Moldy Building Becomes A NIOSH Case Study - but where are the toxicological and neurological tests?

[Guest guest]

http://www.ctnow.com/news/health/hc-sickbuilding.artsep01.story?coll=hc%2Dhe

adlines%2Dhome

Moldy Building Becomes A Case Study

September 1, 2002

By HILARY WALDMAN, Courant Staff Writer

Across the country, headlines tell the horror stories of indoor mold:

Schools are closed; families abandon homes with breakfast dishes still in

the sink; Ed McMahon's dog dies; lawsuits and claims by sick workers

threaten to bankrupt businesses.

The tales are terrifying, but are they true? Is indoor mold a genuine health

threat or merely fuel for a national hysteria?

Ethel Dorsey, a 49-year-old secretary from Farmington, may help national

scientists find the answer.

Dorsey is among 250 employees of the Connecticut Department of Revenue

Services who are participating in a government-sponsored study to determine

if there is indeed a relationship between mold-infested office buildings and

work-related respiratory illness.

" Single case reports are numerous; actual case studies are few and far

between, " said -Ganser, an epidemiologist with the National

Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. " We're trying to fill in some

gaps. "

The tax department's headquarters at 25 Sigourney St. is one of a handful of

buildings across the country that NIOSH, part of the U.S. Department of

Health and Human Services, has selected for testing.

The building meets two important criteria: An unusually high number of

workers there are sick, and the state is spending millions of dollars trying

to fix the 20-story building.

" We wanted to look at a building where the owner had money for remediation

so we could possibly look at before and after, " -Ganser said.

While health problems in the modern brick-and-glass tower probably date to

the time it opened in the 1980s, complaints by state workers came to a head

in the late summer of 2001 - almost exactly a year ago.

Alarmed by reports of hacking coughs, shortness of breath, sinus infections,

dizziness, burning eyes and other serious health problems, union

representatives asked NIOSH to perform a routine health hazard evaluation.

-Ganser, the epidemiologist who did the initial review last year, found

that the rate of asthma among workers at 25 Sigourney St. was one-third

higher than the state average, with 12 percent of building workers reporting

current asthma, compared with 7.8 percent of the state's general population.

That came as no surprise to building workers who have been flocking to the

occupational and environmental health clinic at the University of

Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.

They call themselves " the sickies. " Ethel Dorsey is among them. Most are

veterans of the tax department and moved to the top five floors of 25

Sigourney St. in 1995, shortly after the state bought the building from

Xerox Corp. for $42.6 million.

" I thought I had a cold. My breathing was so bad I had to prop myself up [in

bed] to breathe, " said Dorsey, who since has been diagnosed with

occupational lung disease and has moved to another building.

Dorsey is among 23 of the tax department's 730 workers at Sigourney Street

who have had their desks moved to satellite locations after complaining of

building-related illness.

But others have remained in the building, using medication to treat their

symptoms. Joe , a division chief in charge of auditing tax returns,

continues to work on the building's 17th floor despite building-related

asthma.

, a former marathon runner, said he has always felt fine while

running. Inside the building he feels heaviness in his chest and wheezing.

Like others, his voice becomes raspy at the end of the day.

For a few months his symptoms seemed to subside, said, probably

because he was away from the building a lot. But with the long hours he

recently has worked preparing for the state's newly announced tax amnesty,

he has started having trouble breathing again.

Although is convinced that his symptoms are building-related and he

fears becoming chronically debilitated, he said he would be unable to

supervise his 60-member staff from home or a remote location.

State Public Works Commissioner T. R. Anson, who is responsible for

maintaining state buildings, acknowledged that water damage has been a

vexing problem at 25 Sigourney St. But he said he is not convinced that mold

is making the employees sick.

Leaks plagued the building from the beginning. Every time it rained, water

soaked the new tax offices, making carpets squishy and dampening the walls.

Wallpaper in the bathrooms peeled. Wallboard deteriorated. Files of

paperwork were soggy.

The environment was the perfect breeding ground for the mold and bacteria

that federal investigators now hope to prove - or disprove - can make

susceptible people very sick.

Outdoors, mold is everywhere and causes few problems, short of a little

sneezing and wheezing when counts are high. Only recently have scientists

begun to suspect that the benign and omnipresent fungi can become harmful

when they move indoors and begin to feed voraciously on newer building

materials such as wallboard and cellulose insulation.

