Home Optimization, Aging Minimization Techniques:

Major Rewrite, 11/April/10

Home Optimization, Anti-Aging Technologies, Illness Minimization:

Introduction:

Readers, of this heavily documented web page, who think they can find/build a home that won't shorten life without the comprehensive Quality Control optimization, assessment, and monitoring program, from what they read in: MSO, (Martha Stewart Online), Architectural Digest, Bob Villa, Better Homes and Gardens, Fine Homebuilding, or Colorado Homes and Lifestyles, etc., need not waste their time here. The following are some of the findings of Marsh's environmental monitoring experience since the 1960s. You will need this to start maximizing your life span and minimizing your aging which always culminates in preventable, premature death. Our monitoring data, generated from published Scientific methods, is a rare profession that, easily reveals ever present/growing, complex problems in built environments, 24/7, for efficient removal and control. We address the most subtle contaminants no one else takes seriously, that are way, way Below Regulatory Concern (BRC) and far above harm. Our standards are how tomorrow's homes will be built. Most folks don't know, understand, nor care and die early of prevetable exposures.

Far and away, America's homes are a long way from being `optimized' for health and longevity. Greg Marsh, son E. C. Marsh, Architect; started seeing this as a kid growing up in a house swimming in lead, asbestos, and pesticides while devoid of insulation! Many of these problems remain today! Further education came later in a major government toxicology research laboratory for the Clean Water Act of 1975, university research studies, on the job training since 1968, and in disease incident statistics from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Atlanta. Click on the `Link' tab above and click on www.cdc.gov. See `Links' above for many more important resources, gratis.

Our non unique, in depth, comprehensive characterization of your abode(s) optimizes the 25 kilograms of air you breathe every day and a lot more just like drinking water. Published Scientific methods, instrumentation, and analyses from selected laboratories we know and trust, are the same as those used by the Harvard School of Public Health to achieve the same goals! The major philosophy of this field is based on the fact that chronic environmentally linked illnesses, COPD, cancer, Parkinson's, etc., are caused by chronic exposures to things that are easy to identify, quantify, & eliminate. These destroy the quality and length of your retirement, the fun time of life you've spent a lifetime giving to others for. Transplant patients have special needs and concerns which are always our top priority.

Our findings, solutions, guidance and follow up monitoring always address the implementation of solar & renewable energy that can pay the flat rate costs of our services and remediation. Our fees are about half those of a real estate broker, and less than remediation.

Our reports and guidance minimize remediation costs which can be a lot more. We encourage and assist Do It Yourself. We sell no remediation services nor hardware as this is unethical and a conflict of interest! Our small firm's field work is conducted by Scientists who finished school long before grade and course inflation that started in the 1980s. Youngsters with check sheets and slathers of lawyers, to defend their indefensible work, are routinely used by our competitors who think nothing of mixing remediation with assessment. They find them with ads containing '2-3 years experience required' while who have real experience are labeled 'over qualified'! Read on for the details of what needs to be done to reverse the inadequacies, ignorance, & mistakes of the architects, builders, plumbers, building materials manufacturers & importers, inspectors and lawyers who don't want you to know!

Essentially all Americans are victims. Those who focus on what's popular in the media, i.e., lead, asbestos, etc., or have preconceived notions, always cause oversights in comprehensive investigations. Comprehensive, diverse monitoring reveal 98 % of insults 95 % at the time. This includes unexpected, subtle, life shortening toxics, that are Below Regulatory Concern (BRC) but above medical consequences. Our `Fine Tuning' of built environments, with the powerful tools of Science makes huge, cost effective improvements that put health first. We call our services the `Missing Quality Control'. QC is always minimized as it costs money and never returns a profit for things supplied by the lowest bidder.

Marsh, Forensic Chemist, can be seen as the Physician of the abode who still makes house calls! Our fixed bid is a lot less than your first trip to the E.R., and covers all reports, lab expenses, remediation oversight monitoring, final monitoring, plan of action, hardware specifications, phone support, and much more. Our services are fully compliant with the Hippocratic Oath, the Precautionary Principle (see definitions above), European building policies and standards, new building standards, common sense, and ecological wisdom. Clients, who can supply `Do It Yourself' remediation, will save significantly more. Our solar and renewable energy recommendations, which greatly enhance ambience, will likely pay all or a very large part of total costs. Even in a society with health care for all, the value of our services are very cost effective & beneficial to all occupants.

Premises and Basics:

All unoptimized, built environments contain many easily identified & controlled, toxic substances that must be treated as preventable, unnecessary risks. Their sources are revealed with identification of their composition.
Architects, Engineers and builders, for literally thousands of years, have been filling buildings with deadly substances, to wit: lead plumbing which I had to remove in 1982, arsenic & mercury antifungal laced wall surfacings, drywall laced with toxic hydrogen sulfide, asbestos, creosote, etc. and untested solutions for expansive soils that create massive mold & bacteria problems, and pesticides, to name only a few.
Architects, builders and building materials manufacturers will ignore or fight changes in imprudent use of untested materials regardless of their customers' health benefits. Home owners request what home builders, building materials manufacturers etc. supply, while foolishly thinking government inspectors are protecting them! Like Big Pharma, building manufacturers, suppliers, and importers have learned how to socialize their risks and maximize their profits.
Outdoor air quality is ever diminishing. Exponential increases in air pollutants are required to perceive worsening air quality with ever increasing levels of pollution.
The human body is a huge, poorly understood electro-chemical cell that is adversely effected by many common substances that are Below Regulatory Concern (BRC), but not medical consequences of exposure. See BRC under the `Definitions' tab above.
Long term, low level exposure to an insult is much worse than exposure to the same total dose at a higher level and shorter term.
Human lungs are perfect traps for toxic gasses, aerosols, vapors, and particles. At least 5 different air sampling technologies are listed in Occupational Safety and Health Administration monitoring methods to quantify actual human doses. In normal activity, one breathes 25 kilograms of air daily!
All built environments will necessarily deteriorate over time under `normal' uses. Attached garages and common activities frequently accelerate these problems.
Total risks [harm] from multiple insults [synergy] are much, much greater than the sum of their individual risks.
Buildings, even custom homes, are constructed by the lowest bidders, from toxic materials made in totalitarian countries. These folks have no interest, knowledge nor tracking of medical consequences of their use. All U.S. building construction codes and regulations ignore medical effects of built environments. Ditto for all architectural institutes.
People spend more time indoors than out.
An optimized environment will recover years of human life lost to previous exposures by minimizing stress all users the needed recovery. Your home will be an Oasis in a toxic world.
No US team of Architects, Engineers and builders can construct a building optimized for health and longevity, without rigorous Scientific oversight. Where is your data? We will evaluate it free.
Free standing air purifiers provide little actual benefit while totally failing to solve important Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) deficiencies for many indisputable, scientifically based reasons. Ask for details.
All built environments must be designed to control long term predictable deterioration; short term changes in use, e.g., keeping a friend's cat for a week; and minimizing effects of unpredicted, sudden, potentially catastrophic spills or events.
Three complementary professional skills are required to control exposure to harmful substances and conditions: Source(s) identification and quantification,specification and application of controls, and follow up monitoring. ³⁵
The US leads all first world countries in heart disease, infant mortality, the shortest life span; and is second in cancer, while sixth in income! The only remaining uncontrolled area, significant enough to account for this, are environmental conditions in the place people spend the most time - our homes.

