Not to be indelicate, but the thing that reliably spikes my air monitor is passing gas. Would match up with the nausea and other symptoms. Not to mention the "earthquake" hallucination
That said, it's hard to argue with the measured heart rate. A 10 bpm drop then rise correlated with moving into and out of the apartment is pretty strong evidence of something. It just seems very unlikely it's from ground contamination.
Sure. 'Something'.
The kind of account this person provided is reminiscent of personal testimonials of individuals who live close to cellular towers. And so far, it is only her account. How do you know she's a credible, objective observer? How do you know she isn't experiencing psychosomatic symptoms? And now she's fixating on 500 gallons of something or other because of some passing reference in a report...Maybe there is something buried in there, so what? Who says that has anything to do with anything?
Also, this line struck me: "it’s an outbreak of new housing developments on toxic land and water with laissez-faire oversight". San Francisco and 'laissez-faire' don't really go together. You know, the city that will deny development license if the proposed building will cast an overly large shadow over a playground. Come on.
Is there something here? Who the heck knows, anything is possible. The fact that so many just want to take her word for it without an ounce of skepticism is a little disappointing.
2) The development was explicitly expedited with permission of the city.
3) She actually collected data on both tVOCs and her physical symptoms.
There's absolutely room for skepticism, but dismissing it out of hand by equating it to cell-tower crazies is ridiculous.
Dismissing her symptoms as completely fabricated is ridiculous but I think it's entirely reasonable to dismiss her explanation for them out of hand because it is entirely on-par with cell-tower crazies spouting off nonsense about things they don't understand.
She was on the third floor, no one else is having symptoms, lead and arsenic contamination beneath a foot of dirt and a big thick concrete foundation is never going to plausibly cause very high VOC levels only in one third floor apartment. She even dismisses expert opinions that disagree with her idea as "some expert wordsmithing and spin". She even claims that it's contaminated the tap water, as if it must just come from the groundwater.
I find the claim that there's a high VOC level in an apartment causing numerous health problems completely reasonable. It's the blatantly ridiculous leap of blaming remediated soil contamination that makes me dismayed. Quite frankly it makes people dismiss real environmental health problems by throwing in that nonsense along with it.
There's tons of valid explanations here, maybe when the flooring was replaced they went with a different supplier for that faux wood laminate and it's off gassing formaldehyde. Maybe the carpet in some part of the apartment had a similar issue. Maybe the drywall had to be replaced in that unit in the past and it's contaminated akin to the imported Chinese drywall back in the 00s. Maybe the paint stripper the apartment complex maintenance worker used was based on DCM and he accidently tipped over the can and they just said "screw it, we're putting new flooring over it anyways".
There's a thousand different valid explanations here, her explanation is nowhere on the map.
Some sources: [1] https://www.haywardscore.com/articles/is-your-dishwasher-imp... [2] https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/826
I'll bite. How would that look like in your opinion? In other words, to which part of her story would you apply this skepticism?
>The development was explicitly expedited with permission of the city.
What does that have to do with anything?!!? This is a complete non-sequitur? You're throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.
>but dismissing it out of hand by equating it to cell-tower crazies is ridiculous
Why? People who believe they are harmed by cellular towers present very real symptoms. They are sincere. How do you you know her symptoms aren't psychosomatic?
I said there's room for skepticism because we don't know that it's not psychosomatic. But: she gathered environmental data, and reports completed prior to her moving there had already concluded that "VOCs were above residential limits and, in some cases, even above vapor intrusion risk levels." The developer had made plans for advanced vapor mitigation. One of the reasons the area was a Superfund site in the first place was due to VOCs. In other words, there are a number of external reasons to think this is plausible.
Actually. We don't know anything. Or rather, we only know what she chose to present, already colored to match her conclusion.
How do you know some pertinent information isn't missing from her account?
>But: she gathered environmental data, and reports completed prior to her moving there had already concluded that "VOCs were above residential limits
So what? Let's say VOCs are above residential limits (and I'm not sure about that given that untrained people using consumer sensors are liable to get a fair share of false results or improperly interpreted results) ... BUT OK ... how does she (and you) know that this is what is causing her symptoms?
> In other words, there are a number of external reasons to think this is plausible.
