Allergies afflict so many. Sniff some ragweed in a ripe season, eat a little chicken laced with a new chemical, let a friendly cat get too close
–and a quarter of America`s population is off wheezing, sniffling, crying or erupting in reddish bumps.
Susan Shaner and her three children feel the misery of allergies more acutely than most.
”Allergies? You name it, We`ve got it,” says Shaner, who discovered four years ago that her recurring fatigue and illnesses since childhood were caused largely by allergies to 28 common foods, natural gas, household molds, a few plants, and just about every piece of particleboard and carpet glue ever made. Her three pre-teen children, similarly afflicted, also regard many common synthetics (and even wholesome foods) as toxins.
”Shopping for us is no easy thing. My kids often get sick in shopping centers because of permanent-press clothes and particleboard,” says Shaner, who has learned to recognize a sequence of hyperactivity, then headaches and abrupt loss of strength as a calling card of urea formaldehyde, a chemical used extensively in particleboard and some plywoods.
Building a home for a family of environmental sensitives requires scrutiny of extraordinary proportions, as construction materials also may provoke toxic reaction. Chief among them are urea formaldehyde and petroleum, the latter an essential ingredient in construction glue and tar paper, which typically is laid on roofs and in subflooring to reduce squeaks. Another petroleum agent, tar emulsion, commonly is sprayed around outer basement walls to repel water.
Each of these is a sublethal contaminant for a family such as the Shaners. Each also is sufficient to trigger headaches, arthritic symptoms and erratic behavior among a steadily increasing segment of the human species.
”I would say what the Shaners experienced is not unusual at all, not these days,” says Dr. Gary Oberg, a Crystal Lake pediatrician and allergist who specializes in ecological medicine.
An estimated 40 million Americans are impaired at least a few days annually by allergies of some form, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. With the introduction of new chemicals into our foods and shelters, an increasing number find themselves in situations like the Shaners, who could pursue few of the housing options afforded the majority of our population.
The Shaners decided they had only one option: Trapped where they were, in a 50-year-old home free of chemicals but equipped with gas appliances and laden with common household molds that inhabit all older homes, they had to move. Once Oberg tracked down the reasons behind the family`s recurring illnesses, Steve and Susan Shaner commissioned construction of an ”allergy-free” home.
”Sariah (their 4 1/2-year-old daughter) is really the reason we had it built. She`s the most allergic of all my kids. But we`re all breathing easier because of it,” says the 32-year-old mother.
The new two-story Colonial in Batavia the family moved into last autumn doesn`t look markedly different from the housing stock you`d see in a lot of new subdivisions. But it is.
”We literally built the Shaner house the way homes were built 50 or 60 years ago, before glue” says Richard Devine (of Devine Construction, Geneva), an architect and contractor who never before had occasion to use so many nails in a single house. ”This was the first allergy-free home I`ve ever built. I probably spent more time on that job than on any I`ve ever been on.”
The four-bedroom house was constructed without glue or particleboard, without tar paper except on the roof, without plastic electrical switchplates, without carpeting and without numerous other synthetic building materials that are standard in American homes today.
It is heated with electricity instead of gas because most of the family members are gas-sensitive. As a cost saver, the Shaners elected to heat from the outside with an electrical heat pump, which pulls heat from ambient air and blows it out through floor registers. A heat pump has no particular allergic value, but Susan says she found it cheaper than other forms of electric heat generation.
The Shaner house must be kept squeaky clean because of dust, which carries common allergens. But it was built squeaky as well as clean, too. Because of young Seth`s allergy to petroleum products, no tarpaper was laid between floor and subfloor. Hence the squeaks.
Another feature, considered critical by the allergy-prone but regarded as a luxury by others, is a built-in vacuuming system with nozzle outlets in various rooms and a dust receptacle in the garage.
Susan Shaner visited the worksite daily through 120 days of construction to make sure allergic materials weren`t inadvertantly being used. For workers, who were forbidden to smoke on the site at all because of her allegies, her visits may have been unbidden nuisances. But this onetime farmgirl from Geneseo, treated for years by doctors who didn`t realize her symptoms stemmed from allergies, wasn`t about to chance alterations in architectural plans by well-intended subcontractors who would have exacerbated allergy problems with their good intentions.
”It was a pain, but worthwhile, I think,” she says.
Construction cost 10 to 20 percent more than another home of its type, Devine says.
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The Shaner house has four bedrooms, 2 1/2 bathrooms and an unfinished basement. Floors are 3/4-inch oak and the stairway is solid oak.
”People would be amazed if they really knew what was inside their supposed oak stairway,” Devine says. ”If it`s not pine or basswood, it`s particleboard.”
(Particleboard consists of shavings of various boards, all compressed and glued for strength. )
”A key point is our use of Visqueen (a plastic sheeting about 6 millimeters thick). We used it as a vapor barrier on the inside facing of studs, between stud and drywall,” says Devine, adding, ”A lot of contractors use foil-backed or Kraft paper-backed insulation in walls and ceilings. We couldn`t determine what chemicals are used as adhesives (on backings), so we avoided the whole problem altogether” by using unbacked fiberglass.
