Beyond keeping our homes dust-free and mould-free, many of us are probably too clean for our own good – especially when it comes to allergies. Furniture polishes, window cleaners, aerosol sprays of all types, disinfectants, floor waxes, moth balls – all contribute to an invisible mist of chemical vapors in our homes. Most of these products are a combination of petroleum-based or coal-based ingredients, fragrances and complex chemicals.
‘One of the major factors in chronic illness today is the products we clean with,’ says Dan R. O’Banion, author of the books An Ecological and Nutritional Approach to Behavioral Medicine and The Ecological and Nutritional Treatment of Health Disorders (Charles Ñ Thomas, 1981).
Dr O’Banion is talking about chronic illness from chronic exposure. We all have heard the horror stories of people who mixed chlorine bleach with ammonia and keeled over dead. But repeated single, smaller exposures to these and several other products pose hazards of their own. ‘Even mild exposure to certain chemicals may lead to chronic bronchospastic responses [such as wheezing] or allergic reactions in susceptible persons,’ write Drs Rose H. Goldman and John M. Peters in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The two worst household offenders are probably oven cleaners and air fresheners. Oven cleaners because they’re the strongest; anything that replaces good old elbow grease in battling six months of burned-on fat and pie drippings has to be pretty potent. And air fresheners – either scented aerosols or the perfumed ornaments slapped on the lid of a rubbish bin – because they add more chemicals to the home environment.
But you don’t need either of these products. Keep your oven clean by always wiping it out soon after you use it (and it’s still warm) or by scraping off dried grit with steel wool. And a far better – and cheaper – air freshener, suggests Dr Boxer, is an opened box of plain old baking soda. ‘That will absorb odours, not add them,’ he says.
Baking soda, in fact, is one of many simple, old-fashioned items that do the job of several expensive and odorous housekeeping supplies.
If you must keep strong commercial cleaners on hand, store them in a tightly sealed container, preferably outside the home in a detached storage shed. That includes: paints, solvents, lacquers, turpentine, lighter fluid, charcoal fire-lighters, glues, odorous soaps and detergents, polishes, mops and cleaning cloths, chlorine bleaches and ammonia. When you use them, be sure the windows are wide open and a fan is on. Afterwards, leave the area for several hours while the fumes dissipate.
When it comes to painting, refinishing and re-modeling, you may not have much choice of products. All may be highly odorous. In general, however, alkyd-base paints are better tolerated than latex or epoxy paints, whose odour seems to linger for months. If you’d like to test your personal tolerance to a particular product before making it a permanent part of your home, there are some ways to get an idea of what you can and cannot tolerate.
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