Extreme heat and humidity are making life miserable for millions of people from the Midwest to the East Coast.
Temperatures well over 100 degrees are dangerous for the elderly and anyone living outside, but also for young children and pregnant women. And even if you seek shelter indoors with kids, you should also be thinking about the quality of the air inside.
Dr. Lindsey Burghart, chief science officer at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, recently co-wrote a paper on the risks of bad indoor air quality for kids.
“The pandemic taught us that there are ways to really effectively clean indoor air so that kids can thrive indoors in a safe way,” Burghart says.
6 questions with Dr. Lindsey Burghart
Does heat factor into the quality of the air we breathe indoors?
“Absolutely. And as you said, it’s not just the temperature, but it’s the quality that really has the ability to affect children’s health. And the youngest children are the ones that we really need to be thinking about this with the most. But children of all ages are affected and just like us, children experience heat both indoors and outdoors.”
There are other triggers that might raise the levels of air pollution inside a building. What do you look at specifically?
“We talked for a long time about how important outdoor air quality is. There was the Clean Air Act way back in 1970 and it made a lot of really great gains at reducing the pollutants, some of the most common pollutants outdoors. And while we talk a lot about how this outdoor air quality is really important, actually, most of us spend more than 90% of our time inside.
“And if we think about pregnancy and early childhood, think about where infants spend a lot of their time. It’s probably even more than that. They’re in childcare facilities. Kids are in schools. They’re in summer camp buildings. They’re in community centers. And in all these places, the air has particles, it has chemicals that can have a range of negative effects, not only on children’s health, but on their lifelong development. So it’s indoor sources of pollution that can affect your health. Think of things like composite wood furniture, synthetic carpets, PFAS that makes things water resistant. Things that were designed to make our lives more comfortable actually can affect our health.”
So the chemicals from furniture and carpets can leak into the air?
“Yeah, it depends on exactly what type of product we’re talking about. But there’s an array of different airborne chemicals. Some of them are known as volatile organic compounds. You may hear them described as VOCs, and depending on the product, they’re essentially off-gassed or released from these chemicals, and then they enter the air.”
I also see that gas stoves or insect infestations can cause problems with the indoor air.
“Yeah. Gas stoves, the problem comes from the off-gassing from the burning of the natural gas itself. There’s a great solution there, if possible, really is to just increase ventilation, turning on the hood and making sure the hood, if you have one, ventilates to the outdoors. And yes, a variety of pests, of dust, can enter the air. And if it contains like mites or dust mites or kind of byproducts of different insect infestations, those are other things that can trigger asthma in children.”
Why are babies or really young kids more vulnerable to breathing that kind of air inside?
“We’re all sensitive to these effects, but young children are especially sensitive for a number of reasons.
“One, they’re still developing, whether it’s their brain, their lungs, their immune system, their endocrine system. They’re changing really rapidly. So they’re really sensitive to all of these exposures from the environment.
“And not only are they more sensitive, but there’s actually differences in their physiology. They breathe more rapidly than we do. They inhale a larger volume of air relative to their body size. And in pregnancy, there’s also normal changes both hormonal and physical that lead to an increase in the amount of air being breathed in and out, making these populations more sensitive to all these exposures.”
What are some of the solutions that we can think about that might make a difference in our homes?
“This is one of my favorite things to talk about because it’s a problem with some really actionable solutions on multiple levels. One is just by starting by knowing what’s in your home so you can actually monitor your air quality. Next, we can really all switch to, if we can, some safer products. So low-VOC cleaners. Requiring that the furnishings are things like flame retardant free, that they’re not able to off-gas, some of those harmful things that we talked about. And then there’s actually a group of air filters called HEPA air filters. These are portable and we can put them in childcare centers, in homes, in classrooms, and they’re all really effective and we’re removing the vast majority of these harmful particles from our indoor air environments.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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