(ill)Health

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Ill-health is commonly reported by those living with damp conditions.

While this can often referr to specific conditions such as asthma, atopic, mental health problems, and more, the ebbs and flows in how our body carries traces are far from definitive.

Also endured is a more generalised, non-specific poor quality of health. Getting ill more than usual from repeat infections, random flare ups of rashes, coughs, and pains. While increasingly health bodies like the NHS are communicating the risks of co-habiting with dampness, annecdotally doctors are often cautious to pin-point exact causation in their patients. This is especially true considering the numerous causes associated with many of the health conditions linked to damp housing. It might be hard to determine whether someone has asthma because of their poor housing conditions, or because of the poor air quality in their area.

The UK Centre for Moisture in Buildings report, Health and Moisture in Buildings, outlines both the need for serious consideration of the health impacts of damp housing and the complex methodological considerations in assessing this.

Despite these limitations, the severe impact damp housing can have on people’s health should be underestimated. As Nadine El-Enany notes: environmental harms are a slow and less visible, but no less significant form of institutional violence than custodial deaths.

_{Source: The Mirror, 2022.}

The house I live in has a damp problem. It is very minor now; a year ago it was not. White feathery mushroomed under my mattress, black spots climbed the walls. My childhood asthma resurged for the first time in a decade, I endured infection after infection. My joints hurt at night, I’ve developed allergies where before I had done.

Since moving in, now two years ago, I’ve been prescribed over 20 different medications to manage these nonspecific and never-traced maladies. Antibiotics, antivirals, steroids, painkillers, bronchodilators, antihistamines, immunomodulators. I have inhaled metered aerosol, swallowed pills with food and on empty stomachs, rubbed creams into my skin like ritual. My friends remark that I am often ill: before this date, my last prescription had been in 2014.

So when I speak to someone, and they tell me of their anaphylaxis, of their lying awake at night wondering and worrying, of their trouble walking up the stairs: I always need to catch my breath.