This silly little research announcement about ‘potential’ toxicity from crib mattresses is an annuity for the authors.
I can see the t-shirt brigade forming already–stop crib deaths crib mattresses kill.
http://www.sciencecodex.com/crib_mattresses_emit_potentially_harmful_chemicals_cockrell_school_engineers_find-130972
This is sort of “duh?”. It takes a while to get to someone saying that he didn’t believe the concentrations are of any concern.
a. Lot’s of talk about VOC’s. Even mentioned that formaldehyde is a VOC, but they didn’t find any formaldehyde, so why mention it? Then they get to mentioning some of the VOC’s found.
b. New mattresses emit more than old mattresses. I bet the decline is non-linear and in the interest of research, why didn’t they discover that?
c. Higher concentrations in the breathing zone. Something to do with volume and dilution?
d. Warmer generates more than colder.
Seems to me these folks are quantifying the obvious. Maybe you need to do that for your advanced degrees in those areas.
PS. If you want a big puff of VOC’s stick the wand of your meter close to the tip of a freshly opened magic marker.
Look for the lawyers behind this. We saw a lawyer’s ad last night that claimed talcum powder caused a particular cancer in women and you could sue and get your $15.00. If talcum powder caused cancer, every person in civilized society would be dying from cancer
The question is whether modern mattress materials are better or worse than antique “all natural” mattress materials that quickly become a breeding ground for bacteria, fungus, molds, lice, and several other known harmful pathogens while it goes about biodegrading into other harmful chemicals as you sleep. Not to mention how uncomfortable they usually were.
All things are made of chemicals. Chemicals that come from nature are no more or less likely to be safe and hypo-allergenic. Imagine the risks of accidentally gathering poison ivy while preparing an old fashioned pine straw mattress. One of the biggest reasons for adding certain synthesized chemicals to bedding materials is fire prevention. Most people regard the small risk of a mild rash or temporary respiratory irritation worth it to mitigate the more common risk of burning to death in your sleep.
There’s a lot of space between “potentially harmful” and actually harmful. Anything is potentially harmful if misused or abused, so standards and practices with regards to bedding materials are properly enforced. If an individual finds their self particularly unable to cope with a bad smell, or having a reaction to contact with something, then that individual should seek out an alternative, but there’s no reason for that to concern the billions of people that aren’t similarly sensitive.
The perfect world is still a long ways off. In the meantime we must judge advances by the balance of their advantages and disadvantages and not let rare minor setbacks convince us to undo what progress we have made.
I am most impressed with your reliance on MotherJones. Those boys hate chemicals for sure–scared of modern life–hoping for devolution to smoking dope and pickin berries.
Love your site but chemicals from mattresses like tempur pedic are for real. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/03/should-you-ditch-your-chemical-mattress
Ah, maybe this is why so many children have autism-spectrum disorder and add/adhd?!
Just wonder how those “potential” crib deaths compare with the actual prevalence of the shaken baby syndrome.