At the same time, having a room too cool—even in just a few places—can harm productivity. An employee in the insurance office said her coworkers, when not using the terminals, sometimes wore gloves.
As for bad ventilation, it, too, can jinx production and add to sick leave, and in recent years, especially, it’s been a problem, as companies tightened up their buildings to save energy. People in high-paced jobs or those requiring concentration may suffer the most.
Healthy Honesty
When Laura Moore was pregnant, she neither smoked nor drank—not even coffee.
She did, however, operate a computer terminal for a telephone company in Renton, Washington, near Seattle, and she was one of three VDT operators there with problem pregnancies within a year and one-half.[[44]]
Laura Moore, after nineteen hours of labor, gave birth to a son with a birth defect called spina bifida. “We didn’t see it at first,” she said. “We saw a larger head and a foot that was a little odd and distorted. But when the nurse picked him up, then we saw this huge opening in his back, which is a spina bifida.” Laura was “devastated. Just devastated. We—I went through a severe depression afterward.”
Moore is just one of many people worried about VDTs. In Massachusetts a pregnant journalist, fearing radiation, wore a leaded apron. (A leaded apron’s weight on the mother might itself harm an unborn child.) At the New York Times two young editors developed cataracts and filed for workers compensation, blaming their computer screens.
“We’ve heard of cases of everything from bad dreams of computers chasing people to psychic distress where people have attacks of depression,” says Michael Smith, the ex-NIOSH man. “But it can’t be linked specifically to the VDT.” And yet NIOSH as of this writing was continuing safety studies. “We might find that it has nothing to do with the video tubes,” Smith says of problem pregnancies among terminal operators. “It could be part of the circuitry.... It may be from job stress.” Meanwhile, proven problems—like eyestrain—bedevil men and women on the tube. When 1,236 secretaries and word processing-operators replied to a survey done for a major disk-maker, almost 70 percent worried about potential health complication. Some 63 percent told of eyestrain, and 36 percent reported backaches. Almost 80 percent wanted better lighting and more time to rest their eyes.
So, regardless of how your equipment supplier vouches for your computers’ safety, keep two facts in mind:
1. There is a possibility, extra-slim, but still there, that low-frequency radiation from computers can seriously threaten the health of workers like Laura Moore and their unborn children.