I wouldn't go that far. All we can really say is that she is experiencing symptoms. Those symptoms could be a result of anything (or nothing). Nothing she says passes the smell test because she's engaging in very typical conspiracy theory thinking. She decided that the cause of her symptoms is living in an apartment built on reclaimed land for very flimsy reasons. And then she went around cherry picking evidence to support that conclusion.
I mean, she wrote a message to her apartment management company that stated: "The chemicals are still pouring out full blast" ... are they really? The management company sent an inspector to test for chemical and gas leaks ... and nothing. She hired her own consultant to perform the tests, and that person found nothing... and on and on and on.
She sounds EXACTLY like the people who are convinced cell towers are poisoning them. Every piece of countervailing is ignored by her ... just like a conspiracy theorist. She strikes me as someone who spiraled into this rabbit hole and got absolutely convinced this one thing (out of infinite number of possible things) is causing her symptoms.
Needless to say, I'm skeptical.
And if it's a remediation site with VOCs above vapor intrusion risk levels, don't you think the government should investigate?
Seems like a bigger issue that the remediation was rushed through, and no one would respond to complaints that there could be issues with that rushed remediation.
Hazardous waste isn't cell towers. We know hazardous waste can make people sick, and even kill them -- depending on the chemical and exposure. She mentions concern that vinyl chloride was there above vapor intrusion risk levels and no one would tell her why it wasn't cleaned up. That sounds nothing like EMF panic.
If you read her account, there were multiple tests done, by her hired expert and one contracted by the building management company, not including the testing done by Roux. She didn't accept any of the results because they didn't match her conclusion.
>Seems like a bigger issue that the remediation was rushed through
Rushed through how? This is California where nothing gets built in any reasonable time. But again, what does this have to do with anything? There is zero evidence that her symptoms are caused by the building, or anything related to it. The author simply decided it must be the cause. Must. And now, for some reason, we're debating this non sequitur.
An initial investigation by EIK had 1 sample of 17 that had vinyl chloride above screening levels, which raised VOC from off-site sources (the nearby superfund site) as a potential concern. As a result, Roux took more soil vapor samples several years later, and none of their measurements had vinyl chloride levels above the screening threshold. Maybe this process was rushed or shoddy or something (I wouldn't know or be able to guess), but from the EIR it sounds like Roux did the testing and didn't measure any significant VOCs.
and after this, they put in the system for mitigating vapor intrusion anyway.
Is there evidence that psychosomatic effects can be so strong as to account for a measurable 10% drop in resting heart rate? Especially since her symptoms appeared before she even started measuring air quality.
I have no clue. Maybe. Maybe not.
What doesn't pass the smell test for me is that the author fixated on what she thinks is the cause of her symptoms for non-rational, arbitrary reasons. She decided her symptoms MUST be the result of her building being built on reclaimed land. Why? Well, she got a consumer sensor that shows her something and therefore that must be it. Maybe whatever that VOC sensor is showing has NOTHING to do with anything she has.
It's reminiscent of conspiracy theory thinking, where the conspiracy theorist encounters some unknown phenomena and instead of saying "I don't know", they decide on a solution (whether that be aliens, or illuminati or living on reclaimed land) and they cherry pick and interpret evidence in a way that supports their ad hoc conclusion.
The article didn't make any concrete accusations and she was just asking for an investigation. She didn't say causation, she said correlation. "I began to think that there was an important correlation between this data and my symptoms." Even when she saw high VOCs, she didn't assume it was the remediation site. " I knew the situation was likely going to be complicated and that the tVOC readings on my personal monitors were not going to be conclusive on their own, but my gut told me something was terribly wrong." She was open to the site not being the cause. "I was thinking: If you don’t want me to be worried about this chemical’s impact to my health, you should tell me exactly why it wasn’t included in the clean-up despite being above residential limits." + "So, what made me sick? While in the end everyone agreed it was VOCs, I may never know for certain if it was the chemicals in the soil or groundwater and, if so, which ones."
Also, she mentioned a few times that doctors, government, and even Irvine Company's public relations person admitted VOCs made her sick, but just didn't know where the VOCs came from.
