If your workers complain of eye irritation or pain, the blame may lie no further away than your air conditioning vents. Here’s what to look for, assuming your eyes are ok, that is!
The office worker was getting really scared.
She’d been staring intently at her computer monitor all day, grateful that her building had such powerful air conditioning this hot summer day (The vent blew right over her head). But now something was wrong with her eyes.
It had started as redness and an itchy, even burning sensation. But it had now progressed to a more frightening level, a feeling that some sharp foreign object was imbedded in her delicate membranes that enabled her vision. No matter how much she rubbed, she couldn’t get it out.
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The problem, of course, had nothing to do with something in her eye. It was about what was not in her eye – enough of the beneficial moisture that coats and protects the lens and lubricates eye movements as we look this way and that. She was suffering from dry eye syndrome (DES).
Her symptoms were typical. Other indications of DES include a gritty, scratchy, or filmy feeling in the eye, blurred vision, excessive tearing, and extreme sensitivity to light.
DES has long been a problem as we get older, and the eye’s tearing mechanisms become less efficient, but lately more and more cases have been cropping up in the working population.
“The American Academy of Ophthalmology is logging a ‘staggering’ increase in the number of cases,” reports Diane C. Lade, in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. And one local ophthalmologist she interviewed, Dr. William Trattler, notes he is seeing an average of 10 cases a day.
He believes he knows the culprit. “I see tons of dry eye patients because we are in air-conditioned environments all the time,” Trattler explains. “It’s such a common condition that we overlook it.”
Common is right. Reports indicate some 9 to10 million Americans have been diagnosed with chronic DES, and many more sufferers deal with the symptoms on an occasional basis. More women than men seem to suffer with it, and especially those also going through menopause.
The cases are concentrated in specific work environments. Research by the National Women’s Health Research Center indicates a strong percentage of cases among accountants, software engineers, executive assistants, and customer service reps, all professions tied to computer screens in air-conditioned offices.
This cause is backed by a survey of over 300 workers with DES. More than two-thirds reported their work involved extensive computer use in air-conditioned (or low humidity heated) workspaces.
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But the problem also is found outside the office, among other groups including long haul truckers and airline flight crews. Their commonality: Workdays spent in confined, highly air-conditioned spaces, with little influx of fresh outside air.
As summer heat forces many of us to spend more time indoors, and motivates building engineers to turn up the air-conditioning, DES may well become something your workers experience, and therefore something you want to educate them about. As you do, also make them aware that, if the feeling is unpleasant, painful, or frightening, it’s usually easily treatable and quite preventable.
We’ll tell you how in tomorrow’s Advisor.