chronic carbon monoxide poisoning and symptoms a thing?

[linusbert]

i wonder if this is a thing.
since a few days i am suffering from the smell of car exhaust gases smells. and i dont think its from the street despite living on a big high trafficed road. i instead suspect the heating to be not working good and clean - its heating time in germany and this house in general is pretty lazy with maintenance so i wouldnt wonder.
sometimes i feel a bit dizzy and aggitated... but the people running the nursing home gaslight me as if its just my imagination.
obviously its not very accute otherwise i would be dead if it is carbon monoxide involved. i ordered a measurement device and lets see what is going on.

the first time i noticed that smell was last winter. also last winter some neuro symptoms regarding ears and eyes started to beginn. i thought at first it was progression of disease.. but now i have a different idea.
also i have most of winter at the same times a sudden worsening of symptoms especially diabetes. getting better after winter again.


so,
now i read a lot about chronic carbon monoxide poisoning and wonder how it could be related to CFS. it shares a few symptoms, inhibits oxygen metabolism and atp production causing hypoxia all over the body and organs.
it can go on for long times and slowly damage the body. so could some of us suffer from this. never realizing the road and heating is silently killing us. carbon monoxide itself is without any smell, other byproducts of burning might cause a smell though.

carbon monoxide poisoning can cause diabetes and a lot of other things.


and the other question is, what can i do about it if i cannot immediately switch my place. any supplements helping here?
carbon monoxide binds to hem protein blocking oxygen. usually they treat it with oxygen or HBOT. but thats not a possibility for me either.
for cyanid poisening there is hydroxocobalamin as antidote. wonder if there is something for carbon monoxide as well?

 

[Judee]

I tested positive for petroleum product sensitivities years ago through an environmental doctor. I still have to use natural gas to heat my home, water, and dry my clothes but I cannot use a gas stove in the kitchen. Being in such close contact to it, makes me feel horribly ill within just a few minutes.

I think it goes along with my MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivities) and I've also speculated that heating season may be why my symptoms get worse to some degree in Fall/Winter.

(I have tried one of those seasonal affective disorder lights and it did not improve things so I don't think it is that.)

You might try something like artichoke and/or milk thistle just to see if they would assist your body in removing the resulting toxins. Artichoke has lessened or taken away bad headaches for me on occasion.

 

[Alvin2]

Low level monoxide is bad for human health.

Here in Canada (in my province at least) monoxide detectors are mandatory, like smoke detectors.
If they are not for you then it might be hard to find one, but hopefully you can find a plug in one. Also many have rather high detection thresholds, if you do buy one and you have many options try to find one with a digital readout and a low detection threshold.

Also high CO2 can be an issue, i remember reading about a building scientist who made his parents house too airtight in the 80s and they felt the effects when it turned out furnace exhaust was spilling into their basement instead of going up the chimney. Monoxide detectors will not detect CO2.

Heres the technical paper about it in case your interested, second paragraph:
https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-076-great-moments-in-building-science

 

[linusbert]

I tested positive for petroleum product sensitivities years ago through an environmental doctor. I still have to use natural gas to heat my home, water, and dry my clothes but I cannot use a gas stove in the kitchen. Being in such close contact to it, makes me feel horribly ill within just a few minutes.

interesting, i also suspected petroleum to not be good for me. i noticed with cremes causing worsening of asthma.
i have a similiar thing for fumes , when my head is over or near a candle i do feel sick.

the artichocs i will try, i actually did those a year ago because of potassium.. idk why i stopped but will resume now! i had no adverse effects from them, so thats good at least.

Low level monoxide is bad for human health.

Here in Canada (in my province at least) monoxide detectors are mandatory, like smoke detectors.
If they are not for you then it might be hard to find one, but hopefully you can find a plug in one. Also many have rather high detection thresholds, if you do buy one and you have many options try to find one with a digital readout and a low detection threshold.

Also high CO2 can be an issue, i remember reading about a building scientist who made his parents house too airtight in the 80s and they felt the effects when it turned out furnace exhaust was spilling into their basement instead of going up the chimney. Monoxide detectors will not detect CO2.

Heres the technical paper about it in case your interested, second paragraph:
https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-076-great-moments-in-building-science

great information.
the one i ordered shows digital values as low as 30ppm.

so how low is low threshold?


i already have a co2 detector from airthings.
co2 is mostly in the 800-1000 ppm range.
it spiked at 1400 briefly. last week at 1800.
since friday since exhaustion fumes are so bad the co2 levels are much lower, probably me because of constant opening the window... but my room temperature is cold now. cant keep it up.

