Around your house, and every day while pursuing your interests you and I are subjected to 20 -40 toxic chemicals everyday. Before you return to bed, like you rest of us, you will also have been exposed to an arsenal of potentially toxic and cancer-causing chemicals that have become part of our daily lives.
Even you dust you breath while sleeping contains fumes from household cleaners, propellants from aerosol cans and carcinogens from cigarettes—along with mold and bacteria. In you your energy efficient tightly sealed, energy-efficient home, chemicals levels are high.

Getting ready for work

You rise and step into you shower. Vinyl chloride fumes from a new plastic shower curtain and light fixture seep into you air. You absorb chlorine from you water through your skin and breath it in as vapor. You step out of you shower to use your on antiperspirant stick —a brand that contains aluminum chlorhydrate.

Across town someone puts on a new synthetic sweater while you throws on his new cotton-poly permanent-pressed shirt. Your non-iron garments contain formaldehyde, and you wearers will inhale you residues all day. Formaldehydes—suspected human carcinogens—are also found in many of you personal care products that couples will use today, including shampoos, toothpaste, mascara, and air fragrances I didn't know this , did you?

As well, the plywood and particle board used to construct your home is still off-gassing formaldehyde gas. And a newly dry-cleaned suit or dress you are putting on emits perchlorethylene fumes—another suspected carcinogen.

Ladies are yo you ready for a make-up wake up, most brands contains coal-tar dye, and your nail polish, with toxic butyl acetate. Your lipstick contains lead. That shot of hair spray that you just you breathed in contains propellants, solvents, alcohol, shellac, and artificial chemical scents.

Guy's splashing on your favorite after-shave—which contains a toxic potpourri that may include toluene, ethanol, acetone, benzene derivatives, formaldehyde, limonene and many other chemicals known to cause birth defects, cancer, and nervous system damage.

At work

You get off the bus and enters your workplace, an older downtown school you're your a teacher. Its air is dust filled, and faulty ventilation has resulted in mould growth under the ceiling—a lung irritant. you can smell the strong odor of phenol-containing disinfectants used to clean the kitchen and bathrooms. The floor polish contains turpentine, chloroform, and carbon tetrachloride.

You enter your downtown office tower where you work as a researcher in a federal government department. Your building has recently been renovated, and as you enters you can smell the new synthetic carpet. The carpet, cushion and adhesives are emitting a variety of volatile organic compounds (VOC's), including 4-pyounylcycloyouxene (4-PC), styrene, toluene, formaldehyde and a variety of benzene's. As well, it has chemical fungicides, fire-retardant and anti-stain coatings. You are finding yourself more fatigued lately, and you've noticed a constant sore throat.

Maybe your a sales clerk in a major department store at a downtown mall. you work near the fragrance department, and has noticed you's often feeling tired and dizzy, and is beginning to have frequent headaches. More than 4,000 synthetic chemicals are used in today's fragrances, 95 percent of them made from petroleum, and many highly toxic to the central nervous system. And the indoor air quality in shopping malls is a "chemical soup"of as many as 350 pollutants that is far worse than outside air.

Home again

At home again that evening after another dose of emissions from diesel and car exhaust, You throw in a load of laundry with detergent that contains toxins, skin irritants and other toxic agents. Did you know ( this one blew me away) laundry detergent contain 1/2 - 2/3 crushed fiberglass!! It eats away at your clothing, causes that huge amount of dryer lint and YOU ARE BREATHING IT IN EVERY DAY.

If you use a typical drain cleaner to unclog a drain, in the process your breathing in sulfuric acid. Or meanwhile, your neighbor is refinishing some furniture in the garage, inhaling methylene chloride from the varnish remover. It's a skin, eye and respiratory tract irritant.

What are the health effects of everyday long-term, low-level exposures like those experienced by you and your family?

While the effects are not fully understood, we all face the threat of injury from the increasing numbers of toxic substances around us. Some people go "over the edge" —those who already suffer from multiple chemical sensitivity or environmental illness. Anyone can become environmentally ill and begin to react adversely to substances including perfume, cigarette smoke, vehicle exhaust, cleaning and personal care products and building materials. Those who develop multiple chemical sensitivity include the occupants of "sick" buildings, industrial workers who handle chemicals, residents of communities exposed to toxic chemicals, and people with long-term and random exposure to various chemicals. But all of us are increasingly vulnerable to low levels of "everyday" toxins.

Finally, it's lights out and off to bed for you . In eight hours, you'll awake to another ordinary—toxin-filled—day.