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Is Your Computer Leaking Toxic Dust?
n0alpha writes "A recent study by scientists at the University of Washington suggests that computers emit dangerous chemicals. Specifically, chemicals called PBDEs (poly-brominated-diphyenyl ethers) found in the household dust that collects on your monitor and keyboard could pose a health threat. Scientists say the chemicals have caused developmental and learning defects in laboratory animals and may pose a threat to people and animals. 'It's critical we phase these materials out,' said Suellen Mele, Citizens for Resource Conservation. And some companies are doing just that."
Is Your Computer Leaking Toxic Dust?
Being that they found these toxins on every computer sampled... As an aside, does anyone know what causes "New Computer Smell"? Obviously chemicals but what ones?
Trolling is a art,
Good to know it's not just the lead paint in my apartment.
btw, that article doesn't mention the university of washington at all. Google doesn't seem to think they have anything, either
If I recon correctly, gasoline fumes contains beneze. Have we stopped using gas ? I think not.
Everything is a question of risk. Just going outside is a health risk. Let's stop panicking for a while. We all gotta die of something.
How about using decent ventilation? Any electronic device contains materials that are very unhealty. But I doubt any of that would be really such a hazard if you'd provide sufficent ventilation and occationaly use a vacuum cleaner in the way they were intended to use.
Just look at what a single factory dumps in the air. I'd be more worried about that.
It's already been documented that silicon valley has the highest incidence of autism in children, as well as a growing rate of infertility. No idea on cancer yet.
Health care people also have increasing rates of autistic children, and at the same time their work environment has become increasingly technical (higher end imaging systems etc) I have not seen breakouts on different professions, expect more studies to follow.
I have four friends with recently diagnosed autistic kids, Parents: radiation technician, nurse, medical equipment technician, programmer, data administrator.
The fall of the Roman empire was attributed partly to the fact that the wealthy and affluent would drink wines out of lead vessels while the poor drank from animal sacks. The wealthy and powerful ended up poisoning their minds and allowed the barbarians to overun them. We may be doing the exact same thing with technology.
Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
BDE is not a bacteria or germ or anything of that sorts - it's a highly toxic chemical, much like PCB or DDT. The volume in each computer is not really a health risk to _you_ (unless you are a small child or a pregnant woman), but the accumulation of BDE in nature is an environmental danger that should be addressed.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I know of a banking software support department that was a victim of toxic overload. Their work area was full of computers, smelly carpet on the floor and walls of the cubicles and chemical emmiting magic markers strewn profusely around the work area. Added to that were stacks of computer manuals emitting printing ink vapors. The coup de grace was the cleaning lady that would spray deodorizer and wipe everybody's cubicle down with a cloth so dirty it probably was infected with several new undocumented life forms. What happened here was a situation where a large bank's database needed repairig, a major change that was to be done remotely from the tech support area. A dozen or so guys sat in on planning the change as well as the head of the department. A considerable amount of time was devoted to developing the proposed change. They diagrammed out the change on their chemically saturated ink pen markup board, the kind that is so common these days in corporations (no mind that junkies sniff the same type markers to get high). While they made their changes the cleaning lady made her rounds, the network laser printer spewed pages and clouds of toxic vapors, the fax machine added to this toll of chemical brew. When the time came to make the changes on the bank's ACTIVE database the mouse was clicked. One guy said as soon as that was done he realized they had screwed up. A banking system that processed tens of millions of dollars per hour was brought to it's knees. These guys were literally poisoned by the conditions prevailing in their work area and it made them look like chumps. There were other signs, particulary a high rate of headaches and one guy even had a sinus infection so bad that he ended up in the hospital(he was taking asprin because he just thought he had a 2 week long headache). While no one source of chemical outgassing is particularly signifigant it adds up.
I am a little confused. My research indicates that computers really don't generate very much dust at all. When they are new, they are very clean and generally devoid of fibrous substances that could be liberated as dust.
I have found, however, that computers make excellent dust accumulators. PBDEs are not only used in computers, but also in children's pajamas, mattresses, etc. - all of which generate large quantities of dust. If there are harmful flame retardant chemicals in the dust, wouldn't that have more to do with the mattress, furniture, and clothing than it would with the computer?
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
...may not be your own. There's been a lot of jokes here about how no one's going to live forever and all that bullshit, but there are other considerations than yourself.