None of that sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Read on, because she then becomes convinced and send a message to her property manager that starts off with "The chemicals are still pouring out full blast." and starts her crusade until the management company lets her out of her lease (she wonders why they would do such a thing, but from sidelines, it's obvious - they don't want to deal with her anymore because even after they paid a contractor to test her apartment and surrounding area, she's not satisfied).
>She was open to the site not being the cause. "I was thinking: If you don’t want me to be worried about this chemical’s impact to my health, you should tell me exactly why it wasn’t included in the clean-up despite being above residential limits."
Are we reading the same thing? She's already down the rabbit hole by this point. She's asking non sequiturs and setting irrational standards. She wants answers to a thing that has nothing to do with anything she's going through. Again, there were multitude of reports, tests, and assessments that deemed the site safe - she just doesn't believe any of them (almost like she's asserting a consipracy)
>Also, she mentioned a few times that doctors, government, and even Irvine Company's public relations person admitted VOCs made her sick, but just didn't know where the VOCs came from.
Are you sure they did? And if they did, how would they know? And if they didn't, why would they challenge her? They don't know the situation. If you're a government employee tasked with handling her complaint, at some level all you can do is be empathetic and courteous. She seems to mistake this for agreement. None of it is convincing at all.
Again, I have no idea what the cause of symptoms are but the way she became convinced that this MUST be the answer 'smells' off to me.
[1] https://sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Ashley-Gjov...
[2] https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h2750
[3] https://opentextbc.ca/researchmethods/chapter/quasi-experime...
started before she had any suspicion about what could be the problem
That is so common. As someone who has regular panic attacks, it takes months to admit that there is something wrong with you, that it’s not a form of covid, no you’re not dying, you can breathe even without concentrating, your appendix had already been cut out, and the only thing you need is a psychiatrist. Being smart and able to analyze some random numbers and events only adds to the problem, because you sound reasonable for much longer time. For your entire life you believe that you are a perfect error-free mechanism that cannot be wrong. Of course it takes time to realize that it’s not true (and never was, really).
It’s very hard to realize that an issue may be completely inside your very smart and logical mind. It must be something in the air, or germs/viruses, or vibrations. I bet that at least one of the doctors suggested her to check her mental health, but we always dismiss that, because we are fine, alright. We are not the type of person who could need that, gosh, that’s laughable. Only idiots and schizophrenics may have mental health issues, not us. Of course this little nuance couldn’t make it into the article.
E.g. in my case it took nine months of occasionally “dying”, a bunch of pricey and unpleasant procedures, then two more weeks of the chronic state and three doctors suggesting it, before I decided to go check my mind. Symptoms rate dropped 50% after the first appointment and 45% more after I completed my first “homework”.
High heart rate: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/175241#causes (anxiety)
Low heart rate: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-a-slow-heart-rate-good... (nothing psychological)
You would need to know a lot more before you worry about 50 being low.
And yes, I had to get an EKG and the doctor raised his eye brow at my heart rate, but I said I run and he immediately Moved on.
Yes, meditation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333930474_Efficacy_...
Also panic attacks can mess up your heart rate quite a bit.
And they totally didn’t authorize a residential high rise building with foundation on sand that started to lean... oh wait https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/SF-s-sinkin...
If the VoC that's bothering her is heavier than air, it could be being blown upwards from the ground level and then settling back over the building and falling back down and finding its way back into her apartment somehow, like through the range hood, dryer exhaust, plumbing stacks, open windows, or just cracks due to poor craftsmanship.
If she was still at the site, I would recommend looking for what appears to be an exhaust vent of some kind that might be tied to the VOC barrier system and putting a sensor there and seeing if the readings correlate to the timeline of unusual readings in her home
Until 1996, leaded gasoline was generally legal in the United States (California phased it out in 1992). It remains legal as avgas and possibly for some specialised uses. Tetraeythyl lead is a toxic heavy metal compound thought to be a factor in the rise in urban crime, a phenomenon which traces its use and phase-out closely, though lagged about 20 years.
Among the compounds used as an alternative to lead was MTBE (Methyl tert-butyl ether), an oxygenate and ground-water contaminant, itself banned as a fuel additive in 2004 (2002 in California), though again it remains legal for other uses.
