| A Vision for the 21st Century
Introduction
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is pleased to issue the Healthy Buildings, Healthy People (HBHP) report, a vision for indoor environmental quality in the 21st Century. The importance of the indoor environment to human health has been highlighted in numerous environmental risk reports, including the 1997 report of the President and Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management. On average, we spend about 90 percent of our time indoors, where pollutant levels are often higher than those outside. Indoor pollution is estimated to cause thousands of cancer deaths and hundreds of thousands of respiratory health problems each year. In addition, hundreds of thousands of children have experienced elevated blood lead levels resulting from their exposure to indoor pollutants.
The report challenges all of us to work together to improve the quality of our environment. It can also serve as the basis for discussion and education among professionals in public policy, health, building sciences, product manufacturing, and environmental research. The report is also a blueprint for channeling available resources. Already, EPA has undertaken program initiatives focusing on childhood asthma, characterizing the effect of building and consumer products for use in schools, creating standards of care for existing buildings, and designing guidance for new schools. EPA is also integrating good indoor environmental quality (IEQ) concepts into the Energy Star? label program for commercial office buildings. Moreover, other current federal programs, while not direct outgrowths of the HBHP effort, are complementary of it. For example, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Healthy Homes project has identified moisture and molds as a priority to be addressed in its grant process, and the Healthy People 2010 effort at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) contains several goals relating to IEQ progress in existing buildings. We challenge others, including government, tribes, the health community, academia, non-profit organizations, and industry, to embrace the HBHP goals and work together to invest in the actions outlined in the report. In this way, we can begin to make progress towards realizing the vision of HBHP.
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