Reports of mold-related indoor illness date back to the 1970s, when the

energy crisis and advances in building technology sparked a nationwide

switch from drafty wood-and-brick structures to air-tight, steel-beamed

buildings filled with wallboard and other synthetic materials.

While the buildings may be airtight, it remains difficult to make them

watertight. And the newer materials soak up rainwater like a sponge.

" Mold needs three primary things, " said Gil Cormier, president of

Occupational Risk Control Services, a New Britain company that specializes

in identifying and fixing indoor air problems. " Spores, which are

everywhere; nutrients, such as dust; and water. If they don't have water,

they cannot grow. "

Wet carpets, he said, pose an additional problem. They can become a breeding

ground for gram-negative bacteria, a type of germ different from those found

in the human body. Gram-negative bacteria can affect the immune systems of

sensitive people.

While there are no standards for acceptable indoor levels of mold or

gram-negative bacteria, air and dust samples from 25 Sigourney St. have

shown high enough levels of both to cause concern.

Dr. Eileen Storey, director of the Center for Indoor Environments and Health

at the UConn Health Center, said she is convinced that the tax department

building is making some tax department workers very sick.

About 100 workers from 25 Sigourney St. are patients at Storey's clinic. She

said some are " the worried well, " but a significant number have diagnosable

lung problems that she thinks are linked to their workplace. So many tax

department workers have sought help at the clinic that doctors have added an

extra half-day of office hours to accommodate them, Storey said.

Some of the sick workers have been moved to other buildings and a few are at

home, collecting workers' compensation. Last year, the state processed 128

workers' compensation claims for state tax department workers - although not

all of those workers are out sick. Nonetheless, the number of claims filed

in 2001 was more than twice the number of claims filed by workers at the

state Department of Public Health, a department of comparable size. So far

this year, 44 workers' compensation claims have been filed by tax department

workers, about the same as the number of claims filed by the health

department, which is not believed to occupy a sick building.

One problem facing the tax department is that not everybody gets sick from

breathing mold. Only a minority of workers, maybe one in five, are expected

to feel the effects. Others, who are not susceptible, will feel fine.

Union leaders say that while state Tax Commissioner Gene Gavin has been

sensitive to individual workers, state leaders have missed the big picture.

By next year, the state will have spent more than $6 million to improve

ventilation and stop the leaks at 25 Sigourney St. But Mike Winkler,

president of the state workers' union representing accountants, said the

work should not be done with employees in the building.

" Personally, I want all of us out of the building, " Winkler said. The longer

healthy employees remain there, he said, the greater the risk that more will

get sick.

Anson called any talk of moving employees premature. While he acknowledged

that there are no standards for indoor mold, he said the air inside 25

Sigourney has been tested and meets all requirements.

" We know the air inside that building is better than the air outside the

facility, " Anson said.

Meanwhile, Ethel Dorsey sits at a new desk in a converted state Department

of Transportation garage in Wethersfield, miles from her old boss, Joe

. She now does data entry for another department because she can no

longer perform her secretarial duties from a remote location.

In May, scientists from NIOSH asked her - along with 249 other tax

department workers, some sick, some not - to spend hours completing a

medical history questionnaire and taking allergy and lung-function tests. In

one, she was asked to inhale an irritant that would set off asthma symptoms

in people whose lungs are sensitive to contaminants in the air. She made it

through four rounds of increasing levels of irritation before she had to be

given a special medication to open her airways. She said she was sick for

days after that.

NIOSH investigators also took air and dust samples from work stations,

looked for water damage in the building and used a scope to look for mold

inside the walls. Although test subjects can expect to receive their

individual results within a few months, -Ganser said a report that might

link the building to asthma " will take some time. "

Dorsey, who ate lunch every day in a conference room where Stachybotrys

chartarum, a particularly dangerous form of mold, was found, said she is

just glad that somebody is finally taking an interest.

" I was willing to participate even if it meant it would not benefit me, " she

said.

Dorsey and about a dozen of her fellow tax department colleagues interviewed

over the past two weeks said quitting is not an option. They're going to

stay as a matter of principle, and practicality.

" I got sick through no fault of my own, " Dorsey said. " At my age it's not

going to be easy to get another job, particularly at the pay I'm making.

I've got 15, 16 years of state service. I don't feel that I should have to

throw that away. "