The IBC is a really bad joke for the purpose of assuring quality built environments. The International Building Code/Universal Building Code, IBC/UBC, is about as international as an old, leaky Chevy. The name suggests appropriate authorities, from nations who outlive us handily, had something to do with the development of this code. Not so! Much better to say that some of these codes have been adopted outside the U.S. in developing countries! Like LEED, they contain no methods, standards, testing protocols, nor required credentials of parties monitoring and/or optimizing IEQ. As if no totalitarian countries (read: lowest bidders) existed, guilty of flooding our nation with toxic goods. Imagine bankers, just before the first banking disaster of the twenty-first century, fooling banking regulators and the public with self regulation! The IBC has excellent instructions for the proper method of winding an electrical wire around a receptacle screw! Local codes and inspectors can be much worse - ask about asbestos in Alamosa, Colorado.

Monitoring data before and after remediation will show typical reductions in the levels of harmful substance by factors of 100 to 100,000 times!
The government will most likely not help, to solve or even identify IEQ problems in times of need, and can in fact make the situation much worse.^{11,
16.2, 15,
33, 34}, and the 2005 hurricane season!
A Forensic Chemist or Professional Industrial Hygienist (P.I.H.)* is your first and only line of comprehensive defense from invisible, undetected, air & water borne, life shortening chemical, biological, radiological and physical hazards. What you don't know will kill you!
"When you can't breathe nothing else matters", motto American Lung Association. See: www.lungusa.org by clicking on `Links' tab above. Unlike food and drink, one must breathe at least every three minutes.
Life ends when the sum of harmful exposures exceeds one's tolerance to survive.
Industrial Hygiene solutions never have side effects and last the life of the unchanged environment!

*=Consistent with Tennessee Code: 62-40-101.

Our services are guided by the `Precautionary Principle', click on `Definitions' above. Basically this says that if one doesn't know that conditions are acceptably low risk, than err on the side of precaution and prevention. Typically we shoot for the most cost effective level of cleanup for maximum health within the client's budget. Simply put the 'the most bang for the buck'. Our investigations start with all of he client's concerns and data, if present.

Our chosen direction of assessment is free of preconceived notions, and cling tenaciously to good Scientific principles that minimize biases, based on 35+ years of relevant experience. Our experience reveals that no abode has only one or two insults or that they can be found in a newspaper or TV article. Expect risk reductions from 100 to 100,000 fold, for millions of chemicals and biologicals (100,000s of macro and microscopic), and Naturally Occurring Radiological Materials (NORMs) by the dozens! Dangerous physical problems are part of this process. Folks with transplants, lung disease, and E.I.s, as a minimum need to explain this to the treating Physician, who we will gladly work with.

Who benefits from comprehensive environmental optimization? Everyone including landlords, transplant patients, and the most sensitive 20 % of society. How? With our easy to read reports, which spell out a plan of action, generated data to assist your doctors, early warnings, and regular telephone support from Scientists who speak American. Our services typically have a very short return on investment due to the high cost of energy, drugs, and health care. Yes, energy savings from renewables are usually part of our specifications! Our office is 15 km from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory whose regular events always garner our attendance. Marsh has had over 50 hours of extremely interesting L.E.E.D. training from one of its founders, Robert Burkebile, FAIA.

Experiences & Findings:

Our findings reveal what homes can harbor and are as shocking as those from schools. American Standards for Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in homes, whether for new construction or remodels, are non-existent¹⁸. Even domestic water providers and water wells are a very serious concern.¹⁹ If it can't be seen, nobody cars, if it can, it's someone else's problem! Preventable insults abound as well as the lack of planning & a quality control program to prevent or minimize unnecessary exposures starting with designer/builder lack of understanding the scope of environmental considerations needed to optimize life in his built environments. It is not uncommon for new homes to be sprayed with pesticides when built to deal with the possibility that unknown pests could materialize later! This is a fraudulent, cruel, easy sales tool. Industrial Hygiene oversight, to prevent toxic construction, including our strategic inspections, preclude pesticide use and future pest problems. Profits and convenience must never transcend common sense, non toxic construction.

Without monitoring data, no home can be ascertained as to its real human effects based on anything else, including appearances. Style, location, size, materials, regional weather, ethnicity, age, neighborhood, and cost. They all have their own problems and insults. Please take our survey by clicking on the tab above.

