The actions of the perfect housewife are harmful to herself. As proven by the research of Norwegian and American scientists, the effect of cleaning agents on the lungs is equal to the constant smoking of 4-5 cigarettes a day. Even rare types of cancer of the respiratory tract can be the result.
- Scientists prove that frequent use of cleaning products can be as harmful to our lungs as smoking about 4-5 cigarettes a day
- Researchers tracked the health of over 6000 women over a 20-year period
- Cleaning too much may be responsible for some cases of respiratory cancer in women
Women who clean their homes regularly with chemical cleaners experience a faster degradation of lung function in middle and older age than women who clean irregularly, a study by a team of scientists from the University of Bergen in Norway leaves no room for doubt. At the same time, it is so significant that it was included in the prestigious American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
A team of scientists from the University of Bergen, led by prof. Cecile Svanes, MD, did a really extensive analysis. He examined data from 6235 women from all over Europe participating in the European Community Respiratory Health Survey. These women entered the program when they were 34 on average, and their health details were analyzed over the next 20 years. As explained by prof. Svanes, the negative effects of cleaning and cleaning chemicals, especially for people with allergies and asthma, have come to light before, and no one has studied their long-term effects on healthy people. So the Norwegians wanted to fill this gap. – Knowing their composition, we were afraid that day after day, year after year, they constantly cause minor damage to the respiratory tract, and this damage begins to accumulate with age – explained Prof. Svanes. So people who said that they clean every day were selected for the study. The results were compared with a group of women who themselves stated that they clean “every now and then” or “occasional”.
As it turned out, one of the basic respiratory parameters, the volume of forced breath in 1 s (FEV1), which means how much air a person can exhale in 1 second forcibly, drops by 3,6 ml per year for women who are constantly cleaning at home and 3,9 ml per year for female cleaners. Forced total exhalation (FVC), which is all the air a person can forcefully exhale, drops by 4,3 ml / year for housekeeping women and 7,1 ml / year for female cleaners. This is a very poor result because it means that a cleaner’s lungs degrade roughly twice as fast as someone who works in a different profession, such as an office or even outdoors, such as a gardener. People who clean the house constantly did not achieve much better results – their lungs also lose functionality much faster than the lungs of people who clean less strictly.
What do these results mean?
According to scientists, this is a degradation of the lung function as in a smoker who smokes little, more or less 4-5 cigarettes a day, but constantly. ‘This is rather natural because when you inhale small particles of cleaner intended for cleaning surfaces, but not the lungs, they can be damaged,’ says one of the study authors, Dr Oistein Svanes.
The authors note that it is not very clear what the symptom of a reduction in lung capacity is exactly – whether faster cell degradation or, worse, the cause is not the gradual damage to the mucous membranes lining the airways due to the constant action of cleaning agents that work throughout the duration of the cleaning person’s activity and thus causing cumulative changes in the airways. It is not so that the parameters of FEV1 and FVC drop suddenly in women who are constantly cleaning up, just like the ratio of FEV1 to FVC. These changes are slow, and over time their lungs look very much like the lungs of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. These people also suffer from asthma much more often – most often permanently employed cleaners – than people who clean up “in bursts”, from time to time. Interestingly, the frequency of being ill here is not specific and depends on other diseases, which means that a person with allergies, who lives in an apartment, which cleans quite rarely due to these allergies, despite the burden of the disease, has a lower chance of getting sick. asthma than a person who constantly cleans with chemicals. Researchers created models comparable to each other, so they took into account such loads as high BMI, smoking or the level of education conducive to irrational behavior. Cleaning too often is also likely to be responsible for some cases of respiratory cancer in women – especially those who have never smoked and whose loved ones have not had this type of cancer.
The researchers also note that the analysis so far has only concerned women – it has not been checked whether the relationship is the same for frequently cleaning men. However, the authors note that they mainly clean women, and finding a group that cleans infrequently was a challenge for them. Men working as cleaners are a small group and essentially their work concerns, for example, outdoor places where the influence of cleaning agents is limited, hence exposure to microparticles of cleaning agents is incidental and rather small. – If there was any information to be conveyed to the women on the basis of these studies, it can be seen that in the long term, cleaning agents cause local damage to the lungs. Worse still, in many cases these chemicals are unnecessary – a simple microfiber rag and hot water would suffice, Dr. Oistein Svanes summarized the results of the research.
The researchers noted that there should be a uniform policy on the part of government agencies to regulate the amount of active agent in cleaning agents and to allow cleaning agents to be used with active ingredients that cannot be inhaled or are incidentally inhaled.
Interestingly, Norwegian research resonates with previous research by scientists from the UK. A team of scientists from the University of Bristol, Brunel University and the University of Aberdeen, led by Dr. John Henderson, investigated the effects of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from cleaning agents on pregnant women and young children, and on women working in cleaning companies. Scientists noticed that women who were constantly cleaning up during pregnancy often had children with allergic asthma or allergies to chemicals. The threat was significant – it was about 25 percent. for cleaning women and as much as over 30 percent. for women who worked in cleaning companies. Later in life, these women very often developed inflammation of the respiratory tract, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and allergic asthma. On the other hand, Australian studies on children with allergic asthma proved that in utero and infancy a very large percentage of them (over 40%) were exposed to VOC from household cleaning products. Scientists blamed volatile organic substances in cleaners, or rather their production technologies, for this. As it turns out, companies prefer such forms of cleaning agents where the active substance is fine. This has great advantages in the production process itself: it makes it easier to form suspensions and from them aerosols. Such cleaning agents flow more easily on the work surface and leave fewer traces. Of course, as a result, they also disperse more easily in the air. Companies tested active substances, but in a short-term manner, because long-term testing, due to the time needed for it and the sums spent, is rather not conducted. At present, this state of affairs is likely to change – the European Commission is working on a regulation that will change the way active substances are placed in cleaning agents – they will have larger molecular sizes and will not be volatile.