Air Fresheners and Asthma
If you spend any amount of time watching TV, you’re going to see some air freshener commercials. These commercials are full of wholesome images such as flowers and mountains streams which gives you the impression that these air fresheners are going to be able to make your home smell as clean as these pictures that they are showing to you. What they fail to tell you, however, is that you are actually putting dangerous chemicals into the air that can not only be damaging to our health, they may actually be a trigger which causes us to go into a severe and in some cases, deadly asthma attack.
Ask anybody who has a difficult time breathing and they are going to tell you that whenever somebody uses an air freshener, it causes a little bit of distress for them. For some people, they can be across the house from one of these air fresheners as it is being sprayed and still experience distress in some way or another. Knowing this alone is enough to make many people stop using them altogether but the same chemicals may be available in other forms that we carry with us all of the time.
Perfume is one of the many examples of something that, although it smells good, can be deadly to us. Who of us has not smelled a strong perfume and had at least a little bit of a reaction to it. For those of us who are sensitive and have severe asthma, even a light perfume may put us into an asthma attack that can be difficult to overcome. That is why it is important for you to avoid people who are wearing perfume and certainly to avoid wearing it yourself if you have asthma.
One final place that you may run into this problem is in the detergents that you use. Laundry detergent often contains the same chemicals that are put in air fresheners, simply in a different form. In an effort to make our clothes smell clean and fresh, they may actually be exposing us to dangerous chemicals that we breathe in all day long. If you have asthma, it is imperative that you avoid any of these chemicals and scented detergents that are flooding the markets. Use something that is all natural and unscented and you may just recognize that you are breathing better as a result.