Important Questions for Buyers:

The following is a home owners and buyers list of essential questions to assist spotting real estate `red flags':

Is the home you purchased, or had designed, built or remodeled, actually conforming to your plans, good engineering, good Indoor Environmental Quality, and design standards, including ASHRAE? Does the builder even know what this means? Does it even comply with the standards you desire? Can he state your standards chapter and verse? Can he substantiate that with monitoring data from published, scientific methods? Click on our `Risk Reality Survey' tab above, to get a feel for types and scope of common, ubiquitous problems & deficiencies.
Does it have a high L.E.E.D. rating or was it built 'green'? Yes, this is frequently life shortening! Is it really a 'green building' that is not life shortening? Green is not `clean' without monitoring data. Trust but verify.
Was it built with modern doors, windows and sealants to make it as energy efficient as possible? Can the seller or builder even state the ventilation rate?
Does the builder/seller have any independent monitoring data addressing these important issues that should be the basis for calling it a `green' home? This will be common in the future.
Does it have baffling environmental problems, illnesses, or odors? Think Chinese drywall, lead paint, pesticides, and too much dust.
Did building inspectors fail to do their job?
Did previous occupants or owners use water or air purification hardware? Why?
Is it in a remote area or on a well serving fewer than 25 families?
Does it have asbestos, lead based paint, lead plumbing, `green' arsenic treated wood, or pesticides? ¹³
Has it been territory marked by an animal with obnoxious, toxic, life shortening substances?
Are you impaired with an organ transplant or disabled with lung disease(s)? If steps are too much then IEQ is even more important.

If any of the above are true, you are living in a risky home that will worsen in time with corresponding loss of health and increased aging, which culminates in premature death. Our services will give you the tools to make home a refuge from the myriad of harmful substances & conditions common in today's world. Unlike medicine, Industrial Hygiene solutions have no side effects, and last the life of the unchanged environment. Read on and call* us at (303) 421-3383 for answers to your list of questions, gratis.

So what needs to be assessed? Essentially all insult(s) (contaminates) can be easily identified and quantified with published, reproducible, Scientific methods that come from a variety of national and international sources. We assess, starting with the most likely to be present at harmful levels all chemical, biological, radiological and physical risks. These include pesticides, VOCs, toxic metals, wells, Chinese drywall, and much, much more. These are frequently Below Regulatory Concern (BRC), but far above medical consequences of exposure. Click on 'Definitions' on the above tab. We apply our Scientific judgment and experience from industry, government (environmental research), academia, and private, Scientific epidemiologic research accumulated from the 1960s, to plan and execute your comprehensive, flat rate assessment.

The following is a partial list of the content of our investigations:

All exogenous allergens (from with external sources, e.g., plants & animals),
Asbestos, airborne, water borne and in solids,
Biological agents,
Chemical agent & chemical weapons,
Clandestine monitoring of contamination,
Combustion compounds, including carbon monoxide, and soot,
Contaminated building conditions due to poor indoor environmental conditions, or `Sick Building Syndrome'.
Contaminates from attached garages,
Contaminates from flooding or chronic, excess humidity, including mold & bacteria, bad design, or marijuana cultivation
Chronic deterioration of built environments,
Clothing and fabric contamination,
Diesel emissions & noise,
Dirty HVAC ducts,
Drugs, including methamphetamine (Meth) ops,
Estrogen mimicking compounds,
Feed lot odors,
Filth,
Fire residues remaining after restoration,
Food, crop and soil contamination,
Gasoline and solvent vapors migrating indoors from contaminated aquifers,
Gasoline tank contamination,
Leaking Underground Storage Tanks (LUSTs) and their toxic gasses (VOCs) in buildings,
Medicine contamination and strength,
Metals (toxic) in water and airborne,
Mold and bacteria, respirable & non respirable, viable & non viable,
Nanoparticles, PM_{10 & 2.5},
Oil and grease in soil,
Paint vapors,
Pesticides and their residues,
PM₁₀ & PM_2.5,
Radioactivity of building materials and building sites,
Radon, ambient and dissolved in well water,
Skunk odors, and politicians,
Temperature swings,
Tobacco residues to establish smoking,
Toxic building materials,
Vapors from carpet mastics,
Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) some specified above,

Some of What You Are Facing - The Problems' Scope!

American homes are built without: IEQ standards, commissioning, tracking medical effects, baseline monitoring; nor monitoring for insults other than radon, lead & asbestos, nor even the use of non toxic building materials, nor concerns for ventilation until 2004. Add Architectural negligence, and indifference. With their concurrence OSHA IAQ standards in 1994 were blocked with help from the pesticide industry and building owners & managers (BOMAs). But it gets even worse: e.g., underground solvent plums, are tainting homes with toxic, explosive levels of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).

Homes are built with toxic materials from totalitarian countries (the lowest bidders) and: Asbestos, lead plumbing & finishes, arsenic, mercury & toxic drywall; which designers, builders, inspectors, and lenders do not monitor, understand, nor respect. They never conduct follow up medical studies of folks using their creations; nor, with its one year warranty, do they care as they have little liability or risk.

In fact, homes that appear spotless can be filthy & toxic with life shortening, invisible levels of pesticides, cat & dog emissions, dead animals, insects, dirty ducts, solvents, fuels, and smog, mold, radon, lead, estrogen mimicking compounds, asbestos, nanoparticles, etc., identification is beyond the capabilities of 'building inspectors' and requires Scientific analyses. More common sources of problems include household products. The U.S. E.P.A. have found them to contain more than 60,000 dangerous chemicals!⁷ During their manufacture OSHA compliance is required as well as compliance with hazardous waste disposal rules. We can advise you of free and low cost alternatives of many of them.

Shun builders whose name starts with `Rich...', as they are arrogant, fraudulent, disrespectful, deceitful, use remediation firms without independent oversight, nor publish supporting monitoring data. This same firm built almost 3,000 up scale? homes in Superior, Colorado, on expansive soils with an untested process of using structural floors. This is the placement of the basement floor well above soils, thus creating a large hidden space that is atmospherically coupled to living spaces above. Sooner or later it wets making a swamp with mold, bacteria, bugs and vapors that migrate into living spaces above. Rather than solve these problems they bribed the Colorado State Legislature to cap damage awards at $ 250,000, greatly minimizing a new home owner's legal recourse. Few people realize these facts until preventable exposures have manifested themselves as serious illnesses, just after the one year warranty expires!