 

[Alvin2]

so how low is low threshold?

I don't remember, been a while since i had deep dived into it.

co2 is mostly in the 800-1000 ppm range.
it spiked at 1400 briefly. last week at 1800.

Cognition is negatively affected at 500ppm iirc and especially above 1000ppm.

Modern houses should be built very tight and have an heat recovery ventilator, but its expensive to retrofit.
Also many old houses are very leaky already but yours may not be given the high CO2 level.

 

[linusbert]

I don't remember, been a while since i had deep dived into it.

Cognition is negatively affected at 500ppm iirc and especially above 1000ppm.

Modern houses should be built very tight and have an heat recovery ventilator, but its expensive to retrofit.
Also many old houses are very leaky already but yours may not be given the high CO2 level.

500ppm, i can get that if i move out in the woods and live in a tent ... (actually i like that idea).
but in this building impossible. need to switch nursing home ASAP.

this building isnt even a house, its a cave... if the wolf blows it crumbles and whistles. very leaky.
we had a little storm once, and the ceiling tiles started to move from the wind.

 

[Alvin2]

500ppm, i can get that if i move out in the woods and live in a tent ... (actually i like that idea).
but in this building impossible. need to switch nursing home ASAP.

this building isnt even a house, its a cave... if the wolf blows it crumbles and whistles. very leaky.
we had a little storm once, and the ceiling tiles started to move from the wind.

Yet you have 800-1000ppm.

 

[Judee]

I cannot use a gas stove in the kitchen. Being in such close contact to it, makes me feel horribly ill within just a few minutes.

I noticed this article on PR's header today. I only was able to lightly skim read it.


https://www.news-medical.net/news/2...oves-contaminate-indoor-air-with-benzene.aspx

 

[Albert Donnay]

Hi Linusbert,

You are very lucky you survived your CO poisoning. Writing as a toxicologist who has investigated too many CO deaths, I recommend everyone protect themselves with a personal portable rechargeable CO detector that they can carry with them everywhere and keep next to their bed at night.

These display from 1ppm and alarm instantly at any level you set. The WHO allows only 3.5ppm CO avg since 2021, indoors or outside, while the US EPA allows 9ppm average outdoors but has no limit indoors.

The home CO alarms required by many building and fire codes won't warn you of low levels and are even required to show 0 from 1 to 29 ppm, which gives a false sense of security. They are only designed to prevent deaths that occur at much higher CO levels than normally allowed, over 70ppm for at least one to four hours at the low and over 400 ppm for 4 to 15 minutes at the high end

Many professional CO detectors can datalog or at least recall the last peak measurement, so you can see what high level you may have missed while sleeping.

You also can use these professional detectors to test the CO sources in your home, to test your vehicle (even EVs can accumulate CO from gas vehicles around them), and to measure the CO you exhale, (which by my methods can distinguish levels coming from your lungs, arteries, veins and the average of all your other tissues).

You also can monitor your CO status with a thermometer: when your temp is rising, your body is making more CO naturally. But after a fever breaks, or after any inhaled CO poisoning ends, body temp falls and stays chronically low as long as CO levels remain higher than normal in organs and tissues.
In healthy normal people, body temp and exhaled CO both cycle daily from lowest on waking to highest in the afternoon, so don't expect to see a flat line.

If you have been CO-poisoned from endogenous or exogenous sources, it usually takes your exhaled CO levels many times longer to come back down than they took to go up. I call this a CO hangover and it may last months, years or even decades after high-level exposure ends. This is because we all make CO 24/7 and continue to accumulate more as we age unless we take steps to reduce this.

(The CO we make comes from the breakdown of heme proteins by heme oxygenase enzymes -1 and -2, which also produce iron and biliverdin that go to ferritin and bilirubin, respectively.)

So to reduce your total CO load back to where it was before your last period of poisoning started may not be possible. But everyone can move in that direction with a combination of:

1) increasing how much CO they excrete every day (easy to do with a reflex breathing exercise)

2) minimizing how much CO they inhale every day (easy to do if you have a professional detector), and

3) doing whatever they can to reduce how much CO they make every day (not so easy!)

To reduce endogenous CO production requires avoiding things that are reported to boost HO activity, and trying things reported to lower HO activity, or to lower CO directly.

This is much more complicated, as I have identified over 100 foods, supplements, drugs, and medical procedures that make endoCO go up. And there are more than 100 others that suppress endoCO production.

