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“Sick building syndrome” is a difficult topic to discuss because it’s very difficult to prove a connection between the vague symptoms and the building. In many

“Sick building syndrome” is a difficult topic to discuss because it’s very difficult to prove a connection between the vague symptoms and the building. In many cases, only a single person seems susceptible to the claimed building issues. In this case, the apartment complex appears to have over 1,800 units, which makes it surprising that only a single person is experiencing such dramatic effects. Unfortunately, doubting these people’s stories is taboo online so I’m going to tread carefully. However, when only 1 unit out of 1800 apartments (presumably 2000-3000 total residents considering multi-bedroom units) is experiencing severe and dramatic symptoms, my first guess would not be the soil under the foundation. I would be looking for building materials or chemical spills in that specific apartment unit. Also, I’m not suggesting that we discount this person’s story. Their symptoms are certainly very real in that they are suffering, but the selfie of the person wearing medical equipment in front of a mirror combined with measurements from consumer devices as evidence should be approached with caution. There is a relatively new phenomenon casually known as Munchausen by Internet where some patients are drawn to the increasing attention they can garner by sharing, and unfortunately exaggerating, their stories on the internet. These patients often post selfies of themselves wearing medical equipment, in doctor’s offices, or in hospital beds. More commonly, typical patients prefer not to be photographed with medical equipment or in medical facilities. Again, I’m not suggesting we disbelieve this person, but it’s important that we consider the bigger picture (1800 unit apartment complex, apparently only one case of severe symptoms?) before accepting a single person’s analysis of what is causing her issues. Mistaken “sick building syndrome” diagnoses can actually be very detrimental to patients who mistake other illnesses as being caused by their buildings, as they hyperfocus on their presumed explanation to the exclusion of following more typical diagnostic work ups that would help them eliminate more common explanations for those symptoms.