Combined, synergistic risks of groups of insults are much greater than the sums of their individual risks. Research has found it to be closer to the mathematical product rather than a simple sum of all insults' risks. Slowly, insurance companies and litigation, are forcing removal of: Green colored CCA wood, treated with copper, chromium, & arsenic; underground storage tanks; chlordane and creosote anti termite treatments used in wood construction products; and radon.

Laws try to control where homes may not be built, due to unacceptable environmental conditions, but developers, influence peddlers and dirty money frequently subvert weak regulatory processes in place at great risks to you.^1,^11.1, ^15,³⁷ Some of them are downwind of urban, industrial, military and nuclear weapons production and testing facilities, including homes in remote areas of central Alaska, and Albany & Troy, NY, that are down wind of Chinese and Nevada nuclear test sites, respectively.^16.1 Many more building sites become contaminated long after construction, from migration of unexpected sources. Lack of awareness & enforcement leads to toxic places to live long after development is finished. We have no suitable response to a shocked new home buyer with serious IEQ problems when he asks: 'Why should I have to test my brand new home?'.

Underground solvent plumes can migrate underneath & through residential neighborhoods. Research has identified gasoline station plumes 6 kilometers off site, and airborne plumes of 2,4,D, the infamous herbicide (half of Agent Orange), still sold everywhere to anyone, migrating 20 kms! Solvent plumes can also be sources of explosive levels of toxic gasses when accumulating inside a dwelling.¹⁵ These are particularly diabolical as inside concentrations grow slowly, masking normal physiological warnings but not the medical consequences of chronic exposure.

Across the country, old & new neighborhoods are being discovered with toxic plumes on aquifers below not unlike Love Canal, N.Y. in the 1970s. More recently, concerns are growing about underground plumes of toxic solvents streaming off military, nuclear, government, and industrial facilities' leaking underground storage tanks and improper dumping. A little progress is being made after years and years of litigation from watchdog groups. This forced a few regulatory agencies to live up to their mandates and stop being industry sycophants. But still the U.S. E.P.A. and others have used a very bad computer model from dubious sources, here and in England, to ascertain health risks of homes above underground solvent plumes. This model frequently underestimates risks by a factor of 400 times,¹⁶ causing E.P.A. risk managers to give clean bills of health to poisoned dwellings far and wide. Forensic monitoring is thousands of times more revealing and accurate than visual inspections by skilled tradesman in finding sources of carbon monoxide, leaking plumbing, mold, bacteria, temperature problems, and ventilation deficiencies.

In the high rent district of Chicago's North Shore, chunks of friable asbestos, from previous uncontrolled, illegal dumping in Lake Michigan, is washing ashore! These shore line curiosities are subsequently carried into nearby up scale homes by children and the ignorant. How bad and prevalent can it get?, see: The Day We Bombed Utah.

Some environmentally linked diseases are very frightening, not the least of which is breast cancer. Our monitoring methods easily spot carcinogens. We know one lady, an American college educated member of Brazil's ruling elite, who had prophylactic pre cancer, double mastectomies based on family history. Had she instead conducted a full environmental optimization of her environments, the whole family would have realized the benefits and saved great sums of money and suffering.

Many diseases that, are strongly linked to environmental exposures, including: Parkinson's, see: www.pdf.org/aboutdisease/overview/symptoms.html; Lung disease, see: www.lungusa.org; Lupus, see:www.lupus.org/education/cause.html; Cancer, see:www.nci.nih.gov/cancerinfo/prevention-genetics-causes.causes; Many more, see: www.cdc.gov/exposurereport; to name only a few. The continuing development of computers and computer managed research data, as well as the ever growing results of the Human Gnome Project, are greatly expanding known links between the composition of environmental insults and many common diseases.

Biologicals, usually called microbes, are living chemicals which are very, very troubling to the Scientist and Physician for several very important reasons. This started with the findings (Wash your hands now!) of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, ca. 1845. At that time, German hospitals that did pathology had a 20% death rate of new mothers! Nobody, including Doctors, would listen to his message. In about 1880, Dr. Louis Pasteur proved, beyond a shadow of doubt, exactly why Semmelweis was right long after he died.

Biologicals are very serious. See www.policyholdersofamerica.org, from our `Links' page, and read Melinda Ballard's story about her battle with invisible, one celled animals in their brand new 22 room mansion. To this day, she and her family's health is in recovery. She was cheated by the designer, builder and engineer before her insurance carrier tried to do the same. Their `band aid' solutions resulted in a grand legal victory. This is one unforgettable story and what the insurance company tried to get away with. The jury awarded her $32,200,000!

Microbes which are easy to control, are everywhere all the time; they are very dynamic by species and number; their ability to multiply under common conditions is exponential. Some are 'extremophiles' that live above 100 degrees Celsius; and like chemicals, are invisible & odorless at dangerous concentrations. They can also remain dormant for a long time or die off, leaving toxic remains, and have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Ditto for cockroaches, dead or alive! Some are very toxic and insidious, e.g., mold and their associated mycotoxins and mVOC emissions. Ask! Biological and chemical emissions from dogs & cats, sometimes with pervasive, delayed health consequences appearing much later in life, making their etiology very difficult, even with the alarming growth in patients with lung diseases who are providing clues. This is another sign that preventive methods are greatly under utilized.

Fortunately, Science has identified most molds, numbering in the 100,000s. Mold problems are very dangerous and pervasive. They can be fatal and have been linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The control solution is a proactive, routine, monitoring program patterned after the quality control (monitoring) methods of a potable water provider. To be adequately protected from harmful, airborne microbial exposures, biological monitoring must include mold and bacteria, viable and non viable, respiratory and non respiratory. Non viables must be evaluated by optical and/or scanning electron microscopy. This is NEVER overkill! Quantitation of bacteria can reveal such problems as yet undiscovered leaking sewage pipes and heating and cooling system problems, etc. Monitoring should continue until the environment is well enough understood to plan a reduced, strategic, routine monitoring program. This is called 'results driven monitoring'.