Petrol (gasoline) itself is often formulated with numerous other additives, and "is a mixture of a large number of different hydrocarbons", averaging hydrocarbon length of about 5-6. ("Naptha", shorter chains make more volatile fuels, longer chains heavier, e.g., kerosene, diesel fuel, fuel oil, bunker oil. "Octane" is an 8-chain compound with lower volatility, increasing the ignition point and reducing engine knocking due to premature ignition.) Various of the naturally-occuring, added, and refining-induced compounds themselves may be harmful or toxic, and include VOCs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBE_controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gasoline_additives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Chemical_analysis_and...
I have no idea if that was a common practice.
https://documents.geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/esi/uploads/...
Just like the placebo effect causes real, very significant healing effects, even a subconscious association with a place as ‘bad’ causes real, very significant detrimental effects that are externally measurable.
Essentially believing you have been given something that will make you healthier, can reduce the stress responses, pain perception and other issues that may be making the problem worse. In some cases it can be enough to allow the immune system to get better traction and objectively get healthier faster than with no medicine.
Pretty weird eh?
No, not really. https://www.painscience.com/articles/placebo-power-hype.php
Edit: gee, apparently I hit a sensitive topic. I did not realize that Hacker News was so attached to a belief in such a strong placebo effect.
I'm _very_ aware of the placebo effect, very scientifically minded, etc. I have white coat syndrome and have had to do quite a few of those 24 hour blood pressure tests over the years to make sure I'm not developing the real thing.
I don't know enough about VOCs in this context, however, I do know radon problems fairly well and with radon gases released by radioactive decay underground find their way into peoples' basements.
From there, they don't stay in basements. If they did, the risk to humans would be more mild. Instead, the radon gases migrate upward in the building towards the attic exposing everyone in the living quarters along the way.
Attic design is critical to how the radon flows in a house. You could actually increase the amount of radon that flows into a house by having too much attic ventilation along the roof peak. The ideal way to minimize radon involves low-roofline ventilation of the attic combined with trying to seal the basement floor of cracks/holes/etc.
*If* VOCs travel like radon, it would actually make sense that the higher floors will be more affected.
Another thing that came to mind: there is a known effect with sound waves - where multiple different sources of sound may not be a problem source themselves (e.g. low level rumbling fans from large buildings) - but then where those sound waves intersect can cause a problem point that impacts biological life; it can be a single source of industrial noise pollution, multiple cases of whole towns getting sick because of it being traced back to the frequencies/vibrations given off by large fans - but what if some noises happen to triangulate to be a problem in your specific unit? It's not impossible.
From 1974-1985, Synertek, Inc., leased the area directly uphill from where the Santa Clara Square Apartments currently stand. Synertek manufactured semiconductors, crucial to the production of microchips for computers and other technologies. The manufacturing involved highly toxic chemicals, and several tanks stored underground on site leaked VOCs into the groundwater, contaminating the soil around the area. In 1987, the area was deemed a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. In spite of this, or the VOCs known to be on site of the SCSA property, the DTSC did not make VOCs a part of their remediation plan for the apartments
This 2006 site report does not show the pollution extending under the apartment site, but who knows.
https://documents.geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/regulators/d...
Some people experience high blood pressure because of anxiety in a clinical setting.
An entirely mental process.
In what way is the author being unreasonable? By your own post, it could be anything, including exactly what the author said, no?
The only way to see what going on is by doing another Phase II ESA study. But those are expensive and you will need the approval of the owner which will be unlikely.
But the fact that it's new construction, and that the readings peaked at 3am would lead me to expect it's high-VOC construction materials, and the VOC's are accumulating while people have their windows closed at night and/or the HVAC system circulates less. I also wonder if she by any chance purchased a new memory foam mattress and/or pillows when she moved -- some people (like me) are horribly affected by the VOC's in them, even after many months.
Building on a previous Superfund site could be an entirely separate and coincidental issue here.
My experience with VOC's has also taught me, don't stick around and try to fight it -- just leave ASAP!! (or toss your mattress no matter how much you paid for it). And the fact that her doctors never suggested VOC's could be the culprit seems astonishingly negligent to me. I'm so sorry she had to endure these symptoms for months and months without anyone suggesting, hey go stay at a friend's for a few nights and see if it gets better.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying overall but you reference this “1 out of 1,800” point at least three times in your comment. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not necessarily relevant as any number of people in those 1,800 units may or may not be experiencing a variety of issues related to this.