georgeam 6y ago
The article mentions that there is a 500 gallon tank of some toxic material buried at a unknown location in the property. 500 gallons is very small -- 66 cubic feet, which is about 4 ft by 4 ft by 4 ft. In my opinion, that makes it completely plausible that a problem relating to that tank could be so localized that it will only affect one tenant. I'm not saying her problem was due to the 500 gallon tank. All I'm saying is that if it is, then it is not unbelievable that it affected only one (or a small number) of tenants.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  The site she’s referring to is almost 100 acres and the apartment in question is on the third floor. It’s exceedingly unlikely that a tank is located precisely in a way to leak into a single 3rd floor apartment. > The Santa Clara Square project encompasses approximately 93 acres The challenge with these stories is that they rely on vague details to create an appearance of plausibility. The fact that a tank containing some substance exists somewhere in a 93-acre property would not normally be credible cause to believe that someone’s symptoms in a 3rd story apartment are the result of the soil. Again, to emphasize: I am not doubting that this person is suffering real symptoms. I think it’s a mistake to focus on the soil or mysterious tanks in unknown location as the cause to the exclusion of other possible causes.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > a single 3rd floor apartment I haven't seen this particular complex, but a lot of new apartment construction in the area has a basement parking garage. You'd think it would have enough ventilation and have enough natural circulation that this would be even more unlikely. Unless they shut of the fan because no one was leaving during covid.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      I lived in an apartment two floors above a pool and barbecue area for a year. I regularly had severe air quality issues that did not affect the floors below me. I could watch the smoke from the barbecue grills rise up to my level, then travel horizontally across and into my poorly sealed windows due to persistent local air currents. I moved to another apartment building for the two years after that, and continued to have measurable AQ issues because the dryer, bathroom, and kitchen vents were flowing in reverse due to a poor building ventilation design that used a single central vent shaft and didn't adequately account for wind or the height of the building. I was on a side and floor of the building that had negative relative pressure much of the time. Air isn't a perfectly homogenized uniform fluid -- there are very localized effects, and because it's often invisible, those local effects are often dismissed. IMO the only sane and responsible way to develop apartments in a challenging environment (by a highway, by a fire or bbq environment, in an area where weed is legal, or on a toxic site) is for every single unit to have its own air handling system to maintain air quality and positive pressure in that individual unit.
sroussey 6y ago
Yeah, I’d question the previous person living in that apartment and try and find out if they were cooking meth or something.
- ohazi 6y ago
  It's a new development.
  - sroussey 6y ago
    Still could be someone before, but if not then construction itself could be the issue. That said, I smell my downstairs neighbor smoking even with doors and windows closed because we share a ventilation system (fans in bathrooms, for example). So it could be a neighbor!
treis 6y ago
To add to this she says she's in apartment 349 which is on the third floor. Very hard to imagine off gassing from the ground creates hazardous conditions three floors up. Not to be indelicate, but the thing that reliably spikes my air monitor is passing gas. Would match up with the nausea and other symptoms. Not to mention the "earthquake" hallucination That said, it's hard to argue with the measured heart rate. A 10 bpm drop then rise correlated with moving into and out of the apartment is pretty strong evidence of something. It just seems very unlikely it's from ground contamination.
- lazide 6y ago
  Psychosomatic issues, while ‘in someone’s head’ cause very real physical problems that are quite measurable. Our brain and our bodies are tied together in ways that are not convenient to think about, frankly. Just like the placebo effect causes real, very significant healing effects, even a subconscious association with a place as ‘bad’ causes real, very significant detrimental effects that are externally measurable.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I though the “placebo effect” is just regression to the mean. I.e. “sick people tend to get better”
    - orangeoxidation 6y ago
      That doesn't seem to be all of it. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
    - Stupulous 6y ago
      Nah, it works the other direction too. People expecting side effects from a placebo often get them- though you could argue that many side effects are common symptome now being associated with the drug. Still, the placebo effect beats no treatment per https://ebmh.bmj.com/content/5/1/15 https://ebmh.bmj.com/content/5/1/15 or https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12535498/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12535498/
iJohnDoe 6y ago
The first advice you’ll get from most people is to document everything. Her taking a photo wearing medical equipment is extremely important. It would be normal to include it in the story. Also, people post their lives on social media as part of their journey. Being extremely sick would certainly be part of her journey.
- balozi 6y ago
  > Her taking a photo wearing medical equipment is extremely important Why is a photo of her wearing medical equipment extremely important? All the photo is documenting is that she wore medical equipment for some reason at some point in her life.
- getpost 6y ago
  The tattoos in the photo that caught my attention. Aren't tattoos a source of toxic exposure? https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/think-you-ink-are-tattoos-safe https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/think-you-ink...
zikzak 6y ago
I live in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. We're are downwind from a compost facility sometimes. The smell is horrible k if you grew up using outhouses, it's the smell after a weekend when the extended family visits). Very intense some days. However, it is just "a bad smell". They recently lost thier operating permit and need to relocate in a year or so - so this is a real thing and not just the collective imagination of a Facebook group of local homeowners. However, people report crazy symptoms from "the smell". Migraines, hives, etc. Not being able to sleep, having to rewash clothes because they think the dryer air intake made them stink. I think the vast, vast majority of these symptoms and effects are people outraged that their very expensive home has an odour, only detectable outside, that they don't like. The stress of not getting thier way immediately leads them to these other health issues in my opinion. And it takes thier argument up a notch (prove they don't have a headache). Anyway, my opinion is not popular. :) I don't like the smell either and I'm glad they are moving the facility but it was just a bad smell.
- watwut 6y ago
  I don't find the idea that cloth could be smelly from smelly air crazy. When you have cloth in smelly air, in fact they do smell after. Likewise, migraines does not sound like crazy symptoms, whether they are ultimately tied to compost. Migraines are something that happen when you don't breath well.
  - zikzak 6y ago
    I've never noticed our clothes smelling from the dryer. No one dries on the line here because of all the silt in the air. I am reconsidering my position on the headaches based on another comment. I might be in the wrong there.
- yardie 6y ago
