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Shelter: A Quest for Non-Toxic Housing
Crocuta writes "Many of the geeks on /. voluntarily confine themselves to their homes for vast
stretches of time, but what happens when your home becomes your prison? Eric Hunting
suffers from Environmental Illness which perpetually confines him to his home, which even
as carefully furnished as it is, is still slowly killing him. His website, Shelter, is both a plea for help and a guide
documenting one man's quest for non-toxic housing."
Erm, wood anyone? Bricks and mortar? Glass?
What wood? Plywood (flooring substrate) and press board are all made with really nasty glues.. that give off formaldehyde, among other things, for years and years. Bricks are made of god knows what in some cases, bonding and strengthening agents are used in the formula, and these too can give off gasses or dusts that are toxic to people with allergies. Mortar has really nasty things in it.. which again people can be allergic too, and to seal it you need to use paint.. which also can cause reactions in people who cant deal with certain fumes.
The fact that the guy is leaning towards adobe makes me think he is allergic to something that is pretty commonly used as a "safe" bonding or strenghtening agent.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I grew up with this sort of mindset presented as the normal way of life. My mother self-diagnosed herself with EI, MCS, Lupus, and other assorted disorders which never seemed to be confirmed by traditional medicine. This was always presented by her as proof of the shortcomings of the allopathic community.
:-) Strangely enough, the longer this went on, the less and less sensitive I became to my environment, to the food I ate, to the air I breathed. Now, as I sit here at my glue-ridden wooden desk in my carpeted office, breathing the air of one of the worst polluted cities in the country, the transformation is complete. I understand perfectly that people in my mother's mindset will say that I have "deadened my senses" to the surrounding toxins. My opinion is that, like any exercise in biodiversity, increased exposure to a variety of envioronmental substances makes one's system more able to cope with foreign invasions. The attempt to sterilize our living environment while growing up simply made us react more strongly to any small variation in that environment.
We lived out in the middle of the country, in a house made with a purposeful absence of traditional building materials. Non-treated wood, cedar shakes, etc. In spite of this, my mother seemed to grow constantly more sensitive to her environment, and put more and more safeguards in place to attempt to purify it. Ionic air filters were everywhere, including one in the car to attempt to reduce the effects of hydrocarbon emissions. She pursued a macrobiotic diet in order to attempt to balance her body and eliminate toxins taken in through food. Nothing seemed to improve the situation. Strangely(?) enough, as the years went by, both my sister and I both started exhibiting similar sets of symptoms.
12 years later, I have a very strong feeling about what actually happened during that time of our lives. After I moved out, I started presenting a plethora of external insults to my body in the form of poor environmental conditions, a [comparably speaking] junk food diet, and ingestion of various chemical substances. I called it "college."
As an addendum, my mother is still attempting to isolate herself from the known universe. In spite of this, she is still having the same difficulties. Given my experience over the past decade, I really have to wonder if the cure is a substantial portion of the disease.
http://www.google.fi/search?q=aspartame&ie=UTF-8&o e=UTF-8&hl=fi&btnG=Google-haku&lr=
yeah you shouldn't make assumptions on what comes off from google straight away.
however, there are studies that DO show aspartame as harmful, it tastes like crap, and has no real reason to be used instead of sugar(yeah sugar has energy but drink water then it's not like your going to get rid of fatty ass by drinking alternatives, eh, and they're just as bad to teeth as well, dissolving them).
the biggest gist is that it got through the check system by weaseling a bit.
hmm... i wonder why the more caring types of my family stopped drinking sweetened stuff(educated in medical, reading studies occasionally).
7000 as a number is just absurd too.
"Of the 90 non-industry-sponsored studies, 83 (92%) identified one or more problems with aspartame. Of the 7 studies which did not find a problems, 6 of those studies were conducted by the FDA. Given that a number of FDA officials went to work for the aspartame industry immediately following approval (including the former FDA Commissioner), many consider these studies to be equivalent to industry-sponsored research."
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Also, BTW, "toxic" here is a relative term. Toxicity is the level at which a certain potentially harmful thing begins to have negative effects. Every person has a different tolerance to a given substance based on a host of factors (genetics, prior exposure to that and related substances, current/prior disease states, current/prior injuries, etc); what is toxic to you may have no effect on me.
This guy (and people like him) have a decreased tolerance to a large number of substances for some unknown reason. So, although you may have lived in your house for decades with no ill effects, the case will likely be different for him.
This condition really intrigues me...it makes me wonder what could happen to make someone sensitive like this. There has to be a phsyiological/biochemical reason for it.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.