The gp has to prove a counter factual now: no one else had symptoms.
They can’t do that. Do you know the history of all the move outs of that complex? Do you doubt the owner is highly litigious?
In addition, some people are just more sensitive. They act like a form of early warning system. Does living there give you an increased 10% of lifetime cancer? It would be hard to prove.
And a final note: doesn’t everyone deserve a safe place to live that isn’t poisoning them? The sheer amount of naysaying in these comments is disappointing and reveals a profound lack of understanding of the science and a severely over constrained mindset: if it cannot be proven immediately by an individual without a budget and no resources, then it cannot be true.
In my opinion, that makes it completely plausible that a problem relating to that tank could be so localized that it will only affect one tenant.
I'm not saying her problem was due to the 500 gallon tank. All I'm saying is that if it is, then it is not unbelievable that it affected only one (or a small number) of tenants.
> The Santa Clara Square project encompasses approximately 93 acres
The challenge with these stories is that they rely on vague details to create an appearance of plausibility. The fact that a tank containing some substance exists somewhere in a 93-acre property would not normally be credible cause to believe that someone’s symptoms in a 3rd story apartment are the result of the soil.
Again, to emphasize: I am not doubting that this person is suffering real symptoms. I think it’s a mistake to focus on the soil or mysterious tanks in unknown location as the cause to the exclusion of other possible causes.
I haven't seen this particular complex, but a lot of new apartment construction in the area has a basement parking garage. You'd think it would have enough ventilation and have enough natural circulation that this would be even more unlikely. Unless they shut of the fan because no one was leaving during covid.
I moved to another apartment building for the two years after that, and continued to have measurable AQ issues because the dryer, bathroom, and kitchen vents were flowing in reverse due to a poor building ventilation design that used a single central vent shaft and didn't adequately account for wind or the height of the building. I was on a side and floor of the building that had negative relative pressure much of the time.
Air isn't a perfectly homogenized uniform fluid -- there are very localized effects, and because it's often invisible, those local effects are often dismissed.
IMO the only sane and responsible way to develop apartments in a challenging environment (by a highway, by a fire or bbq environment, in an area where weed is legal, or on a toxic site) is for every single unit to have its own air handling system to maintain air quality and positive pressure in that individual unit.
So you're saying that real patients don't take selfies with equipment on? What an odd thing to say. Like why would that somehow prove the validity of her story?
From her story, she was already under very heavy strain before even moving in (full time program manager job which isn't something to sneeze at, and taking what sounds like a full time legal course at the same time), while moving into a new (and presumably expensive) apartment in what could be a new area. All this, presumably (based on references to '7 months' and 'September 2020 when I finally figured out what was going on', during a historic pandemic with massive, stressful shifts in work and school environments, availability of outlets/breakage in coping mechanisms, etc.
Throw in perhaps an unwillingness of a landlord to release someone from a lease (as the local high end single occupancy rental market has crashed > 40% during this time), nasty nasty air pollution for months (the fires definitely impacted me and my family on top of COVID related impacts during this time - literally months of unhealthy air, orange skies, my cousins house burned down in the santa cruz mountains and many areas I've loved to visit in the past burnt down - it was terrible for mental health), everyone in the medical community confused and scrambled - almost everyone has been going nuts, in many different ways, and the stress has often been incredible.
The whole south bay and peninsula is dotted with superfund sites, and she makes numerous references to public interest advocacy, so I'm sure she is aware of history the issues in the area and with legal training wouldn't lack the tools to dig.
If you move to a new place (very stressful) in the middle of all this, and get worse - it's also hard to look at 'non-negotiable' things like work or school as contributing, because, well, you handled them before and you can't stop now right?
If you run across something else that could be causing it, why not pursue it? Especially if they're a big corp or billionaire with deep pockets? Worst case they let you out of your overly expensive lease (now that the market collapsed) to get you off their back, best case you get a decent settlement to compensate you for the damage they caused (since you can't find anything else doing it).
One of the big challenges here in the bay area is everyone is always trigger happy legally for environmental issues, and most of this stuff is almost impossible to DISPROVE.