  Manure and organic waste excrete hydrogen sulfide while they are being digested. The rotten egg smell you speak of is the hydrogen sulfide and it is toxic. And one of the major symptoms of H2S poisoning is migraines, coughing, shortness of breath. So your neighbors were completely inline with feeling the way the do. BTW, I went to school next to a mushroom farm. A big warehouse with giant mounds of manure. And yeah we felt all of that too during the warmest times of the school year. The school administrator and most parents tried to convince the students it was all in their head.
cdubzzz 6y ago
> In this case, the apartment complex appears to have over 1,800 units, which makes it surprising that only a single person is experiencing such dramatic effects. I don’t disagree with what you are saying overall but you reference this “1 out of 1,800” point at least three times in your comment. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not necessarily relevant as any number of people in those 1,800 units may or may not be experiencing a variety of issues related to this.
- ryanobjc 6y ago
  Also the gp has no proof or basis for this statement other than: a) they read a story about 1 persons experience b) the site has 1800 units The gp has to prove a counter factual now: no one else had symptoms. They can’t do that. Do you know the history of all the move outs of that complex? Do you doubt the owner is highly litigious? In addition, some people are just more sensitive. They act like a form of early warning system. Does living there give you an increased 10% of lifetime cancer? It would be hard to prove. And a final note: doesn’t everyone deserve a safe place to live that isn’t poisoning them? The sheer amount of naysaying in these comments is disappointing and reveals a profound lack of understanding of the science and a severely over constrained mindset: if it cannot be proven immediately by an individual without a budget and no resources, then it cannot be true.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    To be fair its nonsense rhetoric to ask someone to prove the non-existence of something you aren't able to measure (given we can't just barge into people homes and start probing them). But there is a likelihood that other people who have symptoms will now come forward seeing this, so the people of Santa Clara Square still might have more for us. I would be surprised it doctors can't detect if the patient has been poisoned.
Schweigi 6y ago
How do you know this was the only person? Others might have complaint to the property management company. Besides that, not everyone thinks that its their own home who makes them sick and they will blame something else. Its possible that a specific area hasn’t been cleaned properly so only a few apartments will be affacted and not all 1800. The only way to see what going on is by doing another Phase II ESA study. But those are expensive and you will need the approval of the owner which will be unlikely.
- Schweigi 6y ago
  Btw, if you live in CA you can use https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/public/ https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/public/ and https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov to search for any known environment risk in your area.
  - odysseus 6y ago
    Are there any of these for other states?
colechristensen 6y ago
The problem is small effects. There is poison that kills you and then there’s poison that makes your life 1% worse. Most people don’t notice or can’t get a deterministic diagnosis, a small number of people are disproportionally effected. This is where we are in many places medically. The big problems are easy, the small problems are hard.
zby 6y ago
She has some medical problems. She discovered environmental problems with the building or whole property. Most probably they are not related - but there is this disturbing thing that the environmental problems would never be fixed if they cause only very low-grade harm. This is very much https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood
caddemon 6y ago
Complaining about vague symptoms and then complaining about data collected with consumer devices is a little unfair IMO. We should be encouraging people with vague symptoms to collect more objective data! There are of course drawbacks with consumer devices compared to medical equipment, but there are also a lot of medical issues that come and go, possibly with time of day effects or specific triggers. Using only a few brief snapshots that come from official doctor visits to draw any conclusion is a huge drawback of much of modern medicine, and biomedical research is slowly trending towards addressing this. If one is careful in buying high quality consumer devices and doing some sanity checks with their data collection process I feel it can already be informative. It can be a great screener and guide people towards what type of specialist they should see. For some tests there are "take home" medical versions that can get a more official (albeit still much briefer than personal equipment) dataset. However it can often be difficult to get a doctor to order based on vague symptoms, and it is non-ideal for patients to go on such a fishing expedition through official channels, especially the way medical billing/insurance works in the US. I get there is concern about patients reading into the data too much, and yes there will be some people with psychiatric problems that could be enabled. But I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. In addition to early detection of issues in healthy people, it would also have a lot of upside for people with inexplicable chronic illness. Yes people like that are vulnerable and will cling to things, but guess what - giving them a shitty label like Fibromyalgia only drives them to alternative medicine scams and toxic internet forums. It's human nature to look for alternatives when something has failed, and so why not at least channel that in to something potentially productive? In some cases they might even find a real diagnosis, but in general it could lead to actual research on these very poorly defined diseases. I don't know anything about sick building syndrome so can't really comment on that, but assuming the person didn't lie that would be remarkably coincidental timing with the move in and move out dates. Perhaps the toxin they identified is irrelevant, but there sure does seem to be something odd going on while they lived in that apartment. They also are clinically fine again now, so even if it was some weird psychological thing, moving out of the building fixed the problem and therefore the data lead her to the right "treatment". I guess my point is that maybe you're right that this wasn't sick building syndrome, and maybe that makes this article a net negative, because it could lead others to look for that where it isn't. But another takeaway from the article is just the more abstract story about investigating your problems so that you're more equipped to handle them. There can be non-medical/low risk interventions or mitigating strategies, and even in this instance it did also drive her towards relevant doctors (although it's impossible to say whether she sought out legitimate doctors since there is probably a higher ratio of quacks specializing in environmental toxins)
nathanvanfleet 6y ago
> More commonly, typical patients prefer not to be photographed with medical equipment or in medical facilities So you're saying that real patients don't take selfies with equipment on? What an odd thing to say. Like why would that somehow prove the validity of her story?
- caddemon 6y ago
  The photo clearly doesn't provide any real evidence for her story, but it's also reckless speculation to say that "real patients" tend to not take photos with medical equipment. People take photos of everything these days. For a more extreme example of something you would expect people to not photograph - just think about how many people post photos of illegal activity on their social media profiles.
