3 Mar 2008
The health and welfare of our children is right at the top of our personal agendas and we take an inordinate amount of care to ensure that they are safe and well. This concern begins even before birth and extends, whether they like it or not, through their teenage years and beyond. One of the more difficult periods of this protection detail is the first time we hand our children over to someone else to be looked after.
When choosing a child care centre, we will take several factors into account, including its reputation, facilities, location and cost. But would we consider its means of ventilation? If a centre appears to be stuffy, too warm or too cold, we might ask questions but the ventilation strategy can also have a strong influence on the air quality, allowing the accumulation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), some of which are potentially harmful. Developing children are more vulnerable than adults to VOCs because their organs and immune systems are still developing.
The effects of the type of ventilation in child care centres have been examined by a group of researchers in Singapore, with some interesting conclusions. Their work was part of a larger epidemiological study looking at the links between VOC exposures in child care centres and cases of asthma, allergies and respiratory problems. Mohamed Zuraimi and Kwok Tham from the National University of Singapore conducted a nationwide study involving 104 centres with a variety of ventilation strategies.
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