Sick House

Does a house get sick? No, not at all. Defective houses are easily worsening though. Otherwise, it means to miss houses instead of home-sick coming from living alone for a long time from family’s houses. This is not wrong either. Sick house or house sick is a syndrome which makes house owners sick.

This syndrome has been often seen in the people soon after buying new houses, remodeling old ones or moving to new apartments. What is happening to something new at home? New houses usually use building materials which contain volatile chemical substances. Due to these substances, the people living in new or remodeled houses, who are sensitive to chemical substances get sick such as headache, sour throat, eye glittering, skin chapping. Some of the patients suffer from mental instability resulting from these sicknesses.

Some of the chemical substances have already been identified as harmful, for example, formaldehyde, toluene or others. To take it serious, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has set indexes in room concentration against those chemical substances for building materials.

Sick house syndrome is caused by not only new houses but also schools or furniture. Schools, for example, are full of chemical substances for waxes on floors, disinfectants or agricultural chemicals sprayed over trees and weeds in school yards. Surrounded by these bad environments, sensitive kids can easily get sick too.

Furniture is also one of the causes. Since many pieces of furniture are made of woods, some of volatile chemical substances are used for it. Furthermore, moth repellents inside furniture for protecting cloth from moths or other insects eating garments contain chemical substances as well. One of the chemical constituents in moth repellents is paradichlorobenzene to taint room air. The room concentration of the substance in Japanese houses is usually two or three times higher than that in the West. This is because the Japanese climates of high temperature and high humidity make harmful insects comfortable. To kill them, moth repellents or some kinds of insecticides include many of the those substances.

How do you find harmful chemical substances in your houses. Although some companies including furniture makers provide safer materials or their products, it seems that the countermeasures in this field is less advanced. As long as new houses are concerned, however, there is a performance evaluation system in the new law, House Quality & Warranty Law, which was legislated in 1999(effective on April 2000). National-licensed institutions evaluate the performance of houses such as strength of structure, earthquake, resistance, sound insulation, fire prevention and amenity. Particularly in amenity there are close checks to measure the amount of formaldehyde. If you want to reduce the risks of sick-house, it will be one of the ways to have your houses evaluated by the system.