Instead of tarpaper on the exterior wall, behind cost-saving aluminum siding, Devine opted for Tyvek, a tough synthetic that apparently is nonallergic. He also used styrofoam-like insulating blocks made by DuPont on the inside.
”We couldn`t use glue to bind drywall to wood studs, so we used more nails, probably double the number of nails ordinarily used in an American home today,” Devine says. ”They`ll have more nailpops (nails popping out of the wall) because of it. But, as Susan says, ”nail popping is preferable to getting sick.”
How sick, you wonder?
The Shaners` 6-year-old son, Simon, is allergic to 23 foods. He was 3 when he tore a door almost from its hinges after eating a hunk of colby cheese, one of many foods that ravages his nervous system. ”He broke the door apart in the center by kicking it and hitting it with his fists,” his mother says.
Seth, 9, cannot drink a glass of milk causes a two-day stomach ache. Being acutely ethanol-sensitive, he seldom can ride in an automobile without getting sick from exhaust fumes and gasoline odors unless he drops two drops of enthanol neutralizer under his tongue. As a further precaution, Devine built the garage with a breezeway instead of attaching it to the house.
Seth, like Simon, is allergic to cigarette smoke. But neither brother reacts as violently as Sariah. Prone to eczema and hives from a variety of sources, she is allergic to all household pets except fish, and probably will never be able to use cosmetics or even many toothpastes because of their glycerine content. Since infancy, she has had a tendency to vomit whenever she is near a lighted cigarette. A peanut butter sandwich might kill her, her mother says.
”We nearly lost her. That`s how close it was,” says Susan, whose husband, Steve, a bank examiner, is mildly allergic to mold and wheat but apparently little else.
Curiously, none of the Shaners is allergic to the precisely the same range of substances as the others. Nor are their symptoms alike.
The Shaners learned of the root of their physical problems four years ago, when Sariah appeared near death. That`s when they visited Oberg, who concedes he is a ”doctor of last resort” for apparently incurable sufferers who prove resistant to drug therapy or who have been diagnosed by other doctors as overly neurotic. Oberg, like Henrotin Hospital`s respected allergist Theron Randolph, helps patients learn to avoid allergic
circumstances rather than to seek treatment of their symptoms with drugs.
Oberg asked the couple to fill out his standard 25-page medical history. Then he subjected family members to provocation allergy tests. They watched in awe as Oberg first induced allergic reactions, then neutralized them with diluted dosages of the allergic that provoked the reaction in the first place. ”Alcoholics have a phrase for it. It`s called, ”A hair of the dog that bit you,”` Oberg says. ”It works in the right dilution, though a lot of conventional doctors think it`s witchcraft.”
It didn`t take long for Oberg to verify a suspected genetic link. ”I guess you could say he pointed his finger at me,” says Susan Shaner, with curious relief. ”That`s okay. Remember, I grew up with doctors giving me all sorts of pills for symptoms” and other doctors implying it was all psychosomatic.
Soon the entire Shaner family was learning how to avoid certain foods.
”Four years ago I was making whole-wheat bread from scratch. We ate apples and oranges and lots of greens. Nutritionists would love it; but it was killing me,” she says, describing symptoms of arthritic tenderness and flu-like symptoms induced by those foods. Carrots and beans provoked hives.
Helpful as dietary training was, it addressed only part of the problem. Allergies arise from sources other than food; basically, they fall into two other categories–natural inhalants, such as pollen, and manmade chemicals.
Before tackling construction of their new home, the Shaners borrowed heavily from Oberg`s medical library to learn how to avoid chemical allergens. Three books in particular are helpful in building or remodeling homes to minimize allergies, Oberg says. They are:
”Why Your House May Endanger Your Health” by Alfred Zamm, M.D., and Robert Gannon ($7.95 paperback, Simon and Schuster, 1980); ”Coping With Your Allergies,” by Natalie Golas ($18.25 hardback, Simon and Schuster, 1979);
”The Household Environment and Chronic Illness” by Guy Pfeiffer, M.D., and Casimir Nickel ($22.75 hardback, Charles Thomas publishers, Springfield, Ill., 1980).
Shaner relied mostly on the first two books. (Obtaining valuable books on allergies can be difficult because some are out of print and not in libraries. Oberg refers inquiries to Myrtie Jane Kreutzer, a nurse for a clinical ecologist in Colorado, who has established a library of some 60 volumes and the resources to obtain copies. For inquiry, call Kreutzer at
(303)-482-6001 or write Dickey Enterprises, 635 Gregory Rd., Fort Collins, Colo. 80524.)
The Shaners didn`t stop with books, however. She also called manufacturers and inquired of chemists about ingredients in construction products. Most were nice but uncooperative, she says, because of company policies to protect trade secrets. Several chemists, technically circumventing corporate policy, helped by confirming only whether ingredients harmful to the Shaners were in their products.
”We couldn`t afford not to know. So we avoided any products we couldn`t get information on,” she says.
Not knowing means ignoring possibilities, and the price of ignorance can be brutal. Though now living in a house that apparently is an allergy-free haven, the Shaners frequently are reminded of the medical facts of life on the outside. Whenever they visit shopping centers, for instance, or ride in a car, or watch someone else eat a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread, four of the five Shaners must weigh the allure of being like so many others against the risks of getting sicker than most.