  - lazide 6y ago
    The challenge with a lot of these scenarios is it could be real (as in a theoretical normal person would have similar or the exact same issues), it could be psychosomatic, it could be someone pointing the finger at someone with deep pockets for a very real, but actually unrelated issue - not out of malice, but even because they believe it's true and no one has any evidence to the contrary. It can also be someone looking for a payday. Rarer, but it happens. From her story, she was already under very heavy strain before even moving in (full time program manager job which isn't something to sneeze at, and taking what sounds like a full time legal course at the same time), while moving into a new (and presumably expensive) apartment in what could be a new area. All this, presumably (based on references to '7 months' and 'September 2020 when I finally figured out what was going on', during a historic pandemic with massive, stressful shifts in work and school environments, availability of outlets/breakage in coping mechanisms, etc. Throw in perhaps an unwillingness of a landlord to release someone from a lease (as the local high end single occupancy rental market has crashed > 40% during this time), nasty nasty air pollution for months (the fires definitely impacted me and my family on top of COVID related impacts during this time - literally months of unhealthy air, orange skies, my cousins house burned down in the santa cruz mountains and many areas I've loved to visit in the past burnt down - it was terrible for mental health), everyone in the medical community confused and scrambled - almost everyone has been going nuts, in many different ways, and the stress has often been incredible. The whole south bay and peninsula is dotted with superfund sites, and she makes numerous references to public interest advocacy, so I'm sure she is aware of history the issues in the area and with legal training wouldn't lack the tools to dig. If you move to a new place (very stressful) in the middle of all this, and get worse - it's also hard to look at 'non-negotiable' things like work or school as contributing, because, well, you handled them before and you can't stop now right? If you run across something else that could be causing it, why not pursue it? Especially if they're a big corp or billionaire with deep pockets? Worst case they let you out of your overly expensive lease (now that the market collapsed) to get you off their back, best case you get a decent settlement to compensate you for the damage they caused (since you can't find anything else doing it). One of the big challenges here in the bay area is everyone is always trigger happy legally for environmental issues, and most of this stuff is almost impossible to DISPROVE. The science is really not great - we know some chemicals cause predictable things like cancers in certain situations - but there are a LOT of different chemicals, in a lot of different environments/states of weathering, in a lot of different types of exposure settings (residential with windows open a lot, residential with windows closed a lot, ground floor, top floor, near a vent, not near a vent, industrial, etc). And that isn't even counting all the different glues, adhesives, plastics, etc. in typical new construction. You can't run a good double blind study on this stuff (too many variables, ethical issues in many cases), animal models suck, chemical composition is sometimes not well documented or changed random over time, you name it. Ideally we'd all live in untouched pastoral glades far from any industry, but that just isn't how the world works. People need to live near their jobs for efficiency reasons, jobs tend to be concentrated near businesses (or have been historically), businesses often make things, making things can be a messy and polluting business.
ljhsiung 6y ago
Also worth noting is that several large tech companies are on <100 feet away from her apartment, literally across the street. AMD, Hitachi, Applied Materials Again, not doubting her story. I very much think her problem needs to be addressed. But, it's not just an "evil rental company" problem, these huge tech companies directly across the street from this waste had to have known about this too.
- entangledqubit 6y ago
  In many cases they do but neglect to adequately inform employees that may be potentially be affected. At the Google Quad campus in Mountain View there was an incident where some ventilation fans were accidentally turned off which caused employees to be exposed to TCE (affects embryo development so mainly concerning to pregnant employees) that is leeching up from the ground. I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people would not have been able to tell you it was a risk in working there. Also in the area is the "MEW plume". When I asked realtors about it while looking for real estate in the area they all claimed to know nothing about it - despite being locals and there being land development rules requiring that top soil be carted away to be treated. So many people/orgs are tacitly working together to ignore the problem since no one wants to be inconvenienced or left holding the bag.
crazygringo 6y ago
Yes. I know I'm personally extremely sensitive to VOC's in a way most other people aren't, so I don't doubt her medical symptoms at all. But the fact that it's new construction, and that the readings peaked at 3am would lead me to expect it's high-VOC construction materials, and the VOC's are accumulating while people have their windows closed at night and/or the HVAC system circulates less. I also wonder if she by any chance purchased a new memory foam mattress and/or pillows when she moved -- some people (like me) are horribly affected by the VOC's in them, even after many months. Building on a previous Superfund site could be an entirely separate and coincidental issue here. My experience with VOC's has also taught me, don't stick around and try to fight it -- just leave ASAP!! (or toss your mattress no matter how much you paid for it). And the fact that her doctors never suggested VOC's could be the culprit seems astonishingly negligent to me. I'm so sorry she had to endure these symptoms for months and months without anyone suggesting, hey go stay at a friend's for a few nights and see if it gets better.
bsder 6y ago
> Their symptoms are certainly very real in that they are suffering, but the selfie of the person wearing medical equipment in front of a mirror combined with measurements from consumer devices as evidence should be approached with caution. In addition, this woman has, at least, a full arm sleeve tattoo. Tattoo inks are NOT FDA certified and the health side effects are unstudied and unknown. Yeah, most people don't have a reaction, but it's highly probable that some do and she may simply be one of the unlucky ones.
- micropsia 6y ago
  Under that theory, why would she feel better after moving out of the apartment? An why would her vitals stabilize back to normal? (assuming she brought her arm with her)
  - bsder 6y ago
    Got an addition right before it all happened and finally settled down? Quit doing something that reliably bumped her arm? Or, perhaps, eating at different restaurants once she moved? Perhaps something disturbing her sleep? Is she walking more or less? Is she walking through somewhere that uses pesticides or weed killer? Is the local grass watered with grey water that didn't get treated well enough? If the cleaning crew bumps my work monitor an inch or two and I don't notice, I'll wind up with neck and back aches. Commoner and closer things are more likely the explanation for something acute. "Toxic waste" tends to be the culprit when you have weird disease clusters that are more chronic and take a long time to develop. "Toxic waste" that causes acute symptoms tends to be really obvious in multiple people.

