December 12th, 2017
Scientific research has established that residential hazards have a significant impact on public health. Other background papers prepared for HUD’s Healthy Homes Initiative summarize information regarding the extent of residential hazards and methods to reduce these hazards for asthma, injuries, mold, pesticides, and carbon monoxide. This background paper focuses on current methods for assessing residential hazards, including a brief introduction to issues associated with an overall home hazard assessment, as well as assessment of a particular hazard, such as carbon monoxide, or a particular health endpoint, such as asthma. Familiarity with current methods to assess residential risks from lead exposure is assumed. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the issues associated with extending a residential risk assessment for lead to include other residential hazards, with an initial focus on injuries, allergens, mold, pesticides, and carbon monoxide. A major challenge for specifying an overall healthy homes assessment is that occupants of houses receive exposures to multiple agents that may interact physically or chemically with each other or their environment, or that may act synergistically (NAS, 2000). In contrast, assessment of these hazards in a home typically focuses on a single agent at a time, and thus may underestimate the overall health hazard an individual may face in a given environment. For example, asthmatic individuals may react to 20 to 50% of the particles they inhale from indoor air; however, a single allergen such as dust mite allergen likely accounts for less than 10% of the particles in their environment. Therefore, measurement of a single allergen may underestimate the total allergen load by two- to five-fold (O'Meara and Tovey, 2000).