The City Planet

By: Nan Kathryn Fuchs, Ph.D.

WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE CAN HURT YOU !

   If you get frequent headaches, colds, flu, have chronic fatigue syndrome, candida albicans, or other immune problems, you may be living or working in a home or office that is contributing to your ill health. We are now seeing more people with environmental sensitivities and, according to Arthur "Larry" Foster a senior consultant for ECS, Inc. "They’re not born that way." The people I have met have exposures to things that caused their immunity to become debilitated so that now they’re compromised to an extent that they’re now sensitive to environmental pollutants."

   Foster has been detoxifying buildings and improving air quality for more than twenty years since the early 1970’s when no one else was doing it and environmental illness’ were unknown. He started by selling and installing air conditioning systems, then cleaning them in companies like Lockheed.

   A chance encounter with Howard Hughes changed Larry Foster’s career and his life. Hughes heard about Larry through people in the aircraft industry. Employees in one of Hughes buildings were getting sick, and Foster was hired to do his first job decontaminating an entire building. He did such a good job that the sick employees became instantly healthier.

   Based on this success, the Hughes Corporation asked him to detoxify their buildings. At one of the buildings, Foster noticed a long line of people standing outside and found they were an infirmary line. A few days later his own employees started getting sick. Larry donned a full face mask and respiratory equipment and crawled around in the air ducts looking for the problem. He found a mold and sent samples to the University of Texas for analysis. A variety of molds were found. Larry started researching them while reducing their numbers with chlorine. Within a few days, there was no more infirmary line. Foster knew he was on to something. Not only was it beneficial to move air through a building, but you could remove molds. "I became almost possessed when I realized indoor air quality affected people’s health," he remembers, "and I started soliciting people with health problems." He decontaminated hospital nurseries and operating rooms, including an Army hospital with the highest infection rate in the entire military, which he brought down to the lowest. He was asked by the University of Alabama to be director of a study to cure sick buildings and was the first person to bring this information to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, where he lived.

   In the mid-1980’s, Foster testified before the National Academy of Arts and Sciences on indoor air quality after passengers had died and others had become sick on a plane flight from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Congress member Dan Inoye, a passenger on that flight, spurred an investigation. Foster took air samples from the plane and found the problem was both bacterial and fungal.

   While Foster was applying his infection control technology to hospitals, factories, and office buildings, he cleaned homes for employees who worked at these sites. But why work for individuals at all? Why not just do commercial work which is more lucrative? "I don’t like to be corny about it, but we’re all God’s people," Foster says. He’s moved by the results he’s obtained for individuals who were given up by doctors and has notebooks filled with letters from people who have recovered from serious illness’.

   One ten year old boy had been in an oxygen tent more than a dozen times in five months. His pediatrician and allergist had given up on him. When the boy’s mother contacted Foster, she could not believe his claims that he could help her son when the best specialists she had found had been unsuccessful. Foster offered to decontaminate her house at no charge if the boy was not helped. That Friday, Foster’s crew decontaminated the house. On Monday, the child was outside playing with his friends. He’s had two colds in the past eight years, and Larry has a letter from the mother to prove it. Foster never charged the family. The gratification he received for saving the boy’s life was worth more than the money to him.

   Foster’s work consists primarily of eliminating large quantities of bacteria and molds, checking for leakage in fiberglass insulation, and sealing asbestos. When major contaminants are reduced he has found people’s immune systems are stronger and their health improves. In addition to his commercial work, he has decontaminated more than 20,000 homes. "What I’m bringing to you is results," he insists, "not opinions."

   Nan Kathryn Fuchs, PH.D., is a nutritionist in private practice in Santa Monica, CA. She is also the author of The Nutrition Detective and Overcoming the Legacy of Overeating, and co-author of Save L.A.