Hardware That Literally Doesn't Stink?

gtaylor writes "You know that new computer smell? Some people (like me) get sick from it. Can Slashdot readers provide good suggestions for mice or keyboards made from ceramic, unlacquered hardwood, metal, etc, non-plastic headphones and microphones, screens like the new metal-framed cinema display from Apple, etc? (Wood is not necessarily right if it's glued or varnished.) I have a Sharp Plasmacluster air purifier that is very helpful but the fewer volatile organic chemicals released in the first place, the better. I'll also need a chair (leaning to the Herman Miller Mirra chair) and an adjustable metal/hardwood desk. High-density hard synthetics like polypropylene (a popular material at Ikea) or acrylic are also inert enough to be fine if they have no plasticizers - suggestions for a full office set-up welcome."

Comments

Oh, patients...

[Davak]

As a practicing pulmonary doctor, I see patients that claim a wide variety of environmental sensitivies. My one patient was an engineer who thought her computer "was releasing chemicals that were killing her" did the following.

She placed her computer case in a plastic storage bin and placed it in the crawl space under her bedroom. She then bought extension cables for everything and ran the cables up into her living space. I wish I had the pictures she brought in... but her setup included a desk mounted power switch as well.

Once she moved her computer out of her bedroom she decided that her light bulbs were releasing harmful chemicals. It was obviously her light bulbs because she had moved basically everything else out of her bedroom.

Of course, she slept with her cat... but her cat couldn't be causing her allergies. Of course not.

Gesh... just another day at the office.

Davak

Re:Oh, patients...

[tarquin_fim_bim]

but her cat couldn't be causing her allergies

No, her cat told her about the computer.

Re:Oh, patients...

[BoldAC]

I am a practicing allergist and I have found that most people with multiple environmental allergies are just a little mental. Sorry, there is no other way of saying it.

I am NOT suggesting that all people are like that... just most. So I hope the person who submitted the question doesn't get offended.

As an allergy doc, let me suggest something before you kill yourself with this stuff. Just go see an allergic specialist in your area. We can skin test for almost every known allergic substance to man. Plus, as the medline article that you referenced (which says nothing about computer/electronic smells) suggests, you may have asthma if these smells are making your feel poorly.

Reading from your website it appears that you may believe you have chronic fatigue syndrome as well. Is there some connection between multiple environmental sensitivies and chronic fatigue? It would be odd for you to have two rare diseases.

Re:Oh, patients...

[Kaboom13]

Engineers with common sense? As an engineering student, trust me when I say you have no idea how wrong you are.

Re:Oh, patients...

[CaptainCarrot]

I know what holistic means, thank you very much.

It's easy to complain that doctors don't treat patients "holistically", but mistakes in this area are unforgivable. You can thank our legal system for that. As a result, doctors dare not treat patients for conditions outside their specialized areas of expertise. Not if they want to stay in practice, that is.

You'll find that doctors generally have little say in who comes to them. In extreme cases they will refuse further treatment, but usually they make a good-faithg effort to treat a patient for the complaints they bring forward. But when a patient refuses necessary tests, refuses to acknowledge true causes for her complaints, and possibly even refuses a suggestion for psychiatric treatment -- what can a doctor do but throw up his hands over it?

It's easy to be cynical from where you sit, of course, but if you ever knew any actual doctors personally you'd know that by and large they'd be perfectly happy never to see another hypochondriac again. But they dare not turn them away just on the off-chance it's something real this time. You can thank our legal system for that too.

Re:Oh, patients...

[Anne_Nonymous]

Clearly this is a case of allergy to cat pollen. Go ahead, ask me another one...

I like the smell...

[Kjuib]

send me your new goods, and I will send them back after I wear the new smell off... Sounds like a plan to me!

Ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

I think with the majority of Slashdotters, the hardware which suffers most from stink problems lies between the keyboard and chair...

keyboards

[funkdancer]

dunno about plastics etc but if you ever tried popping off a key or two in one of your few-year-old keyboards - particularly if you regularly eat at your computer desk, well chances are you've located a primary source of smell just there.

Take up smoking...

