Sick school syndrome

I did for all those years before I started my sick school syndrome consulting business. I wound up doing a lot of writing about nutrition and food. That kind of laid the groundwork because then I had the facility for writing when I learned about environmental illness and sick building syndrome and sick school syndrome. 

In March of 1988 I did my first workshop on the subject. Very naively, because I didn t realize the extent of what I was taking on, I announced that I was going to do a workshop on the sick school syndrome for our support group and community. That s what started... 

Irene Wilkenfeld is an environmental health consultant, lecturer and writer specializing in issues related to the sick school syndrome. Her consulting company provides in-service training workshops for school districts, educating them about the myriad health hazards in schools and offering efficacious and cost-effective options to detoxify schools. Wilkenfeld also offers phone consultations and personalized research reports to help students, parents and teachers advocate for change and win accommodations. Wilkenfeld is passionate that every school must be a citadel of safety. 

Norback D., Torgen M. and Edling C. (1990) Volatile organic compounds, respirable dust, and personal factors related to the prevalence of sick building syndrome in primary schools. Brit. J. Ind. Med., 47, 733-741. 

The term sick building syndrome was first used in 1984 by a Danish-born Yale biophysicist in a Swedish publication and quickly proliferated in the English-language medical literature and in media accounts of problem office buildings on both sides of the Atlantic. The name was immediately controversial—how could a building properly be called sick Moreover, the events sbs described were themselves strange in form—imperceptible chemical exposures combined with multiple symptoms. Could such events be proved real. Were offices, homes, schools, and mails—spaces previously understood as shelters from hazard—polluted ... 

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