How to Diagnose and Treat Sick Building Syndrome
If workers in your organisation frequently suffer from respiratory, eye, and skin irritation, the root cause could be sick building syndrome (SBS). This condition describes chronic poor indoor air quality, which can have serious health effects for workers who are forced to spend several hours in affected buildings every day.
What Symptoms Does Sick Building Syndrome Cause?
Look out for these symptoms in your workforce:
- Skin irritation
- Nausea
- Fatigue
- Headache
- Frequent nosebleeds
- Eyes that are red, itchy and watery
- Sore throat
- Poor concentration
All of these symptoms can have serious impacts on an employee's ability to be productive while they are at work. According to the Department of the Environment and Energy, the annual cost of poor indoor Australian air quality could be as high as $12 billion. Taking action to resolve SBS is a good way to protect your employees' health and perhaps even increase productivity in your company.
How Can Sick Building Syndrome Be Diagnosed?
Workers who are affected by SBS usually feel better when they go on vacation or take time off from the workplace. In contrast, symptoms that are caused by an infection or individual health condition do not usually correlate with the amount of time spent at work.
To confirm SBS, you need to look into local air quality services. A professional air quality consultant can carry out tests to check the levels of common indoor air pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, mould and airborne dust.
What Can You Do About Sick Building Syndrome?
A local air quality services provider can help you develop a plan to tackle sick building syndrome in your office building. This plan might involve taking steps to improve ventilation in the building to allow pollutants out and fresh air in. A filtration system can also help to improve the quality of the air that circulates inside your workplace.
In certain cases, making a serious effort to tackle sick building syndrome will require you to replace outdated heating systems that produce carbon monoxide with modern alternatives. An air quality consultant can suggest heating options that are a suitable replacement for the systems you are currently using.
To keep the air quality in your building consistently high, you need to maintain your ventilation, filtration, heating and cooling systems regularly. It is also important to clean the building regularly to remove sources of indoor air pollution such as mould, hair, dust and dirt.
It is important that every person carefully considers the types of building products they use when building a new home. After all, the environment only has a finite amount of resources it can provide us, and once those are gone they cannot be replaced. To protect the environment, I recently built a home using sustainable building products. This means the products used are either recycled or come from renewable sources. My blog posts cover the different types of products you can use like reclaimed timber and bamboo. When it is time to build your next home, make a conscious effort to reduce your impact on the environment by making sustainable choices of your own.