THE VARIABILITY OF PERSONAL CHEMICAL EXPOSURE IN EIGHT OFFICE BUILDINGS

摘要

In case-referent studies of factors associated with "sick building syndrome" (SBS) the selection of referents to the cases (i.e. people with SBS symptoms) is often crucial. In this study the personal exposures of aldehydes, amines, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particles and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were measured in office buildings, with the aim to investigate the variability between people, floors and buildings. The study involved eight office buildings with in total 79 participants. In total 523 compounds were detected. We evaluated the variability among the 123 compounds that were found in samples from at least 20 persons. The substance variability among these was explained to the major part by the differences between individuals in 78 %, and between houses in 14 % of the compounds. In 8 % of them the variation was explained in equal amounts by the differences between individuals and buildings. This supports that referents to cases can be chosen randomly.