Indoor Contamination Rises After Katrina
Researchers working under the guidelines of Dr. John Spengler of the Environmental Health and Engineering Department at the Harvard School of Public Health have really found indoor contamination rates 2 and a half times greater than outdoors readings in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
” We are finding some specifically nasty varieties of molds that are very allergenic,” Spengler mentioned. “My problem is that if people try to bring back things from inside their homes and take them to their new homes in houses, homes or mobile homes, the molds may bring back.”
Spengler specifies that much of the focus in the clean-up effort has in fact been on outdoors levels of molds and mildew, which posture significant health risks to people with allergies, asthma and reduced body immune systems. While outdoors readings exposed focused pollutant levels as high as 650,000 per cubic meter of air, Spengler’s group carried out exposed levels and indoor tests as high as 1.6 million.
Comprehending these high levels position serious potential health concern, Spengler’s group created a bundle for property owners they call a “mold bundle,” that consists of gloves, information and respirators sheets on safe elimination strategies. These were exposed to Red Cross authorities who are monitoring aspects of the clean-up, and the company bought 30,000 of the sets with funding assistance from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Spengler, an indoor contamination professional, was honored by eco-friendly benefactor Teresa Heinz with the ninth annual Heinz Award in the environment category for his research study, which has in fact exposed that direct exposure to indoor contamination can be a lot more unsafe to human health than outdoors pollutants.