[WarMonkey]

Take up smoking. Tobacco will give you a legitimate reason to worry about your health and deaden your sense of smell.

I used to hate Big Macs

[QuantumG]

Couldn't stand em. Made me sick. Well one day I decided to have one even though I didn't like em. Felt like I had wasted my money. Know what I did? I bought another one. After about 5 Big Macs I was startin' to dig it. Now I really like Big Macs. Sometimes you have just to grin and bare it until your body adjusts. Now maybe you have a serious medical condition and are literally allergic to this stuff. In which case, you can probably get some injections that will very slowly expose your body to it until you are used to it. But chances are you're not seriously allergic to this stuff, you're just a big cry baby. Eat the damn Big Mac.

How to make the problem *better*

[Anonymous Coward]

My youngest son had many such allergies: plasticizers, peanut butter, and a few others. After dealing with the HMO quacks for over a year, we took him to a real doctor, who showed us that the only way to cope with these afflictions is to gradually increase your exposure to them so that you can build up a tolerance. DO NOT try to run from them like a sissy; they are everywhere, and you will ruin your life if you can't handle a little plastic or varnish here and there. These days, the symptoms are all but nonexistent in my son, and the treatment worked.

Just my 2 cents, from a concerned parent who's been there.

My PCP

[lavaface]

Whoa! For a second there I thought you said your PCP wasn't giving you heart palpitations and I thought "Man, your dealer's rippin' you off!" : )

Re:Maybe the cat isn't the problem

[gl4ss]

do you think that somebody who decides 'it's the lightbulbs' would have properly ruled that out?

Re:Maybe the cat isn't the problem

[Davak]

That's a great question. She has refused skin or RAST testing looking for environmental allergies... so I do not know for sure.

However when her daughter takes the cat off to college, she feels dramatically better. She says that's it the stress that her daughter gives her.

She also notices that she gets hives and a runny nose when around other cats... and she honestly thinks she might be allergic to them. Just not her cat.

Congrats with the chicken thing. Reminds me of the old joke:

"Hey, doc... I get palpations everytime I eat chicken."
"Great, don't eat chicken. Next!"

Davak

Very nice but, for the price...

[da5idnetlimit.com]

I could ask for a Natural keyboard 8)

"It takes about 15 working hours to finish a complete one solid wood keyboard, starting from a carefully chosen piece of lumber up to the polishing and testing of the final product. Because of this labour intensive and careful process, Wood Contour can only deliver a limited amount of items per year, since we want to guarantee you that the quality we deliver is the best in the world.

keyboards
Solid Wood PC Keyboard - Ash
$1,115.00
Solid Wood PC Keyboard - Beech
$1,115.00
Solid Wood PC Keyboard - Cherry
$1,115.00
Solid Wood PC Keyboard - Mahogany
$1,115.00
Solid Wood PC Keyboard - Maple
$1,115.00"

While browsing I also found this ...
Stone mice and keyboard and screen...

quite expensive, with the whole set a more than 7000$... but hey, here it is!

NASA Might help

[Fiz Ocelot]

Everything that goes into space that interacts with humans needs to be tested for smells. Even things that seem perfectly fine to any normal person could be terrible in space due to temperatures and environment they're exposed to.

So I think a starting point me be with This guy. Here also. I don't know if they would release any info to you about what items you may find tolerable but it might be worth a shot.

Re:Maybe the cat isn't the problem

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

I dunno if I'd call it "stupid". I work in Healthcare ( respiratory as well, but mostly dealing with sleep medicine instead of allergies ), and people think they understand their bodies pretty well. I mean, they're around them practically all the time, so they sort of consider themselves to be an authority on the subject.

People form a speculative hypothesis on what might be causing their problems, and then their everyday experiences are subtly edited by memory to fit and reinforce these ideas. Not everyone has the understanding of proper eliminative testing, or the discipline, to correctly figure out their problem, or at least some kind of ameliorating behavior, unlike that chicken-dude who's floating around in this thread somewhere. This isn't just a medical problem - people do this in all facets of their lives.

