“This is for you,” it read. “You are expected to wear it.”
For years, Charlotte Hutchinson had been suffering from headaches and nausea that she attributed to her workplace. Her managers had bounced her from office to office in search of one that didn't make her sick. This flimsy plastic mask was her employer's final gambit, she says.
“Can you imagine how ridiculous you'd look walking around the office in a mask?” says Ms. Hutchinson, who no longer works for the government.
Frank Haverkate’s air quality equipment can detect particles one-50th the diameter of a human hair. (Aaron Harris for The Globe and Mail)
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Ms. Hutchinson suffers from environmental hypersensitivity, a condition that employers and even some doctors have traditionally viewed with some skepticism. But new research on office toxins is making Ms. Hutchinson look more like the office equivalent of the canary in the coal mine.
Last week, Australian researchers unnerved cubicle dwellers the world over with a report showing that laser printer emissions are as bad for the lungs as a lit cigarette. Toner particles join the cloud of invisible office toxins that researchers have been identifying in recent years.
The research paints an unsettlingly toxic picture of modern workplaces: desks laden with more germs than a toilet seat, office ventilation systems circulating noxious gases, mould spreading undetected in workplace walls, office chairs and keyboards warping muscles and bones.
Ms. Hutchinson's biggest problem was the air. Until recently, people with conditions such as hers were more sensitive to environmental toxins than any available detection technology. Now, researchers are using sensors that pick up particulate smaller than one micron, or about one-50th the diameter of a human hair.
“We're gaining a new appreciation of this invisible pollution,” says Karen Bartlett, a professor at the school of occupational and environmental hygiene of the University of British Columbia.
The problems don't stop at laser printers.
“We hear a lot of people saying they get headaches when they're photocopying,” says Frank Haverkate, who runs a Toronto-based company that tests indoor air quality. “Sure enough, when someone has a large job going, the [air quality] sensors go through the roof.”
The particulate floating about offices wouldn't be so bad if ventilation systems were up to the task of filtering it out. With up to several hundred grunts' living, breathing and sweating bodies in a sealed room for eight hours a day, office workers are almost as dependent on good air circulation as airline passengers.
Mr. Haverkate once tested an office where workers were complaining of persistent headaches. He found a cranky old furnace in the basement and perilously high levels of carbon monoxide. “I immediately directed everyone to get out of the building,” says Mr. Haverkate, whose business has taken off since 2003, when Ottawa passed a bill imposing a legal duty on company owners to protect workers' safety. “I had a headache for the rest of the day, and here these workers had been in there for weeks.”
Somewhat more benign are the germs swarming throughout workplaces. Keyboards, mouses and phones can be so loaded up with microbes as to constitute biological weapons. In tests throughout the Toronto area, Mr. Haverkate has found that most computer keyboards are more rife with microbial creepy-crawlies than bathrooms, a finding that props up recent research from the University of Arizona.
Mr. Haverkate also employs a thermal imaging camera and yellow Lab named Quincy to sniff out mould-infested walls. Moulds grow anywhere that moisture builds up, and their health effects range anywhere from respiratory impairment to organ damage.
The noxious air doesn't always come from within. Dr. Bartlett routinely visits workplaces where bad air is being piped in from outdoors.
Once she tested an office where the air was so redolent of styrene that workers were falling ill. Trudging outside the office, she found that the air intake for the entire office building was situated right next to a fibreglass plant. “They were having a terrible time there,” Dr. Bartlett says, “but they never connected the two.”
Work stress and illness
Even if our offices are clear of mould, printer particles and more biohazards than a medieval infirmary, we can ruin our bodies by sitting and typing improperly. Desk work flattens out the lumbar portion of our backs and distends the muscles in the area of our shoulder blades, giving the seasoned office worker a distinct pear shape.
And none of that even approaches the minefield of illnesses linked to work-related stress, which triggers nearly half of all new depression cases, according to a New Zealand study released last week.
“Work involves your head more than your muscles these days,” says Merv Gilbert, a University of British Columbia psychology professor specializing in occupational health. “It used to be an injury to your back that was the biggest problem; now it's an injury to your brain.”
Those psychological wounds can be traced to a variety of sources, but the most common factors in the workplace, says Gilbert says, are overworking, underappreciation and bullying.
Some companies in Europe have introduced stress testing for employees. But in North America, we're still lagging.
“Our health care system is woefully ill-informed about the workplace,” says Dr. Gilbert, who recently developed a free online self-help manual for depression in the workplace.
Considering all these office-linked maladies, cubicle dwellers could be excused for a hint of paranoia. The scare can go too far, however. “In some cases, these complaints need addressing, but in many cases, it's just a seasonal flu spreading through the office,” Dr. Bartlett says. “Hysteria quite easily takes hold.”
Patrick White