Health

Something in the air
Between 1989 and 1993, 800 workers at Halifax's Camp Hill Medical Centre fell sick because of chemically contaminated air. More than 100 are still off work--and a fight is raging over the reasons why. Kim Pittaway explores the modern fears and slippery truths behind the environmental illness debate

First published in Chatelaine's November 1995 issue.
© Kim Pittaway

It's just after 7 p.m. and the third-floor lounge at Dalhousie University is filling with nurses, occupational therapists and hospital support staff. They chat about test results and doctors as they take their seats, and if it weren't for the handful wearing white respiratory masks, the scene could be mistaken for a staff meeting. But for most of these 26 women, staff meetings are a thing of the past. This is a weekly meeting of the Camp Hill Environmental Victims Society (CHEVS), and the illness they are here to discuss is their own.

Elaine Nepjuk, the group's chairwoman, sits perched on the edge of an institutional couch, file folders full of letters and government documents stacked in her lap. Nepjuk is one of over 100 staffers with symptoms of multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), a controversial disease characterized by allergy-like reactions to everyday compounds. A slim athletic-looking mother of two, Nepjuk is the type of person one suspects might actually use the running shoes she sports for, well, running. It's a suspicion that fits her self-description: someone always on the go, into sports and outdoor recreation, never sick. But Nepjuk hasn't been that way for more than four years, not since what she and fellow support group members call the "environmental disaster" at Camp Hill Medical Centre (now the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre).

Others call it Canada's worst example of sick building syndrome. Between 1989 and 1993, an estimated 800 out of 1,100 Camp Hill workers were sick with symptoms attributed to chemically contaminated air: rashes, eye irritations, headaches, memory loss, poor concentration, respiratory illness, digestive disturbances and extreme fatigue. Over 300 were so sick they went on long-term leave. And while the hospital got a clean bill of health two years ago, after $2 million worth of repairs, more than 100 of its staff are still off work.

As a result of her exposure to Camp Hill's bad air, says Nepjuk, the athletic on-the-go Elaine has been replaced by a woman concerned with her fragile health. When she goes to church, she sometimes sits alone in the pastor's office to listen to the service, because a whiff of someone's perfume is enough to make her dizzy and nauseous. Stopping at the gas station on the way home, the scent of gasoline leaves her too confused to park. The only sure way to avoid feeling sick is to avoid the chemicals, but as Nepjuk says, "you have to live." And retreating to your home in an attempt to build a chemical-free bubble--as some victims of MCS have done--is no way to live.

"This disease is a nightmare," says Nepjuk. "But if I didn't have it myself, I admit that I'd be skeptical."

And some are skeptical. No one, including hospital officials, denies that Camp Hill made workers ill. But there's plenty of debate about whether contaminated air could have caused the chronic illness from which Nepjuk and other members of CHEVS claim to suffer.

Proponents of the MCS diagnosis argue that victims of the disorder--some 80 percent of whom are women--are the canaries in the coal mine, an early warning to all of us that the chemical soup of modern life is affecting human health in ways we still don't understand. They point to chemicals leaching from paints, carpets, caulkings and glues as proof that our very homes and offices are making us sick.

But skeptics like Halifax physician Dr. Kempton Hayes call MCS "gobbledygook." And while they go out of their way to avoid words like "hypochondriac" and "crazy," they talk of victims who have been manipulated by biased doctors, and of people drawn into a "belief system" that convinces them they are chronically ill.

Nepjuk and her colleagues in the support group are more blunt. They see only two choices: canaries or crazies. "And I am not crazy," says Nepjuk. "Camp Hill hospital made me sick."

---

What happened at Camp Hill wasn't the photogenically newsworthy catastrophe of a chemical spill or a pipeline explosion. Instead, this environmental disaster lurked in the air.

---

It began in the mid-1980s. At the time, the hospital occupied three buildings: Camp Hill, Abbie Lane and the newly constructed Veterans Memorial Building. Complaints of rashes and respiratory problems first surfaced at Abbie Lane but weren't taken seriously. Staff were assured the symptoms were not work-related. It wasn't until 1989, when a newly appointed occupational health doctor spotted a pattern of complaints by workers in the basement kitchen of the Veterans building, that the hospital started looking for a common cause.

Maintenance staff initially blamed poor air circulation, but adjustments only made things worse. A team of air-quality experts finally isolated the culprit: detergent-laden exhaust from the industrial dishwashers was being sucked back into the kitchen through a nearby fresh-air vent. Instead of getting clean air, workers were being blasted with sodium hydroxide from the soap powder.

The vents were rerouted, and officials celebrated the solution with a party for kitchen workers. But new complaints continued to pop up in both Abbie Lane and the Veterans building. They had diverse chemical causes-phenols and formaldehyde in one area, paint fumes in another, automobile exhaust somewhere else--but all were aggravated by a poorly designed ventilation system.

To save energy, the system shut down whenever the indoor and outdoor air temperatures differed by more than 10 degrees--and in Nova Scotia, that's about six months of the year. As well, staff didn't realize that dampers automatically sealed room vents when the fire alarm went off. Some rooms could have been without fresh air for months. Finally, a mysterious dust-like powder was traced to the building's humidification system; employees were adding five times the recommended amount of an antirust agent to combat persistent rust problems.