Fragrance Free Workplace in Canberra?

Yes, agree miz…fresh air in the office would solve alot of the workplace illnesses that employees keep catching from one another over and over again.

Thanks for the replies. I’m surprised that so many others are effected. Yes miz the problem with green buildings is they don’t always seem to take account of the workers.. It’s great that energy is being saved but a lot of these buildings are ‘tight’ buildings to reduce heating bills and the air can be recirculated many times.

I totally empathise as I have a related issue – I find the overwhelming smell of cleaning chemicals makes me feel ill. We are now working in an (allegedly) ‘green’ building which means that the cleaners now come in during the day, presumably to save on electrickery. It is really awful trying to work with the overpowering smell of bleach and that ‘back of the bus’ toilet chemical smell of commercial cleaning products.

Also, the building is very stuffy and airless (probably another ‘green’ saving – crap air con). I invariably have a headache by Monday evening, which I suspect is because of the weekend accumulation of formaldehyde from the horrid cheap MDF furniture (yes folks, they made everyone leave the beautiful, solid, old furniture behind so that the modern, cheap and nasty decor all matched! The irony is the building won an architectural award recently.) – http://www.gbca.org.au/media-centre/gbca-media-releases/call-to-phase-out-formaldehyde-based-glues-in-mdf-other-products/731.htm

A lot of these problems would not arise if they would only design windows that (safely) open to let in fresh air.

I’m slightly sensitive to perfumes and have enormous sympathy for people who have a serious problem with it. I use unperfumed products, being unperfumed does NOT mean going without washing or deodorant or whatever. Interestingly I eventually realised that expensive perfumes don’t necessarily bother me, it’s the cheap supermarket sprays and the fragrances added to other products that are the problem. It would be interesting to compare the Material Safety Data Sheets for the chemicals in expensive perfumes and in cheap scented additives.

Postalgeek said :

You’d think smelly people would’ve been bred out of the gene pool by now. No accounting for some tastes.

I think eugenics has had a bad rap ever since that whole Nazism thing. Boy was that embarrassing.

You’d think smelly people would’ve been bred out of the gene pool by now. No accounting for some tastes.

I’m always flabbergasted (and suffocated) by the people that think it is a brilliant idea to spray perfume all over themselves 23.5 hours into a 24 hour flight. Because that will fix everything!

There are treatments..

But what about treatments? It is not uncommon in medicine to be diagnosed by your treatment. The doctor suspects you have a certain illness and gives you medicine for it. If the medicine works, he was probably right. Can we define MCS by a common successful treatment? No, because MCS is not considered a curable disease, and the treatments are as diverse as the symptoms and causes.

If you search the Internet, you can find the name of Pietr Hitzig, a Maryland physician who prescribes a combination of the drugs phentermine and fenfluramine for MCS. Nowhere on his World Wide Web page does he tell you that these are actually weight loss drugs in the amphetamine family. Perhaps Hitzig feels that if he can’t cure his patients, he can at least make them happy by helping them drop a few pounds.

One clinical ecologist, Sherry Rogers of Syracuse, New York, has prescribed a macrobiotic diet – based on grains and vegetables, free of wheat and dairy products – for MCS. Rogers says it works by detoxifying the body, especially critical in today’s toxin-ridden world. Another clinical ecologist, Joseph Weissman, who has a practice in Torrance, California, reportedly agrees with the macrobiotic diet but also recommends avoiding tap water, caffeine, and alcohol. He tells MCS sufferers to rid their homes of toxic chemicals such as cleaners and pesticides, improve the ventilation system, and avoid all drugs, whether prescription or over the counter.

A favorite MCS treatment is saunas, which supposedly “sweat out toxins.” One correspondent in an Internet news group said the government ought to provide all MCS sufferers with a sauna. They would probably like that (who wouldn’t?), but you can’t sweat out a toxin, because the sweat glands aren’t connected to any of the organs that process toxins. And no, saunas don’t help you lose fat either.

Other treatments include coffee enemas, something called “salt-neutralization therapy,” gamma globulin, interferon, vitamins, ginseng, and the patient’s urine (as a beverage or injection). A Sacramento-area specialist treats many of his patients with injections of “the north wind.” He bubbles air through water, then injects the water as a “neutralizer.” Why “the north wind”? Because many of his patients complain they feel worse when the wind blows from that direction.

A common treatment for MCS is simple avoidance. This can be mild, as in avoiding, say, formaldehyde or solvents. But sometimes it means making yourself a prisoner in your own home, living in a small porcelain house (porcelain being one of the few materials said to be safe for MCS sufferers), or, in extreme cases, moving away from civilization. One favorite refuge is the small scorpion- and fire ant-infested town of Wimberly, Texas, an hour’s drive from San Antonio. MCS patients are often referred there by Gerald Ross and William Rea, physicians at the Environmental Health Center in Dallas.

In Wimberly can be found a woman who hangs her mail on a clothesline for weeks before reading it, to allow the toxins in the ink to dissipate. Another woman tried living in a six-by-nine-foot porcelain hut but now just spends almost all her time on her porch, no matter how cold it gets. Yet another wears a protective mask while shopping but still develops breathlessness, palpitations, and vomiting when she smells gasoline fumes.

http://fumento.com/mcs/sick.html

WestonGuy said :

Nicely sad Boo. I can’t agree with you more. Perfumes can be a real assault on the senses. I find the worst offenders are usually smokers who’ve dulled their sense of smell.

+1. The same people that think a breath mint covers their stink.

Darwin