georgeam 6y ago

The article mentions that there is a 500 gallon tank of some toxic material buried at a unknown location in the property. 500 gallons is very small -- 66 cubic feet, which is about 4 ft by 4 ft by 4 ft. In my opinion, that makes it completely plausible that a problem relating to that tank could be so localized that it will only affect one tenant. I'm not saying her problem was due to the 500 gallon tank. All I'm saying is that if it is, then it is not unbelievable that it affected only one (or a small number) of tenants.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The site she’s referring to is almost 100 acres and the apartment in question is on the third floor. It’s exceedingly unlikely that a tank is located precisely in a way to leak into a single 3rd floor apartment. > The Santa Clara Square project encompasses approximately 93 acres The challenge with these stories is that they rely on vague details to create an appearance of plausibility. The fact that a tank containing some substance exists somewhere in a 93-acre property would not normally be credible cause to believe that someone’s symptoms in a 3rd story apartment are the result of the soil. Again, to emphasize: I am not doubting that this person is suffering real symptoms. I think it’s a mistake to focus on the soil or mysterious tanks in unknown location as the cause to the exclusion of other possible causes.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > a single 3rd floor apartment I haven't seen this particular complex, but a lot of new apartment construction in the area has a basement parking garage. You'd think it would have enough ventilation and have enough natural circulation that this would be even more unlikely. Unless they shut of the fan because no one was leaving during covid.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I lived in an apartment two floors above a pool and barbecue area for a year. I regularly had severe air quality issues that did not affect the floors below me. I could watch the smoke from the barbecue grills rise up to my level, then travel horizontally across and into my poorly sealed windows due to persistent local air currents. I moved to another apartment building for the two years after that, and continued to have measurable AQ issues because the dryer, bathroom, and kitchen vents were flowing in reverse due to a poor building ventilation design that used a single central vent shaft and didn't adequately account for wind or the height of the building. I was on a side and floor of the building that had negative relative pressure much of the time. Air isn't a perfectly homogenized uniform fluid -- there are very localized effects, and because it's often invisible, those local effects are often dismissed. IMO the only sane and responsible way to develop apartments in a challenging environment (by a highway, by a fire or bbq environment, in an area where weed is legal, or on a toxic site) is for every single unit to have its own air handling system to maintain air quality and positive pressure in that individual unit.

sroussey 6y ago

Yeah, I’d question the previous person living in that apartment and try and find out if they were cooking meth or something.

ohazi 6y ago
It's a new development.
- sroussey 6y ago
  Still could be someone before, but if not then construction itself could be the issue. That said, I smell my downstairs neighbor smoking even with doors and windows closed because we share a ventilation system (fans in bathrooms, for example). So it could be a neighbor!

treis 6y ago

To add to this she says she's in apartment 349 which is on the third floor. Very hard to imagine off gassing from the ground creates hazardous conditions three floors up. Not to be indelicate, but the thing that reliably spikes my air monitor is passing gas. Would match up with the nausea and other symptoms. Not to mention the "earthquake" hallucination That said, it's hard to argue with the measured heart rate. A 10 bpm drop then rise correlated with moving into and out of the apartment is pretty strong evidence of something. It just seems very unlikely it's from ground contamination.

lazide 6y ago
Psychosomatic issues, while ‘in someone’s head’ cause very real physical problems that are quite measurable. Our brain and our bodies are tied together in ways that are not convenient to think about, frankly. Just like the placebo effect causes real, very significant healing effects, even a subconscious association with a place as ‘bad’ causes real, very significant detrimental effects that are externally measurable.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  I though the “placebo effect” is just regression to the mean. I.e. “sick people tend to get better”
  - orangeoxidation 6y ago
    That doesn't seem to be all of it. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    Nah, it works the other direction too. People expecting side effects from a placebo often get them- though you could argue that many side effects are common symptome now being associated with the drug. Still, the placebo effect beats no treatment per https://ebmh.bmj.com/content/5/1/15 https://ebmh.bmj.com/content/5/1/15 or https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12535498/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12535498/

iJohnDoe 6y ago

The first advice you’ll get from most people is to document everything. Her taking a photo wearing medical equipment is extremely important. It would be normal to include it in the story. Also, people post their lives on social media as part of their journey. Being extremely sick would certainly be part of her journey.

