quality indoor environments, can be injurious to your health. There isnt much awareness in India of just how this could affect general users, says ISHRAE, which has been conducting workshops and seminars ever since it undertook the study. The symptoms could range from a niggling feeling of poor health to far more serious conditions.
Mild symptoms include eye irritation, nasal congestion, inability to concentrate the kind of minor trouble that wouldnt prevent you from turning up at the morning meeting. Typically, relief occurs shortly after you leave the building and all youd notice is that it feels so good to be going back home. Hardly the kind of thing youd report to the doctor or connect with office at all.
Serious ailments include Pontiac fever, with symptoms like chills, constant headaches and upper respiratory infection debilitating but not fatal. Theres also Legionnaires Disease, which attacks the pulmonary system and can be fatal in some cases. The mortality rate for Legionnaires ranges from 5 to 24 per cent.
And the main culprit? The trail leads inexorably to underperforming air-conditioners (ACs) or contaminated potable water systems. Most allergy epidemics in office buildings have been traced to ACs or humidification systems that are playing host to bacteria and mold.
This could mean big trouble, warns Dr Manjit Kanwar of Apollo Hospital. Sick buildings could indirectly be responsible for cardiac or renal diseases, sustained high fever or other illnesses that could mean prolonged hospitalisation. The problem, of course, is to establish that the building you work or live in is the villain of the piece. I have treated a few cases for Legionnaires Disease in Delhi. But in India its difficult to find out the number of actual sufferers most people respond to the symptoms with self-medication, since the antibiotics you need can be bought off the shelf.
The lack of oxygen is not the only thing that results in lots of sick days in the company register. Poor maintenance can lead to building users breathing in a mocktail that sounds as though it came from the three witches cauldron in Macbeth.
This is what could be going into workers lungs: germs, dust mites, formaldehyde from the panelling, benzene from cigarette smoke, synthetic chemicals from fabric, cleaning agents, paints, radon gas from cracks in the buildings foundation... Just reading about it is enough to make anyone feel a little sick. In conjunction, some of the elements of this cocktail can be even more dangerous for example, tobacco smoke along with radon exposure increases the risk of lung cancer. It can be tempting to play detective a damp smell indicates that the humidity is too high; a mouldy odour is a pointer to the presence of microbes.
But scientists are quick to point out that some symptoms will occur only with significant exposure. As Dr Kanwar says: Theres no reason for people to panic about the possibility of getting Legionnaires. Instead of popping pills, though, it makes more sense to go and see a doctor.
The main offenders are often the users themselves. Says G K Khemani, director of Dastur Consultants, an airconditioning consultancy: Often the users, to save on electricity, reduce the ventilation level, thereby cutting the flow of fresh air into the system. Improper maintenance is the other problem.
Occasionally, the problem goes right back to the blueprint. A 1992 dissertation by a TVB School of Habitat Studies student demonstrated that 15 out of 20 or 75 per cent architects were neutral or negative about the importance of health and environment in designing buildings.
In India, most of our buildings are sick, says architect S K Das. Here building developers an follow the minimum guidelines and get away with it. Unpartitioned false ceilings are fire hazards, as well as being rat paradises. The Delhi government has banned the use of generators in the basement after the Uphaar fire, so now generators blow hot air right on pedestrians faces. The law told them not to keep the generators underground; so now theyre put right on the street.
Besides, the National Building Code as laid down by the Indian Standard Institute just about sets the minimum standards on indoor air quality. Those airconditioning standards are not enough to ensure indoor air quality. Many more parameters need to be considered, says Pahwa.
Some raise their eyebrows at the concept of sick building syndrome, seeing it as just as much of an upper-class disease as say, the yuppie flu. Sumit Saxena, fellow, Tata Energy Research Institute is dismissive: Its a minor issue when compared to the acute indoor pollution caused by the wood stove thats used in so many rural homes and urban slums.
That doesnt change the fact that many buildings are simply not good for your health. The awareness has to come through controls at all levels so that nobody can get away with the minimal guidelines, feels Das.
He cites the story of what happened in the late 1970s in Mumbai. In the aftermath of a jaundice outbreak, accusations flew indiscriminately. It began with someone alleging that suburban factories were dumping effluents in the river. The factories swore that the riverside slums were responsible. Slum dwellers pointed at the estate developers, saying the overhead water tanks must have been contaminated. The promoters blamed the housing societies for poor tank maintenance. The occupants of the buildings said that their plumbing system was at fault and passed the buck to the promoters.
So if sick building syndrome did make the headlines for the wrong reasons, chances are that it would spark off another outbreak of that familiar Indian virus Its Not My Fault. And that, naturally, wouldnt help the users, considering that all theyd ever want is a little more breathing space.