Radiologicals are very ubiquitous, odor free, invisible and usually occur as Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORMs) plus radon. They are found in such places as building materials. Pre-construction monitoring solves this important problem that usually manifests itself as elevated, long term exposures. Research has shown radon in the home to be the second greatest cause of lung cancer after smoking. Know anybody who's died of cancer? The U.S. rate of cancer is the second greatest in the entire industrialized world! This makes it clear, to those who care, we need a lot more prevention which is very 'doable'.

Radioactivity's greatest danger is when 2.5 micron and smaller airborne, radioactive particles are trapped in the lungs, such as radon decay products and fugitive mining dusts. Radioactivity can be found in all types of property, well water, and in certain kinds of building materials. Common household things can also contain radioactivity, such as certain glazes on china. Think the government is protecting you from these? Think again. Such common sense controls were labeled 'socialism' long ago!

Radionuclides are also very troubling when undiscovered in private well water, exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), when wells serve fewer than 25 families. Well water laced with them, and usually other toxic substances, create a `synergistic effect'¹⁷, which is very much greater than the sum of individual risks. Some isotopes replace elements in bones making them radioactive, a condition considered impossible to reverse. Time is of the essence! A former colleague discovered the worst home in Colorado whose bathroom would exceed the E.P.A. guideline (guidelines are unenforced) of 4 pico Curies per liter by 2000 times in the course of one 5 minute shower! Sadly, the victims included two teenage boys, who had been exposed to these levels for the first 16 years of their lives after the start of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The SDWA has `teeth' but frequently fails miserably. Everyone must protect themselves and family as the government fails frequently.

Fine particles and nanoparticles are another serious concern. They are very life shortening even if not radioactive nor viable microbes. They are also easy and low cost to assess and control. This has been a recognized problem for a long time. You can be sure J. Cesaer delt with the problem by closing doors and windows. But they had a life expendency of 29 years. Today we can do a whole lot better, about six orders of magnitude (one million times) better, with low sost technology once indoor air patterns are characterized. This also applies to wetting, microbes, and temperature swings that usually accompany particulate problems.

What have regulatory agencies done to limit these exposures? The same thing they did when they found out the dangers of asbestos in 1940! And again with asbestos in Lake Superior in 1971. The newly formed U.S. E.P.A., at that time recommended to keep drinking Superior water as no proof of danger had yet been found! Their Motto: "Let's all be industrys' Guinea Pigs"! Cleanup funding was far too little, far too late and is far worse now. Dangers attached to NORM exposures are stated in terms of risk of cancer mortality to laboratory animals while other dangers, such as birth defects, are ignored. Ad the risks of trying to extrapolate animal study results to humans.

Important as it is, forty-four percent of Americans drink `potable' water from providers that get a `D' or `F' for the quality of the reports they file to regulatory agencies as required by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).¹⁹ Further, chlorinated drinking water research has demonstrated that chlorine, and its byproducts, are putting hundreds of thousands of pregnant women at great risk of birth defects and miscarriages.²⁰ Additionally, a large proportion of total consumption comes from small wells serving fewer than 25 people. Colorado requires only one test for bacteria, regardless of well depth, geology, or scientific logic, after it first clears and are exempt from SDWA reporting. Small wells are also not required, under the SDWA, to ever be tested for radiologicals even in an area known to have risks of radioactivity! The most common victims of under tested water are wealthy people who can afford to build in remote places and have their own well. Folks in a big city ghetto never have this problem! Our services meet SDWA criteria.

In the U.S. incidence of birth defects and serious respiratory diseases, such as asthma, are growing alarmingly and are themselves a very sensitive measure of the presence of certain environmental contaminants. For example, some common household substances, such as pesticides and detergents, are now known to mimic estrogens that cause alarming, irreversible damage to the unborn, including male sterility, as well as compromised immune systems.¹⁴

It is a well known fact that chemical, biological and radiological pollutants accelerate aging and hence death. Much less known is the Marsh axiom: "Life ends when one is exposed to one more insult than is tolerable, and we are constantly being exposed to multiple insults that can be greatly minimized at low cost." Another: The difference in sensitivity to any given insult, between the least and most sensitive member of a large population, is commonly as much as a factor of 1,000,000 times. It follows: Those who contract cancer and other diseases were exposed to levels of agents that were above that person's threshold of tolerance. The good news: Today's Science can easily and reliably detect such substances, even at very low levels.

Guilty Parties - Who Are Your Friends?

Concerned independent Scientists and Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the U.S. have important input. Sadly, they are sorely underfunded and frequently ignored, like Ignaz Semmelweis and Child Bed Fever in the nineteenth century and Ralph Nader on banking safety in early 2008, and countless others throughout history.

U.S. regulatory agencies continue to set and enforce fewer and fewer health and safety standards of all kinds. Nor have they conducted necessary, relevant, overdue, supporting research. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been defunded 18 of the last 19 years. The bad news: Its leadership comes from the industries it is charged with regulating! Tragically, the age old problem of incompetent morons and self serving politicos at the top are still blocking real protection and making bad policy decisions, dictated by their sources of election revenue. See: "Food Inc.", DVD. These hurt us all with collateral damage to real professionals resigning from critical regulatory agencies for morale. A good example of this phenomenon is the highly publicized 'The air at ground zero on 9/12/01 is safe[sic]', from Christy Whitman, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She knew it wasn't nor could that have been even remotely possible. Society was not fooled by her attempt to shift the blame to her vast scientific staff, and now see her as a new hitler. Terrorists 2957: Whitman/Bush 100,000s over the next 30-50 years.