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Let me give you a *painful* personal example. Three years ago, my six year old son was diagnosed with Autism - a genetic defect that may in fact be linked to chemicals such as these.
It would really piss me off to find that my career was directly responsible for his condition. My wife sent me this article before even Slashdot picked it up and it got me thinking about it.
It's all water under the bridge now, but my son's condition has affected our lives in countless ways including the decision not to have children in the future.
It also made me wonder about this article on Wired:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/asperge
It's how Silicon Valley has the highest rates of Autism in the country. Maybe it's not so much who you mate with, but in what environment...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I know that you are trying to be funny, but my budget allows me $1000 to build a new computer in the next couple of months (big news for me, since I use a Celeron 466 at home). I also have two small children at home -- a three-year-old and a two-year-old, and I love them very much and want them to be healthy.
What I want to know is if the "dust" is left on the item from manufacture, or if the "dust" is regular houshold dust which leeches chemicals from any exposed surface. The first one you can hope to clean off, the second one you can't. I did read a version of the article linked from the Yahoo new site (not sure how different it is from the article mentioned here). But in the article that I read, they just found dust, and apparently made no effort to determine the source, or if cleaning a new computer would help.
And if chemicals are being emitted by every available surface, are any airborne, or do they need a carrier such as dust in order to travel?
If the resudue can be cleaned off of the parts, what is a safe cleaner to use on a motherboard?
At least I am glad that I have already decided on an Antec server case which has air filters over the intake fans in the front. If I do find a way to clean off the mobo and other internal electronics, then I might be able to keep dust off of the inside of the case.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Maybe, but I can't imagine anyone ever coming back in a couple of years and saying these chemicals are good for us.
As far as I can tell, nobody can really tell for sure that they are bad for us now. I haven't been able to find any health effects on humans, and the studies I have found are limited to lab mice and don't appear to be conclusive (IANA biologist). If someone could point me towards something a little more conclusive I would appreciate it.
I'm not saying there definitely isn't a problem, but at the very least it looks like we need more research. There's enough bad science going on now to make me skeptical of any health warnings printed in major news media, and the article takes it as a given that PDBE's are toxic to humans while only really reporting that they are present in computers.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
As far as I can tell, nobody can really tell for sure that they are bad for us now. I haven't been able to find any health effects on humans, and the studies I have found are limited to lab mice...
:-)
One of the biggest problems with such studies is that they don't know how they "scale down". For example, if 100 exposure units causes a loss of 10 IQ points, does that mean that 10 units causes a loss of 1 IQ point?
Some toxins scale down linearly and some bottom out quickly and don't seem to cause detectable problems at low levels. Then again, lowering the IQ of every citizen by 0.1 percent is still not a good thing. And, combinations of toxins from different sources may cause problems that they would not in isolation.
It is very expensive to test rats at low levels because you need huge numbers of rats and lots of time to detect small differences in their health or behavior. Thus, they usually use a smaller number with higher doses.
It is a messy grey art. Even peanut butter and other "natural" substances have been found to cause cancer in rats in high doses. Whether peanut butter is causing cancer in humans also is unknown. Most natural foods probably have various toxins it that our bodies simply cope with by living with some amount of degeneration. Then again, human bodies originally only lived to around 40 years. If we live longer, than such toxins may pose more problems.
Enjoy your sandwich
Table-ized A.I.
Unfortunately for us, in the US at least, we have become overly obsessed with germs and germ fighting. Everything you see kills 99.9% of bacteria!
My wife and I raise goats. (for milk & meat) One thing I noticed is I'm a lot more resistant to the "office flu" then my coworkers.
Soon we will be bathing in extra strength bleach, drinking pool water (we basically do), and using disposable/burnable everything.
On occasion, my wife and I will spend a few days at her parent's house. They live in the city. I can hardly stand to take a bath there because the fumes from the chlorine hurt my eyes. I swear they have more chlorine in their water then in a pool! We can't stand drinking it, so we buy bottled water.
At home my water comes from a well. It's probably packed with e.coli and anthrax, since I'm raising goats a few hundred feet from the well head. In fact, I'm pretty sure it has e.coli, since e.coli outbreaks occure at country fairs if they use the water out of the well for the city folk. (doesn't effect the country folk) Most fairs will bring in bottled water for that reason.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
May be a primary cause of Sudden Infant Desth Syndrome (SIDS).
A lot of research has been done in this area recently.
It may not be a conspiracy, but there seems to be something to it.