OBJECTIVES As a part of the worldwide European Community respiratory health survey, possible relations between symptoms of asthma, building characteristics, and indoor concentration of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in dwellings were studied. METHODS The study comprised 88 subjects, aged 20-45 years, from the general population in Uppsala, a mid-Swedish urban community, selected by stratif...

The waste that arrives at MBA Polymers’ big blue factory in Worksop, in England’s industrial heartland, is a dirty, smelly mess. Fresh from a metals recycler that has extracted hunks of steel from the crushed remains of cars and other trash, it contains many types of plastic jumbled in with carpeting, rubber, glues, bits of metal and glass, and even the occasional dead animal. Inside the cacoph...

Concerns about energy consumption and climate change make residential evaporative coolers a popular alternative to central air conditioning in arid and semi-arid climates. However, evaporative coolers have been shown to significantly increase indoor relative humidity and dust mite allergen levels in some studies, while showing no association in other studies. Improved measurement of temporal fl...

Microbial volatile organic compounds (MVOCs) are a type of VOCs produced by microorganisms. Exposure to 1-octen-3-ol, one of the known MVOCs, has been reported to reduce nasal patency and increase nasal lavage myeloperoxidase, eosinophil cationic proteins, and lysozymes in both experimental and field studies. We reported in a previous paper that 1-octen-3-ol exposure at home is associated with ...

Most children with asthma develop their symptoms before the age of 5 years and many preschool wheezers continue to wheeze in the early school years. It is thus important to investigate the factors that predispose young children to wheeze. The objective of this study was to investigate the relevant environmental and family influences on recent wheeze (wheeze within the last 12 months) in prescho...

Obstructive jaundice can have various causes, and both neoplastic and non-neoplastic lesions have to be considered. In cases of malignant disease, the tumors are usually located in the extrahepatic bile ducts, the pancreatic head, or the ampulla of Vater [1]. In rare cases, the causative lesion originates from the duodenum [2,3]. A 67-year-old man presented with nonspecific right upper quadrant...

Most published environmental remediation interventions have been directed at single allergens and have employed demanding strategies; few have been performed in the homes of inner-city children disproportionately burdened by asthma. Our objective was a) to describe the allergen sensitivities, environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) exposure, and home environmental characteristics of a national sample...

Her eyelids were closing. It must have been the stillness in room that made her realize. The two young elders advanced their slides across laptop screen and it felt late. She nodded slowly. Then more quickly, attentively, to show that, no, of course she wasn't dozing off. Surely, somewhere mission home there was drawer, it, a folder with plane ticket for morrow. alert.She looked out powder blue...

Shocked that chemical offshoots of his company's products were winding up in polar bears and seals, the CEO of 3M put an end to the existing version of Scotchgard® in 2000. Business observers were struck by how quickly this multinational corporation removed a flagship commodity worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the market. Now some scientific observers are becoming impressed by how qui...

Carpeting can be found throughout various buildings, whether residential or commercial. This carpeting can be very useful to forensic scientists, especially when biological samples are present on it. However, obtaining high quality DNA profiles from this potential piece of evidence can be challenging due to the presences of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) inhibitors that will interfere with the...