And it gets worse: "RADIATION EXPOSURE LIMITS WEAKENED IN DEPARTING BUSH MOVE, Huge �Hikes in Allowable Radioactivity in Drinking Water, Air and Soil. ...Outgoing Acting EPA Administrator Marcus Peacock signed off on the new Protective Action Guide [PAGs] on 15 Jan 09... The radiation `PAGs' are supposed to be protocols for � protecting the public from radiological incidents ranging from � nuclear �power-plant accidents to transportation spills to `dirty' bombs to �contamination �events at metal recycling facilities. In October, the Bush administration shrugged off objections filed by more than 60 public health and environmental groups...including a nearly �1000-fold increase in �permissible �concentrations of � strontium-90, 3000 to 100,000-fold for iodine-131, and a nearly 25,000 increase for�nickel-63. In the most extreme case, the new standard would permit radionuclide concentrations seven million times more lax than permitted under the Safe Drinking Water Act." From: http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1151

Can Physicians find the sources of your environmental insults? Yes, at 10 to 20 times greater cost than an I.H. with his monitoring assistance and instrumentation. But Physicians do not make house calls nor are they willing to ask for nor accept scientific services from outside their own profession. They even choose to ignore sources of critical information in their own professional journals and colleagues.²³ Ask your holistic or otherwise Physician, Allergist, or Chiropractor, for the last time he/she retained the powerful services of a professional Scientist to assist with a patient with a difficult environmentally linked illness. Aren't Doctors guilty of at least two crimes: The sins of omitting the fact that practical, low cost Scientific solutions are available; and the Hippocratic Oath `I will do no harm', while choosing to shun environmental monitoring data?

It gets much worse. How often do medical practitioners misdiagnose from lack of knowledge of patients' environmental conditions? Why aren't they trained in this important field? Ask your Physician about his/her environmental training and their use of independent monitoring data from their patients' environments from a Scientific study. See: www.questionabledoctors.org for criminal actions against Physicians in your State who are rigorously protected by big, self serving medical associations. These have been recently made public on the InterNet by Dr. Sidney Wolf, M.D., after a major 30 year battle.

Sadly it is up to the patient to insist on monitoring services from the Scientist. Unfortunately, nearly all Doctors are Prima Donnas, who refuse to communicate with Scientists already studying his patient's environment! Really!

Even Dr. Doris Rapp, M.D., bless her heart, refused to use the words `Industrial Hygienist', even once in her 635 page book¹⁰ which is 90% pure Industrial Hygiene science. And she failed to state the fact that virtually all I.H. services are permanent and totally free of "side effects". When taken to task on this issue, she admitted that Doctors were too proud [sic]. Send a SASE for our letter and her response.

Doctors and their societies give lip service to `preventive medicine', but do not support Industrial Hygiene title protection in the State of Colorado. They do not pressure the insurance industry to cover the real 'preventive medicine' of environmental assessments under 'Doctors' services' for their patients whose illness is suspected or known to be linked to environmental exposures in their homes, schools and work places. Additionally, they have never provided serious support for the `School Environmental Protection Act of 2001'. When was the last time Physicians supported any professional outside their own?

Unlike some of us, very few Doctors even optimize the use of their software to diagnose & track maladies, their prevalence & distribution among their own patients' data. Such findings could be reported to health departments or written up in an article for publication for the betterment of the whole community. Throughout history they have even rejected or ignored findings of their own colleagues, including Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis,²³ who successfully employed tracking statistics, to isolate and identify the cause of deadly 'child bed fever'.

Could Architects and Engineers solve these problems? Yes, with assistance and oversight of a Scientist who's expertise, tools, and their client's full cooperation and funding. This doesn't happen unless the subsequent buyer is astute enough to demand and fund it. The painful, life shortening diseases of asbestos exposure were revealed in 1940, but Architects and their colleagues continued to employ it until banned by unrelated health and regulatory agencies in 1980. Ditto with lead based paints, plumbing hardware containing too much lead, and lead sweated copper plumbing. They have contributed nothing to the discovery of building related human diseases. This includes ASHRAE standards for IEQ, which are solely based on olfactory responses among that part of the healthy, adult population that can actually participate in their human exposure tests, which are conducted in large, dirty, filthy, toxic urban places! They cannot grasp health problems resulting from their creations as the concept is also wholly foreign to their training. They refuse to perform 'baselining' for new buildings, that would not only protect their own interests and improve the next structure, not even as a part of building commissioning, unless the new owner is astute enough to demand & fund it. As Dr. A. Einstein reportedly said: "A problem cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking that created it".^23.1

Nor do they care, beyond their personal liability, as their work is only guaranteed for one year! In fact, the offices Architects selected for their State headquarters for the major American architectural institute in downtown Denver stank and functioned so embarrassingly badly they had to move out before the end of their lease! This was a beautiful, high end, newly remodeled 19^th century building. They then moved into a much newer, high end office building that was so contaminated with asbestos it could be seen in the elevator portals! This building, the joke of local I.H.'s, also housed some of the State Attorney General's staff! See the web site: www.aia.org, and search with 'indoor air quality', 'indoor environmental quality' 'IEQ'. Also check their roster of classes for Health, Safety, and Welfare (HSW) training seminars for periodic, required, continuing education credit for their license maintenance. None Exist! They offer no courses for addressing a structure's possible environmental problems in spite of astronomical cost to users.²⁵

Finally, all the Doctors, Architects, HVAC Engineers, builders and bankers, with all their wealth, influence, and connections, failed to get passage of the OSHA proposed rule, on 5 April, 1994, "Indoor Air Quality: Proposed Rule", for indoor air quality standards in non industrial work places.²⁵ These would have been adaptable to homes. Little evidence exists that they even tried. This proposal rule was a result of a federal court suit brought by the American Lung Association, G.A.S.P., and Public Citizen in 1987, to force O.S.H.A., under existing emergency powers, to implement IAQ standards in non industrial workplaces that would have prevented many environmentally linked diseases. It was effectively blocked by the tobacco, pesticide and building owners' & managers' societies by 1996. During the Clinton administration, O.S.H.A. failed to promulgate one single new regulation for control of workplace hazards, for the first time in any four year period in their history, and he served for eight! I.H.s have said he turned the agency into a consulting group, pushing us back into the 19^th century and penalties for on the job fatalities were all but eliminated^37, ^38,³⁹ And his successor was a lot worse and never reversed anything!