balozi 6y ago
> Her taking a photo wearing medical equipment is extremely important Why is a photo of her wearing medical equipment extremely important? All the photo is documenting is that she wore medical equipment for some reason at some point in her life.
getpost 6y ago
The tattoos in the photo that caught my attention. Aren't tattoos a source of toxic exposure? https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/think-you-ink-are-tattoos-safe https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/think-you-ink...

zikzak 6y ago

I live in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. We're are downwind from a compost facility sometimes. The smell is horrible k if you grew up using outhouses, it's the smell after a weekend when the extended family visits). Very intense some days. However, it is just "a bad smell". They recently lost thier operating permit and need to relocate in a year or so - so this is a real thing and not just the collective imagination of a Facebook group of local homeowners. However, people report crazy symptoms from "the smell". Migraines, hives, etc. Not being able to sleep, having to rewash clothes because they think the dryer air intake made them stink. I think the vast, vast majority of these symptoms and effects are people outraged that their very expensive home has an odour, only detectable outside, that they don't like. The stress of not getting thier way immediately leads them to these other health issues in my opinion. And it takes thier argument up a notch (prove they don't have a headache). Anyway, my opinion is not popular. :) I don't like the smell either and I'm glad they are moving the facility but it was just a bad smell.

watwut 6y ago
I don't find the idea that cloth could be smelly from smelly air crazy. When you have cloth in smelly air, in fact they do smell after. Likewise, migraines does not sound like crazy symptoms, whether they are ultimately tied to compost. Migraines are something that happen when you don't breath well.
- zikzak 6y ago
  I've never noticed our clothes smelling from the dryer. No one dries on the line here because of all the silt in the air. I am reconsidering my position on the headaches based on another comment. I might be in the wrong there.
yardie 6y ago
Manure and organic waste excrete hydrogen sulfide while they are being digested. The rotten egg smell you speak of is the hydrogen sulfide and it is toxic. And one of the major symptoms of H2S poisoning is migraines, coughing, shortness of breath. So your neighbors were completely inline with feeling the way the do. BTW, I went to school next to a mushroom farm. A big warehouse with giant mounds of manure. And yeah we felt all of that too during the warmest times of the school year. The school administrator and most parents tried to convince the students it was all in their head.

cdubzzz 6y ago

> In this case, the apartment complex appears to have over 1,800 units, which makes it surprising that only a single person is experiencing such dramatic effects. I don’t disagree with what you are saying overall but you reference this “1 out of 1,800” point at least three times in your comment. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not necessarily relevant as any number of people in those 1,800 units may or may not be experiencing a variety of issues related to this.

ryanobjc 6y ago
Also the gp has no proof or basis for this statement other than: a) they read a story about 1 persons experience b) the site has 1800 units The gp has to prove a counter factual now: no one else had symptoms. They can’t do that. Do you know the history of all the move outs of that complex? Do you doubt the owner is highly litigious? In addition, some people are just more sensitive. They act like a form of early warning system. Does living there give you an increased 10% of lifetime cancer? It would be hard to prove. And a final note: doesn’t everyone deserve a safe place to live that isn’t poisoning them? The sheer amount of naysaying in these comments is disappointing and reveals a profound lack of understanding of the science and a severely over constrained mindset: if it cannot be proven immediately by an individual without a budget and no resources, then it cannot be true.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  To be fair its nonsense rhetoric to ask someone to prove the non-existence of something you aren't able to measure (given we can't just barge into people homes and start probing them). But there is a likelihood that other people who have symptoms will now come forward seeing this, so the people of Santa Clara Square still might have more for us. I would be surprised it doctors can't detect if the patient has been poisoned.

Schweigi 6y ago

How do you know this was the only person? Others might have complaint to the property management company. Besides that, not everyone thinks that its their own home who makes them sick and they will blame something else. Its possible that a specific area hasn’t been cleaned properly so only a few apartments will be affacted and not all 1800. The only way to see what going on is by doing another Phase II ESA study. But those are expensive and you will need the approval of the owner which will be unlikely.

