As part of a graduation project, a typical ‘sick’ office building was subject to a retrofit R&D programme. It concerned a typical 1975 building with a sealed façade and a central climate control system with induction units. An interview of the some of the

The first survey of the ‘French permanent survey on Indoor Air Quality’ will start in 2003 on a random sample of 710 dwellings. To optimize the study cost, a ranking method was developed for prioritizing 70 pollutants including chemical and biological age

This paper will review 6 years of experience in risk communication and meeting workplaceinformation needs about the health effects experienced by people working in sealed buildings.The purpose of this paper is to discuss examples of the kinds of information that theworkplace community is seeking and what answers can or cannot be provided.In the past two decades, there has been a growing concern about potential chronic healtheffects of poor indoor air quality and mould.

Knowledge about gender-relate exposures is rare. Therefore, based on a patient collective in environmental medicine gender specific aspects of surrounding exposures were investigated. Questionnaire data of 656 women and 501 men, who have to be affected by environment-related health disorders were retrospectively analyzed. Gender specific differences and risk factors were determined by frequency distributions. Significant differences between women and men could be shown for exposures at home and workplace, for behavioral risk factors, and for health effects.

Since 1987, in Germany advisory centers for environmental medicine were founded. In the present study the relevance of indoor air problems in a patient collective in environmental medicine was investigated. Questionnaire data of 772 patients, who consulted the former Consulting Center of Environmental Medicine (CEM) of the Medical Institute of Environmental Hygiene at the Heinrich Heine-University Duesseldorf because of the suspicion of environment-related health disorders, were retrospectively examined regarding exposures and health effects.

There are several factors that affect the hygiene in the surgical operating theatres. The HVACairside system plays an important role to maintain the adequate hygiene level in the operatingtheatres. The present paper displays comparisons between different HVAC airside designs toassess their impact on the surgery staff and patient health and comfort. The present workutilizes a numerical modelling technique to predict local flow field characteristics, heattransfer and air distribution profiles.

The relationship between psychosocial characteristics and sick building syndrome(SBS) was explored among 348 employees occupying two buildings engaged in thepublic sector in Pretoria, South Africa. One building was characterized as sick(building B), whilst the other was not a known sick building (building A).

Correlation analysis of subjective responses of tropically acclimatized office workers in a fieldstudy conducted over nine continuous weeks using a 2 2 balanced design with temperatureand fresh air ventilation rates as control variables revealed that several related SBS symptomsare highly correlated. Thermal comfort and acceptability of air quality exhibit a strongcorrelation, whereas perceived indoor environmental variables have poor correlations amongthemselves. Principal component analysis further improved measures to variability bycombining coherent variables into six factors.

In January 2002, a new European project named HOPE (Health Optimization Protocol forEnergy-efficient Buildings) started with 14 participants from nine European countries. Thefinal goal of the project is to provide the means to increase the number of energy-efficientbuildings, i.e. buildings that are at the same time healthy and low energy users. Reducingenergy use by buildings also reduces CO2 emissions from primary energy used for ventilation,heating and humidity control.

Current remedial actions to buildings with indoor-environmental problems do not seem to decrease efficiently residents’ symptoms typical of the sick building syndrome (SBS). Apart from potentially unsuccessful renovations (cases), the cause could be that