Other Places With Serious Problems:

Parents and Teachers, do you suspect your school is toxic or otherwise working poorly from causes no one will admit to? Are your children doing as well as expected in school? Are poor or substandard building conditions causing poor grades, loss of academic and athletic achievement, attention problems, or anti-social behavior? Are they dragging home too many illnesses? Teachers, are you suffering from a building that isn't transparent to its users and enhancing its uses? Most American schools are in dreadful condition¹. Are school heating and cooling appliances filthy because they have never been properly cleaned? Ask the custodian when they were last cleaned. Many school HVAC appliances were not even designed to be cleaned, or are built without needed accesses. Has the school your children attended ever been assessed or optimized by an independent Scientist? Findings please. If not, you have much to gain at a cost that is a lot less than that of your child's illnesses. This is easy to understand when one realizes that school principals & superintendents are likely to be teachers from non technical teaching areas, completely unprepared to understand building management, maintenance administration and optimization, and whose selections are politically driven.

Do you need to organize concerned parties to achieve real improvements because administrators aren't/won't listen? If you have the courage for action ask administrators these critical questions: Do you have real concern for optimizing building performance that goes beyond lip service? What is the budget? Where is your plan. If it isn't written it doesn't exist. Who is the independent Scientist for timely assessments, emergencies, and remediation oversight, follow up monitoring, and what are his credentials? Ask us for important, key questions and answers for taxpayers who are or wish to finance a new school. Give us a call at (303) 421-3383, and ask for Greg.

Do you have a loved one who is in or will be going to a nursing home or assisted care center? The following also applies to schools. Have you read or heard the horror stories of their filthy condition? Those with dementia cannot file a complaint nor explain. The following is a of list of essential questions for their owner/management corporations needed by responsible parties to cull out the homes with horrible, ubiquitous, preventable, substandard conditions:

Where is your IEQ management plan and complaint tracking form? If it is not written it doesn't exist.
What is your IEQ budget?
Who is responsible for it's regular implementation and tracking of complaints? What is the scope and budget of this person's authority?
Where is a copy of this persons resume?
Where are your complaint tracking forms and your written records of their resolutions?
Who is and contact information of the independent Scientist who is called in for difficult problems & routine monitoring?
Are leaking underground storage tanks of other sources close enough to this facility to be a risk? How is this known & tracked?
Is it in a remote area on a well that has had only one initial test required by the local health department?

Recently Marsh completed an 18 month in depth study and three page proposal for vastly improving Colorado's nursing homes with modern, established methods that include key monitoring with established, cost effective, published Scientific methods used elsewhere with expected success. This is in lieu of current visual methods, like those of ancient Roma, that somehow just never detect existing life shortening insults, especially the aged. This was written with the help of at least one Registered Nurse, with nearly 40 years nursing home experience, who requires anonymity for obvious reasons. Call for your copy. It was all but ignored by all members of the Colorado Board of Health (it was apparent that some didn't even bother to read the 3 pages) and all their recommended contact persons (read: spineless finger pointing) in the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment who, in some cases didn't even bother to return calls! Ditto with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Affairs and their Nursing control division. It was then submitted to Colorado State Rep. Sara Gagliardi, R.N. who listened to my phone explanation of benefits, cost savings and greatly improved protection of patients and staff. She promised to read my proposal. She was too spineless to call back and delegated that task to an ignorant helper! Gagliardi says she's a Registered Nurse. Ninety % of nursing home patients are old ladies. Why doesn't she realize that if she lives long enough she could spend the last 15 % of her shortened life enduring preventable insults. What drives her, Big Insurance? Let's give her the Florence Nightingale award for courage and concern done up in yellow!

War Stories-for Late Nite Reading:

From 1987 to 2005+ Marsh was a key player in the closure and clean up of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant SuperFund MegaSite (RFP) along with about three dozen others, that was abandon before cleaned up was completed in 2005. The citizens' enemies were the regulatory agencies who deserted we victims from the Colorado Front Range to the Eastern Sea Board for the next 240,000 years, the toxic life of Plutonium 239, thought to be one of the five most deadly substances known! Firstly the U.S. E.P.A. defunded the Rocky Flats Cleanup Commission, who administered the E.P.A. Technical Assistance Group, that Marsh cofounded, in an arbitrary and capricious way that was hence illegal. This chronic, pathological, habitual liar, who's Federal Court appeal revealed that she was a charlatan falsifying laboratory data and couldn't even run the world's simplest laboratory instrument for the U.S. Geological Survey. When her case number, DE04328310145, was brought to the attention of the Epidemiology Division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, they jumped behind her 100% and attacked the lady who produced the documentation which we make available to responsible parties! Why? Because the regulatory agencies wanted to destroy the years of work produced by the Citizens' Soil Sampling Committee of RFP by hiring a corporate whore to falsify the data validation process and hence the data. Her name is hidden in the code of this page.

The headquarters for Architectural and Engineering staff of the National Park Service, national design office, got their first IEQ complaint 30 days after opening their new building in 1987, which was build by the General Services Administration to their own specifications! NPS administrators chose to ignore the findings of the I.H. consultant, their in house HVAC Engineer, and innovative, cost saving contributions from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who could have provided free, low cost solutions, to be put up on the Web for all to use. The fact they had an architect, who received two Presidential design awards and beat leukemia twice meant nothing!

Builders cannot be trusted either, even up scale ones in Boulder, Colorado. The now defunct Boulder builder most famous for high quality, up scale, `green' homes with very important solar benefits, had designed a new group of `green' homes that are also supposed to be very low in toxic materials. This builder, who has an outstanding environmental record of stopping the sale of old growth trees on National Forest lands to a very large, irresponsible logging company, called on our firm to verify his ad claims. After initial discussions defining the scope of what he thought would verify a good indoor environmental quality optimization monitoring program for optimization of his construction techniques, we never heard from him again nor implementation of the project, nor did he ever return our calls.