Much simpler, faster, most effective, as well as free in every country of the world, is to donate blood, if your local blood bank will take it. Wet cupping works even better as it removes thicker blood but it is not free.

Blood banks in the US don't test donors (or their blood donations) for CO, but you may be rejected for other reasons. If so, you can ask your doctor to order a "therapeutic phlebotomy," just as they do for patients with hemochromatosis who have high levels of iron.

If anyone is not sure about whether they have CO poisoning, they count how many CO-related conditions they currently have among the 32 listed on this awareness poster:

www.tinyurl.com/COposter2022

All the CO survivors I have consulted with report developing at least 10 of these conditions and some more than 25 that they did not have before their poisoning. Fortunately, most of these improve or resolve when their CO poisoning is reduced.

 

[linusbert]

@Albert Donnay we were not talking about CO but CO2. i got a CO alarm in my room its not showing any readings but CO2 readings are getting high pretty fast if window isnt constantly opened in this nursing home.

 

[Albert Donnay]

@Albert Donnay we were not talking about CO but CO2. i got a CO alarm in my room its not showing any readings but CO2 readings are getting high pretty fast if window isnt constantly opened in this nursing home.

I quoted and was commenting on your first post on this topic, which only discusses your concerns about exposure to CO from exhaust while driving and how CO could be related to CFS. You didn't mention that you have a CO2 detector until your second post, replying to @Alvin2, and you are only now telling me that you have not seen any readings about 0 on your CO alarm.

But as you acknowledged in your first post, the CO alarm you bought displays 0 until 30ppm, hiding exposures in the range of 1-29. The display of 0 is dangerously misleading because it gives people a false sense of security that there are no CO exposures to worry about.

As I wrote above, the US EPA limit for public exposure is 9ppm and the WHO Air Quality Guidelines recommend no more than 3.5ppm (at sea level; less at altitude).

The problem is that CO alarms in USA and Canada are designed only to prevent deaths, not to warn of lower level exposures. That's why some companies sell CO alarms that display and alarm instantly at lower levels, either 5 or 10ppm. I designed the first one of these sold in USA back in 1999, variants of which are still sold by three companies that I assume PR rules prohibit me from naming. I have no financial affiliation with any of them.

 

[linusbert]

@Albert Donnay
despite talking about CO2 above, i'd like to engage into the CO mechanism you suggested above.

i was checking your links. As i dont think a active source of CO pollutant through environment despite streets is happening and also my CO meter not showing any readings might suggest that no high expose to CO is given. though a low chronic poisoning still is possible probably through street and cars i imagine but i guess its not my main problem.

what i read in your links though is that medications and supplements can increase internal CO which can lead to similiar (chronic) poisoning, i guess?

interesting is that Vitamin C is also on the list. when i check the sources
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/collections/60110256/?sort=pubdate
i do not see (or understand) any relation to CO but to zink oxide nanoparticles and VC actually having protective effects.

i found this via searching https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24927128/
which is using VC as a non toxic heme oxidase 1 inducer , which shows general positive effects in the treated condition. probably its not as clear as suspecting all heme oxidase inducers to have the bad effects. but just reading into this for a few minutes. i hope you can clarify.


and another list of protective things like Glutathione and NAC.


so i am interested in how to treat and prevent internal CO
and actually whats about the vitamin c because its protective against a lot of things and its one of the rare few things i actually take.
i also take actos/pioglitazone and insulin. are those bad too?

 

[linusbert]

I quoted and was commenting on your first post on this topic, which only discusses your concerns about exposure to CO from exhaust while driving and how CO could be related to CFS. You didn't mention that you have a CO2 detector until your second post, replying to @Alvin2, and you are only now telling me that you have not seen any readings about 0 on your CO alarm.

But as you acknowledged in your first post, the CO alarm you bought displays 0 until 30ppm, hiding exposures in the range of 1-29. The display of 0 is dangerously misleading because it gives people a false sense of security that there are no CO exposures to worry about.

As I wrote above, the US EPA limit for public exposure is 9ppm and the WHO Air Quality Guidelines recommend no more than 3.5ppm (at sea level; less at altitude).

The problem is that CO alarms in USA and Canada are designed only to prevent deaths, not to warn of lower level exposures. That's why some companies sell CO alarms that display and alarm instantly at lower levels, either 5 or 10ppm. I designed the first one of these sold in USA back in 1999, variants of which are still sold by three companies that I assume PR rules prohibit me from naming. I have no financial affiliation with any of them.

you can PM me your low CO alarm device. if its available in germany.