Sick – Building Syndrome
Elizabeth Steinberg was a healthy 16 – year – old student on the tennis team at St. Charles High School, west of Chicago, Illinois. But then she started to have strange health problems. The same thing happened to dozens of teachers and students at the school. They went to doctors for treatment of a number of symptoms such as sore throats, tiredness, headaches, and respiratory (breathing) difficulties. Doctors treated respiratory infections with antibiotics, but the condition didn’t seem to improve, except – mysteriously – on weekends and over vacations, when the symptoms disappeared. Experts came to investigate and find the cause. They discovered that St. Charles High, like thousands of other schools and office buildings nationwide, is a “sick building” – in other words, a building that creates its own indoor air pollution.