Dennis Weaver, we all loved ya! But you only made it to 81! The famous actor and environmentalist, who put his money where his mouth was, took only a few seconds to nix our services for his new 'Earth Ship' shortly after completion in the summer of 1990. At the recycling expo in Denver he impressed all with his knowledge, wit, charm, and accomplishments. This now appears to be the beginning of his cancer incubation period of about 15 years for he died of lung cancer, living in a most pristine part of Colorado - Ridgeway. How does anyone get cancer in such a place? It looks, once again, like the lack of prevention.

In another instance, we were called in to direct detoxification of a $ 1+ million, 6000 + sq. ft., 13 year old home in Denver's most exclusive community, Cherry Hills Village. Next to the golf course, it had brick, leather, and solid walnut flooring, full automation, splendid art, and beautiful views. The owner tore down the original (it must have been splendid) because it stank so badly from a myriad of building defects. His poor wife, the most sensitive person in the household, had complained about it from just after they first moved in but he ignored her ominous & prophetic complaints. This incompetent guy made his fortune building 5000 low cost homes in Harvey Park (Denver)! His new, opulent, replacement home, that took three years to build with infinite funding, became so contaminated in the following 13 years that he and his wife had to flee when odors overwhelmed them! The owner died at about 75 years of age of cancer!

Problems are worldwide. Bankers and lenders in general have an abysmal record of not only `red lining' complete neighborhoods to ruthlessly destroy real estate values so they can unfairly profiteer later when the neighborhood is in receivership. They fund large construction projects that have non existent quality control and oversight. "...Bangladesh supports, within a space the size of Wisconsin, about 125 million largely impoverished but resilient people.... And now it has another problem: the poisoning of potentially 70 million people from arsenic in drinking water drawn from millions of new wells installed, with World Bank funding, massive water borne drinking & surface water contamination."²⁴ It is very possible that this mistake will cost 50% of the entire population 50% of their life span. The World Bank program totally failed to include the most rudimentary monitoring program to verify drinking water quality.

This is comparable, in this country, to the use of untested `structural floors', to prevent damage from expansive soils. See the above section on 'builders'. It's as if bankers have never heard of standards nor toxic substances in water! Beware of their due diligence environmental audits as they sometimes use unqualified relatives as there are no standards for them either!

Final Advice:

How clean is clean? Degree of cleanup is only limited by time and resources. We specify maximum clean up per clients' dollars. It is very easy for the Scientist to minimize remediation costs when remediation, is under direction of the Scientist. Expect independent laboratory monitoring data to show a reduction of insults by a factor of at least 1000 in an environment that already looks and smells impeccably clean. Average environments can realize 100,000 fold improvement. How can this be? Toxic building materials, lack of IEQ standards & commissioning, and the lack of plans that prevent common,expected deterioration of built environments. Physicians, architects, engineers, builders, building materials suppliers & importers, and real estate brokers ignore this issue and greatly exacerbate this growing problem. A rare exception is Dr. Nichols Nonas, Environmental Physician, at (303) 694-2626, Denver, whom we work with to guide cleanup to patient specific levels. His extensive patient data has revealed links between common monitoring data and respiratory illnesses by ZIP code!

Our procedures were identified in a major national study on the effectiveness of 62 different techniques in ten categories for effectiveness to 305 folks with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS) ²¹. These are easily the most sensitive portion of society, they are sometimes called 'Canaries'. Techniques we apply are 100% congruent with the only two methods that were reported to provide `major or enormous help'. Our methods also address elements of 4 of the top 7 treatments. The study: `MCS Treatment Evaluation Survey of 305 Participants', was conducted by Dr. Leonard Jason, Ph.D., DePaul University, Dep't of Psychology, Chicago, IL, in 1995. Send a large, self addressed, two stamped envelope for a copy. We will not respond to a P.O. Box return address.

It is very easy for our firm to specify control techniques that reduce harmful environmental concentrations of insults by factors of 100 to 100,000 fold reduction. Some are safety management tools coming from industry 'engineering controls' that have been protecting workers for a long, long time, that are easy to adapt to home use. Some from the 19^th century. Such old, proven controls can also be scaled down for residential applications that are very low cost, reliable, and effective.

Optimization is a Scientific process comprised of four steps: Characterization; remediation; follow up monitoring; and management planning for permanent, for prevention of future IEQ deterioration. We provide the keys to all, sometimes with eloquent, no cost/low cost renewable energy solutions that quickly pay for themselves with substantial ongoing savings for the life of the structure.

The Harvard School of Public Health is one of our few competitors. We all use the same laboratories and published methods! No one needs a sledge hammer to crack a peanut! Costs for comprehensive assessments are far less than real estate brokerage fees!

Patients is a virtue: Competent Microbiologists, Chemists, other Scientists, and laboratories are becoming fewer and fewer. They cost too much and have too little return on their investment(s). We have lost at least seven Senior Scientists and Professional Engineers in the last 30 years who had more than two centuries of combined experience. Fortunately, technological developments have improved some of these problems.

Feel free to call with questions after reading this section. From time to time we get calls from concerned folks who follow the philosophy of our message, sometimes for a long time, who are trying to make the best environmental decision without monitoring data. Although we can be seen as the 'Physician of your environment(s)' it is impossible to give recommendations or otherwise help choose between the lessor of evils in the absence of relevant monitoring data. It would be very rare indeed to conduct even a simple assessment on a small environment and not generate data. How could a Physician advise someone who he hasn't seen? Additionally, callers have biases (preconceived notions), lack relevant education (how many go to college to study Chemistry?); and fail to grasp overlooking the 'right bunny' is a failed process. How many know or implement the scientific process correctly? The solution starts with establishment of a budget to reap all benefits.