Curing the sick building.

• Author: Skertic, Mark

Tracking down indoor air pollution takes part doctor, part detective.

When Pamela Harvey Hogue goes to work she is part doctor, part detective, trying to cure an unknown malady by searching for a culprit she very likely will be unable to ever see.

"Most of the time it's the air, the ventilation," says Harvey Hogue, executive vice president of the Corporation for Environmental Management in Indianapolis. "But it can be a lot of things."

The company is one of a growing number that investigates and tries to cure instances of sick-building syndrome, an affliction common in the modern office complex. It's not the building that gets sick; it's the people who work there who suffer the troubles.

The symptoms experienced by workers can include nausea, watery eyes, sore throats and headaches. The cure can be something as simple as moving the office copier to another part of the room or as expensive as revamping the building's ventilation system.

It's a problem that is difficult to pinpoint, but one that has an effect on the bottom line. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates workers take up to $3 billion worth of sick days annually to recover from the effects of sick-building syndrome. About $100 billion annually in health costs and lost earnings can be attributed to sick-building syndrome and the reduced productivity it causes, according to the Consumer Federation of America.

For the consultant called in to help solve the problem "it's a detective story and you never know if you'll solve it the first day," says Dan Zbinden, of Micro-Air's industrial hygiene division in Indianapolis.

Problems can include molds, dusts, methane gas leaking from plumbing, microscopic particles escaping from new carpets, gases coming from office partitions and some types of furniture, inefficient lighting systems, escaped fiberglass fibers, chemical smells from copy machines and not-so-fresh-air systems.

Sick-building syndrome can manifest itself in hundreds of ways, but generally the problems employees report go away once they leave their workplace. It can take weeks or longer for a noticeable trend to develop, as employees working in a building begin to realize that others in the office or on another part of the same floor are experiencing the same headaches or nausea.

"Sometimes management needs to have someone look at the problem from a fresh perspective, from a health-based view," Zbinden says.

Even a seemingly clean office where management tries to...