Schweigi 6y ago
Btw, if you live in CA you can use https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/public/ https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/public/ and https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov to search for any known environment risk in your area.
- odysseus 6y ago
  Are there any of these for other states?

colechristensen 6y ago

The problem is small effects. There is poison that kills you and then there’s poison that makes your life 1% worse. Most people don’t notice or can’t get a deterministic diagnosis, a small number of people are disproportionally effected. This is where we are in many places medically. The big problems are easy, the small problems are hard.

zby 6y ago

She has some medical problems. She discovered environmental problems with the building or whole property. Most probably they are not related - but there is this disturbing thing that the environmental problems would never be fixed if they cause only very low-grade harm. This is very much https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood

caddemon 6y ago

Complaining about vague symptoms and then complaining about data collected with consumer devices is a little unfair IMO. We should be encouraging people with vague symptoms to collect more objective data! There are of course drawbacks with consumer devices compared to medical equipment, but there are also a lot of medical issues that come and go, possibly with time of day effects or specific triggers. Using only a few brief snapshots that come from official doctor visits to draw any conclusion is a huge drawback of much of modern medicine, and biomedical research is slowly trending towards addressing this. If one is careful in buying high quality consumer devices and doing some sanity checks with their data collection process I feel it can already be informative. It can be a great screener and guide people towards what type of specialist they should see. For some tests there are "take home" medical versions that can get a more official (albeit still much briefer than personal equipment) dataset. However it can often be difficult to get a doctor to order based on vague symptoms, and it is non-ideal for patients to go on such a fishing expedition through official channels, especially the way medical billing/insurance works in the US. I get there is concern about patients reading into the data too much, and yes there will be some people with psychiatric problems that could be enabled. But I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. In addition to early detection of issues in healthy people, it would also have a lot of upside for people with inexplicable chronic illness. Yes people like that are vulnerable and will cling to things, but guess what - giving them a shitty label like Fibromyalgia only drives them to alternative medicine scams and toxic internet forums. It's human nature to look for alternatives when something has failed, and so why not at least channel that in to something potentially productive? In some cases they might even find a real diagnosis, but in general it could lead to actual research on these very poorly defined diseases. I don't know anything about sick building syndrome so can't really comment on that, but assuming the person didn't lie that would be remarkably coincidental timing with the move in and move out dates. Perhaps the toxin they identified is irrelevant, but there sure does seem to be something odd going on while they lived in that apartment. They also are clinically fine again now, so even if it was some weird psychological thing, moving out of the building fixed the problem and therefore the data lead her to the right "treatment". I guess my point is that maybe you're right that this wasn't sick building syndrome, and maybe that makes this article a net negative, because it could lead others to look for that where it isn't. But another takeaway from the article is just the more abstract story about investigating your problems so that you're more equipped to handle them. There can be non-medical/low risk interventions or mitigating strategies, and even in this instance it did also drive her towards relevant doctors (although it's impossible to say whether she sought out legitimate doctors since there is probably a higher ratio of quacks specializing in environmental toxins)

nathanvanfleet 6y ago

> More commonly, typical patients prefer not to be photographed with medical equipment or in medical facilities So you're saying that real patients don't take selfies with equipment on? What an odd thing to say. Like why would that somehow prove the validity of her story?

caddemon 6y ago
The photo clearly doesn't provide any real evidence for her story, but it's also reckless speculation to say that "real patients" tend to not take photos with medical equipment. People take photos of everything these days. For a more extreme example of something you would expect people to not photograph - just think about how many people post photos of illegal activity on their social media profiles.
- lazide 6y ago
  The challenge with a lot of these scenarios is it could be real (as in a theoretical normal person would have similar or the exact same issues), it could be psychosomatic, it could be someone pointing the finger at someone with deep pockets for a very real, but actually unrelated issue - not out of malice, but even because they believe it's true and no one has any evidence to the contrary. It can also be someone looking for a payday. Rarer, but it happens. From her story, she was already under very heavy strain before even moving in (full time program manager job which isn't something to sneeze at, and taking what sounds like a full time legal course at the same time), while moving into a new (and presumably expensive) apartment in what could be a new area. All this, presumably (based on references to '7 months' and 'September 2020 when I finally figured out what was going on', during a historic pandemic with massive, stressful shifts in work and school environments, availability of outlets/breakage in coping mechanisms, etc. Throw in perhaps an unwillingness of a landlord to release someone from a lease (as the local high end single occupancy rental market has crashed > 40% during this time), nasty nasty air pollution for months (the fires definitely impacted me and my family on top of COVID related impacts during this time - literally months of unhealthy air, orange skies, my cousins house burned down in the santa cruz mountains and many areas I've loved to visit in the past burnt down - it was terrible for mental health), everyone in the medical community confused and scrambled - almost everyone has been going nuts, in many different ways, and the stress has often been incredible. The whole south bay and peninsula is dotted with superfund sites, and she makes numerous references to public interest advocacy, so I'm sure she is aware of history the issues in the area and with legal training wouldn't lack the tools to dig. If you move to a new place (very stressful) in the middle of all this, and get worse - it's also hard to look at 'non-negotiable' things like work or school as contributing, because, well, you handled them before and you can't stop now right? If you run across something else that could be causing it, why not pursue it? Especially if they're a big corp or billionaire with deep pockets? Worst case they let you out of your overly expensive lease (now that the market collapsed) to get you off their back, best case you get a decent settlement to compensate you for the damage they caused (since you can't find anything else doing it). One of the big challenges here in the bay area is everyone is always trigger happy legally for environmental issues, and most of this stuff is almost impossible to DISPROVE. The science is really not great - we know some chemicals cause predictable things like cancers in certain situations - but there are a LOT of different chemicals, in a lot of different environments/states of weathering, in a lot of different types of exposure settings (residential with windows open a lot, residential with windows closed a lot, ground floor, top floor, near a vent, not near a vent, industrial, etc). And that isn't even counting all the different glues, adhesives, plastics, etc. in typical new construction. You can't run a good double blind study on this stuff (too many variables, ethical issues in many cases), animal models suck, chemical composition is sometimes not well documented or changed random over time, you name it. Ideally we'd all live in untouched pastoral glades far from any industry, but that just isn't how the world works. People need to live near their jobs for efficiency reasons, jobs tend to be concentrated near businesses (or have been historically), businesses often make things, making things can be a messy and polluting business.