The science is really not great - we know some chemicals cause predictable things like cancers in certain situations - but there are a LOT of different chemicals, in a lot of different environments/states of weathering, in a lot of different types of exposure settings (residential with windows open a lot, residential with windows closed a lot, ground floor, top floor, near a vent, not near a vent, industrial, etc). And that isn't even counting all the different glues, adhesives, plastics, etc. in typical new construction. You can't run a good double blind study on this stuff (too many variables, ethical issues in many cases), animal models suck, chemical composition is sometimes not well documented or changed random over time, you name it.
Ideally we'd all live in untouched pastoral glades far from any industry, but that just isn't how the world works. People need to live near their jobs for efficiency reasons, jobs tend to be concentrated near businesses (or have been historically), businesses often make things, making things can be a messy and polluting business.
They recently lost thier operating permit and need to relocate in a year or so - so this is a real thing and not just the collective imagination of a Facebook group of local homeowners.
However, people report crazy symptoms from "the smell". Migraines, hives, etc. Not being able to sleep, having to rewash clothes because they think the dryer air intake made them stink.
I think the vast, vast majority of these symptoms and effects are people outraged that their very expensive home has an odour, only detectable outside, that they don't like. The stress of not getting thier way immediately leads them to these other health issues in my opinion. And it takes thier argument up a notch (prove they don't have a headache).
Anyway, my opinion is not popular. :)
I don't like the smell either and I'm glad they are moving the facility but it was just a bad smell.
So your neighbors were completely inline with feeling the way the do.
BTW, I went to school next to a mushroom farm. A big warehouse with giant mounds of manure. And yeah we felt all of that too during the warmest times of the school year. The school administrator and most parents tried to convince the students it was all in their head.
so kinda like the fervent supporters (most news outlets included) of lockdowns, pervasive mask-wearing, and long-covid (as if post-infection complications are something new and unique)? or the opposite faction defiantly anti-mask and anti-vaccine?
people exaggerate and then fall into a hole of argumentative sunk cost, where they then view their own reputation being on the line, so they double-down rather than back down. in the moment, we don't realize that it's actually not that costly to concede to exaggeration, that a matter of degree almost never bolsters an argument.
the curious part is not that, but that we've yet to solve this collecctive dilemma (reason vs. dignity) that's seemingly been with us since the dawn of time. in a private conversation, it's possible to recognize the dilemma and redirect the conversation to a more productive line of reasoning by just asking questions and unraveling contradictions with the respondent. 'giving face' is somewhat related, but isn't necessarily concerned with veracity and reason, only dignity, especially for the (perceived) higher class person. i've always liked the 'wisdom of crowds' concept because it could be exactly this collective dignity-preserving redirection, but it defies power and expertise, so doesn't get enough merit and employment.
Her taking a photo wearing medical equipment is extremely important. It would be normal to include it in the story. Also, people post their lives on social media as part of their journey. Being extremely sick would certainly be part of her journey.
Why is a photo of her wearing medical equipment extremely important? All the photo is documenting is that she wore medical equipment for some reason at some point in her life.
This is very much https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood
In addition, this woman has, at least, a full arm sleeve tattoo.
Tattoo inks are NOT FDA certified and the health side effects are unstudied and unknown.
Yeah, most people don't have a reaction, but it's highly probable that some do and she may simply be one of the unlucky ones.
Or, perhaps, eating at different restaurants once she moved? Perhaps something disturbing her sleep? Is she walking more or less? Is she walking through somewhere that uses pesticides or weed killer? Is the local grass watered with grey water that didn't get treated well enough?
If the cleaning crew bumps my work monitor an inch or two and I don't notice, I'll wind up with neck and back aches.
Commoner and closer things are more likely the explanation for something acute.
"Toxic waste" tends to be the culprit when you have weird disease clusters that are more chronic and take a long time to develop. "Toxic waste" that causes acute symptoms tends to be really obvious in multiple people.
There is poison that kills you and then there’s poison that makes your life 1% worse. Most people don’t notice or can’t get a deterministic diagnosis, a small number of people are disproportionally effected.
This is where we are in many places medically. The big problems are easy, the small problems are hard.