Don't be too harsh on these folks. Nobody likes to feel sick, and even less to not understand what's happening to their body. Reaching out for a hypothesis that they can understand is natural in this situation - it's the job of healthcare professionals to reach through this barrier of uncertainty and provide correct diagnosis and treatment.

YLFI

full-on...

[SethJohnson]

I used to hang out with a couple of these guys. Total hypocondriacs. Sometimes I think it's also a power trip. Like these people feel powerless over their own lives, so they attempt to exert some kind of influence over others to placate their special needs.

I have some distant relatives who claim environmental sensitivities. I had to stay at their house for a wedding. They went nuts because my girlfriend ignored their pleas and she used her own shampoo. We solved their problem by just never visiting them again.

Seriously. When these people get in your face trying to lay a guilt trip, they're trying to control you. Ignore them.

Re:full-on...

[DunbarTheInept]

I know someone who is allergic to just about every type of food. The list of bad foods includes all nuts, and fruits in which the seeds touch the 'flesh' if the fruit - like strawberries, watermelons, and banannas. (Fruits where the seeds are contained within by a thick hull or core are okay), Several beans are also bad, including Cocao, so chocolate is out. And on top of all that, he's lactose intolerant. And no, it's not a power trip, nor a case of hypochondria. Unless, that is, you believe he is so good at unconsiously controlling his body that he can cause his windpipe to swell and cut off his breathing, requiring a speeding trip to the hospital (in which adrenneline was used to kill the swelling (not sure how that works) so he could breathe again, and then the emergency room doctor advised him to never again go out and eat in public restaurants, and only eat food he'd cooked himself so he knows every ingredient that goes into it.)

I've seen it happen. It's really not pretty.

The problem is that the existence of people like this (real deadly multiple-allergy sufferers) gives ammunition to the whiny hypochondriacs. Because some people like that exist, Hypochondriacs think they might be one of them.

Given how allergies work, it makes perfect sense why someone with one allergy tends to have other ones too. An allergy is caused by your immune system having corrupt data on its threat-identification lookup table, so to speak, so it ends up labelling things as major threats when they really aren't. If the identification is badly off enough, it can even raise the threat level of the "intruder" to the point where the immune system "thinks" it's a deadly poison, and so it "thinks" it is authorized to react with everything it's got, even measures which could themselves kill you. And the thing is, this "lookup table" is something that gets edited over the course of your life. Your immune system starts with genetic presets from your parents, but then learns as it goes. If something makes you sick, your immune system learns to fight that something in the future. The nasty thing about some allergies is that they snowball. The allergy itself makes you feel sick, and so the immune system raises the threat rating of that substance and fights harder against it next time, making you even more sick, so it raises the threat rating even more, and starts getting really overzealous about anything that even looks remotely like the allergen - so what starts as an allergy to just walnuts ends up becoming an allergy to all nuts - anything which has a similar enough recognizable chemical pattern in it gets flagged as a problem.

Essentially, the immune system has a cascading snowballing effect that makes it so that more exposure to the allergen makes the allergy worse in the future. So that's why there do exist some people who really *are* that allergic to things - if their immune system is confused to begin with, it tends to cause itself to get even more confused.

fsck me, highly improbably computers are the cause

[riprjak]

"High-density hard synthetics like polypropylene (a popular material at Ikea) or acrylic"

(warning, I am about to rant again, one of those weeks)

Polymers such as Polypropylene are not just popular with Ikea, there is a good change damn near every white good in your house; most of your car and several of your brown goods are mostly polypropylene (PP) (toilet seats/cisterns even in some countries); your outdoor furniture is almost certainly PP if it isnt metal and glass; maybe even have polyamide (see rant below) cushions. Im certain the top of your washing machine is polypropylene unless it is one of the very new (recently trendy) aluminium exterior or an industrial steel construction one.

Lets not forget the ABS/PC (Acrylonitrile butadiene Styrene/Poly Carbonate) Alloys often used in computer equipment and cars and most "finished" (painted or electroplated) polymer products; "Acrylic" (sic), perhaps you mean PMMA (Poly Methyl Methacrylate); like most of the non-glass drinkware in your house?? That woodgrain in your car, unless it is a VERY EXPENSIVE luxury vehicle, it is almost certainly cubic printed PC/ABS (mercedes owners, sit down, most of yours are cubic printed too). The lenses of your sunglasses/glasses are almost certainly Poly Carbonate or, worse, a thermoset polymer; more volatiles!!! (used in production, but, being volatiles, long past outgassed) oh no!!!.