ljhsiung 6y ago

Also worth noting is that several large tech companies are on <100 feet away from her apartment, literally across the street. AMD, Hitachi, Applied Materials Again, not doubting her story. I very much think her problem needs to be addressed. But, it's not just an "evil rental company" problem, these huge tech companies directly across the street from this waste had to have known about this too.

entangledqubit 6y ago
In many cases they do but neglect to adequately inform employees that may be potentially be affected. At the Google Quad campus in Mountain View there was an incident where some ventilation fans were accidentally turned off which caused employees to be exposed to TCE (affects embryo development so mainly concerning to pregnant employees) that is leeching up from the ground. I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people would not have been able to tell you it was a risk in working there. Also in the area is the "MEW plume". When I asked realtors about it while looking for real estate in the area they all claimed to know nothing about it - despite being locals and there being land development rules requiring that top soil be carted away to be treated. So many people/orgs are tacitly working together to ignore the problem since no one wants to be inconvenienced or left holding the bag.

crazygringo 6y ago

Yes. I know I'm personally extremely sensitive to VOC's in a way most other people aren't, so I don't doubt her medical symptoms at all. But the fact that it's new construction, and that the readings peaked at 3am would lead me to expect it's high-VOC construction materials, and the VOC's are accumulating while people have their windows closed at night and/or the HVAC system circulates less. I also wonder if she by any chance purchased a new memory foam mattress and/or pillows when she moved -- some people (like me) are horribly affected by the VOC's in them, even after many months. Building on a previous Superfund site could be an entirely separate and coincidental issue here. My experience with VOC's has also taught me, don't stick around and try to fight it -- just leave ASAP!! (or toss your mattress no matter how much you paid for it). And the fact that her doctors never suggested VOC's could be the culprit seems astonishingly negligent to me. I'm so sorry she had to endure these symptoms for months and months without anyone suggesting, hey go stay at a friend's for a few nights and see if it gets better.

bsder 6y ago

> Their symptoms are certainly very real in that they are suffering, but the selfie of the person wearing medical equipment in front of a mirror combined with measurements from consumer devices as evidence should be approached with caution. In addition, this woman has, at least, a full arm sleeve tattoo. Tattoo inks are NOT FDA certified and the health side effects are unstudied and unknown. Yeah, most people don't have a reaction, but it's highly probable that some do and she may simply be one of the unlucky ones.

micropsia 6y ago
Under that theory, why would she feel better after moving out of the apartment? An why would her vitals stabilize back to normal? (assuming she brought her arm with her)
- bsder 6y ago
  Got an addition right before it all happened and finally settled down? Quit doing something that reliably bumped her arm? Or, perhaps, eating at different restaurants once she moved? Perhaps something disturbing her sleep? Is she walking more or less? Is she walking through somewhere that uses pesticides or weed killer? Is the local grass watered with grey water that didn't get treated well enough? If the cleaning crew bumps my work monitor an inch or two and I don't notice, I'll wind up with neck and back aches. Commoner and closer things are more likely the explanation for something acute. "Toxic waste" tends to be the culprit when you have weird disease clusters that are more chronic and take a long time to develop. "Toxic waste" that causes acute symptoms tends to be really obvious in multiple people.