That said, I smell my downstairs neighbor smoking even with doors and windows closed because we share a ventilation system (fans in bathrooms, for example). So it could be a neighbor!
AMD, Hitachi, Applied Materials
Again, not doubting her story. I very much think her problem needs to be addressed. But, it's not just an "evil rental company" problem, these huge tech companies directly across the street from this waste had to have known about this too.
Also in the area is the "MEW plume". When I asked realtors about it while looking for real estate in the area they all claimed to know nothing about it - despite being locals and there being land development rules requiring that top soil be carted away to be treated.
So many people/orgs are tacitly working together to ignore the problem since no one wants to be inconvenienced or left holding the bag.
There are of course drawbacks with consumer devices compared to medical equipment, but there are also a lot of medical issues that come and go, possibly with time of day effects or specific triggers. Using only a few brief snapshots that come from official doctor visits to draw any conclusion is a huge drawback of much of modern medicine, and biomedical research is slowly trending towards addressing this.
If one is careful in buying high quality consumer devices and doing some sanity checks with their data collection process I feel it can already be informative. It can be a great screener and guide people towards what type of specialist they should see.
For some tests there are "take home" medical versions that can get a more official (albeit still much briefer than personal equipment) dataset. However it can often be difficult to get a doctor to order based on vague symptoms, and it is non-ideal for patients to go on such a fishing expedition through official channels, especially the way medical billing/insurance works in the US.
I get there is concern about patients reading into the data too much, and yes there will be some people with psychiatric problems that could be enabled. But I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. In addition to early detection of issues in healthy people, it would also have a lot of upside for people with inexplicable chronic illness.
Yes people like that are vulnerable and will cling to things, but guess what - giving them a shitty label like Fibromyalgia only drives them to alternative medicine scams and toxic internet forums. It's human nature to look for alternatives when something has failed, and so why not at least channel that in to something potentially productive? In some cases they might even find a real diagnosis, but in general it could lead to actual research on these very poorly defined diseases.
I don't know anything about sick building syndrome so can't really comment on that, but assuming the person didn't lie that would be remarkably coincidental timing with the move in and move out dates. Perhaps the toxin they identified is irrelevant, but there sure does seem to be something odd going on while they lived in that apartment.
They also are clinically fine again now, so even if it was some weird psychological thing, moving out of the building fixed the problem and therefore the data lead her to the right "treatment".
I guess my point is that maybe you're right that this wasn't sick building syndrome, and maybe that makes this article a net negative, because it could lead others to look for that where it isn't. But another takeaway from the article is just the more abstract story about investigating your problems so that you're more equipped to handle them. There can be non-medical/low risk interventions or mitigating strategies, and even in this instance it did also drive her towards relevant doctors (although it's impossible to say whether she sought out legitimate doctors since there is probably a higher ratio of quacks specializing in environmental toxins)
Unfortunately, doubting these people’s stories is taboo online so I’m going to tread carefully. However, when only 1 unit out of 1800 apartments (presumably 2000-3000 total residents considering multi-bedroom units) is experiencing severe and dramatic symptoms, my first guess would not be the soil under the foundation. I would be looking for building materials or chemical spills in that specific apartment unit.
Also, I’m not suggesting that we discount this person’s story. Their symptoms are certainly very real in that they are suffering, but the selfie of the person wearing medical equipment in front of a mirror combined with measurements from consumer devices as evidence should be approached with caution. There is a relatively new phenomenon casually known as Munchausen by Internet where some patients are drawn to the increasing attention they can garner by sharing, and unfortunately exaggerating, their stories on the internet. These patients often post selfies of themselves wearing medical equipment, in doctor’s offices, or in hospital beds. More commonly, typical patients prefer not to be photographed with medical equipment or in medical facilities. Again, I’m not suggesting we disbelieve this person, but it’s important that we consider the bigger picture (1800 unit apartment complex, apparently only one case of severe symptoms?) before accepting a single person’s analysis of what is causing her issues.
Mistaken “sick building syndrome” diagnoses can actually be very detrimental to patients who mistake other illnesses as being caused by their buildings, as they hyperfocus on their presumed explanation to the exclusion of following more typical diagnostic work ups that would help them eliminate more common explanations for those symptoms.