As for plasticisers; except for FLEXIBLE polymers (like the TPE's used on your mouse wheel and your toothbrush), manufacturers try to avoid volatile plasticisers as they outgas and cause defects during processing; indeed, correct processing of rigid thermoplastics tends to ensure all volatiles are outgassed during processing. If they dont outgas at the 200~300 degrees C they are processed at, they wont at room temperature!!!

Your car's Instrument Panel is almost certainly skinned with a TPE that will outgas volatiles. Either that or painted with a soft feel paint, once again, it will outgas volatiles. Why do you think you need to clean the inside of your winshield so often??

Do you use a latex or synthetic pillow?? or blanket/quilt/doona/comforter(insert name for said from your country here)... more polymers with volatile plasticisers.

I am fairly certain, in fact, that your computer is the LEAST LIKELY item in your home/life to produce volatiles which make you sick/cause allergic reaction. Unless dust/fluid from YOUR ENVIRONMENT is frying on heatsinks etc...

Do you wear ALL COTTON/WOOL clothes??? well, bugger me if you arent wearing plasticised poly amide filaments ("Nylon" or "polyester"); your toothbrush bristles are made of similar materials. Even your toothpaste probably comes out of a PET (Poly Ethylene Teripthalate) or PE (poly ethylene) or PP receptacle.

Hell, the shelves in your fridge are likely to be PMMA or PC if they arent steel mesh. Im fairly certain you have a Poly Ethylene chopping board in your house and drink your favourite soft drink or fruit juice from a PET bottle (oh! no, plastic!!!) bottle.

Bloody hell, whilst we do tear shit out of the enviroment using fossil fuels to create these polymers (although recycling helps, ALOT, you all should do it or lobby your local council/government to do it; takes maybe 5 minutes out of your day); they are so all pervasive that suggesting the use of plasticised polymers in your computer or doped ceramics is making you sick. Lacquered wood or coated metals are just as likely to outgas if heated as many polymers...

What a crock; most allergy specialists would look for OBVIOUS causes first... dust, dust mites, pollen... And even if it *IS* from polymer additives (not plasticisers, these are far from common in rigid polymers), your computer hardware is almost certainly the SMALLEST contributor.

I challenge ANYONE in the western world to proove that they come into contact with more variety of polymers due to their computer than in the rest of their life. If you drive a car, you already loose Almos

Never underestimate psycho-somatic effects.

[Halo-]

I'm not a doctor. I can barely spell doctor. But, I do know this from personal experience:

It is definitely possible to make yourself physically sick if you are mentally convinced you are sick.

I spent years fighting near constant bouts of nausea. Saw a slew of specialists, had scans, tests, X-rays, pokes, prods, and pills. Nothing helped. After a few years I began to realize it was the situtations I was in that seemed to induce my nausea... gee could it be mental?

Short story: yes. I had(have?) "Social Phobia" before it was the cool thing (like ADHD that every third kid has). The damnest thing is that once I knew what was wrong, and was positive my feeling sick was purely in my head, I discovered it was still impossible to not feel "sick" sometimes. It's just like being scared of flying. You can be on a plane and rationally know that you are safer than in your car, but still be terrified at the same time.

My feeling is that a lot of these MCS people just freak out when they smell something "odd". I doubt there is a single treatment to snap these people out of their loop. Therarpy did nothing for my problem, but the slightest taste of an SSRI drug fixed me like flipping a switch. For other people, drugs just make them feel nasty, and talking things out helps.

The point is, I think there is something wrong with people who "have" MCS, and it can be serious, but no amount of avoid the "bad chemicals" is going to help them.

Take two, call me in the morning. Don't sue. No for use with certain sets, your mileage may vary...

Re:BULLSHIT

[swordgeek]

I disagree. MCS victims are virtually never frauds or attention whores. They're severe psychosomatic cases, and need psychiatric help.