subject: Your House - Is It Making You Sick? [print this page] You may be a typically house proud personYou may be a typically house proud person. Someone who just must have a sparkling clean house, with spotless windows, a germ free kitchen and bathroom, immaculately vacuumed carpets, shining floors and well polished furniture. If you are - look out! You could be on completely the wrong track.
Instead of protecting your family's health, you could in actually be making yourself and your family sick. House sickness?? -yes, that definitely is a sickness. Believe it or not, your house can make you very sick indeed.
If you are creating a spotlessly clean home using the numerous chemical and highly toxic products on the market, you are really perpetuating the myth that buying expensive synthetic detergents and cleaners is a guarantee of a clean germ free home.
You are in fact allowing numerous dangerous and harmful chemicals to sabotage your health. They become a part of your everyday life and inevitably what follows are allergies, infections and unexplained rashes.
Abrasive chemical cleaners are hard on our skin and also bad for our general health. Perhaps you suffer from unexplained headaches or you develop nausea and a rash and can find no obvious cause for these illnesses. Maybe you have an annoying cough, fatigue, an allergic reaction, dizziness, respiratory problems, dry or inflamed skin or eye irritation. Such symptoms can be caused by exposure to toxins which commonly found in our homes. For these symptoms however your medical practitioner will need to check you out.
Environmental hazards can cause or aggravate a wide range of common medical problems. Short and long term exposure to hazards such as chemicals, allergens, pollution and other toxins can definitely cause environmental illnesses.
Just picture your little one on the floor, happily sucking her thumb - a thumb that has been in contact with the harshest of all floor cleaners. Your food perhaps being cooked in a saucepan containing a cocktail of dishwashing liquids, grease cutting aids, abrasive scourers etc. (unless you have rinsed it out really well and how many people do?). This can be serious and yet I am constantly amazed at the number of people who do not think of rinsing their dishes well after washing. Widespread, haphazard application of most destructive deadly chemicals occurs around our modern day homes, inside and out, at an appalling rate.
There are so many products which can negatively affect your health. Although we all want to make sure that germs, harmful insects and viruses are kept at bay we do need to think about this and try to achieve the desired outcome in a more natural and less harmful way.
Yes, nature has given us alternative options and today with the emphasis on preserving our environment it is up to us to make our contribution. Not only do many synthetic chemicals harm our health but they also do enormous environmental damage, contaminating our underground water and rivers through run off and leaching. Detergents, shampoos, oven cleaners, dishwashing liquids etc. are very difficult to treat in our sewage systems. This results in toxic chemicals in our streams and oceans which ultimately contaminate our fish. It is a vicious circle.
However, this pattern can be broken. If we make a start in our own homes we will not only be improving the well being of ourselves and our families but we'll also be helping to save the earth and all the creatures that depend on it for life.
