Cold comfort harm

Cold, damp houses have been linked to everything from asthma to depression. Yet many of us will spend this winter in them, perhaps wondering how - with rising petrol and food costs - we will ever afford improvements. Kim Dungey looks at a significant problem and what the Government is doing about it.

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• Culture shapes heating choices

Last winter Lesley huddled on her couch, buried in blankets and nursing a hottie.

She wore several layers of clothing, including two pairs of socks.

But her bid to keep cosy made little difference.

On the coldest mornings, frost formed on the inside of her windows and she could see her breath indoors. The chill made her bones ache. There were problems with condensation, too.

"It was awful. Just coming home to it was really depressing," says the St Kilda resident, who does not want her surname used.

Lesley was living not in a draughty old villa but in a reasonably modern townhouse. Built in the early 1970s, it had no insulation in the walls or under the floor and barely any in the ceiling.

A damp, mouldy smell lingered, even though she kept the property well ventilated.

"I kept thinking it was because it had been closed up," she says. "Nobody had been living in it for a while before I bought it. So when it wasn't cold, I opened all the windows but it kept coming back."

Lesley's situation has improved recently thanks to insulation paid for partly by the Government - more on that later.

But leading researchers, while applauding the government scheme, say the plight the Dunedin woman found herself in is common and we need to do better.

The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) estimates about 750,000 New Zealand houses have inadequate insulation.

Winter indoor temperatures often fall well below World Health Organisation recommendations of 20degC in living areas and 18degC elsewhere, increasing the risk of respiratory illness, strokes and heart attacks.

And surprisingly, a New Zealander has more chance of dying from the cold than someone in the icy climes of Siberia or Scandinavia.

Prof Philippa Howden-Chapman, director of He Kainga Oranga, the housing and health research programme at the University of Otago (Wellington), says New Zealand's excess winter mortality figures are among the highest in the world and our underinsulated, underheated houses are partly to blame.

Studies show hospital admissions are 8% higher in winter than in summer. And about 1600 more people die - four times the road toll - mostly from circulatory illnesses, respiratory illnesses and infectious diseases.

"If our houses protected us better, you would barely see a seasonal effect."

Viruses survive longer in cold, damp houses, she explains. And in winter people tend to cluster in the one room that is heated, increasing their chance of passing on bacterial infections.

One of her community trials is asking older people whether they shiver inside their homes, an indication of the body trying to cope with low temperatures that is virtually unheard of in other developed countries.

"We also did a study with medical students, who you'd expect to be very healthy and found that students who judged their flats to be cold and damp were more likely to have illnesses during winter and time off from their studies."

Associate Prof Bob Lloyd, director of energy studies in the University of Otago physics department, says researchers calling on student flats in Dunedin have found occupants "jumping to the door" in sleeping bags and indoor winter temperatures as low as 2 or 3degC - colder than inside a refrigerator.

Prof Lloyd also calculated the percentage of New Zealand households likely to be in fuel poverty - a term used when they would need to spend more than 10% of their income on energy to provide a healthy indoor environment.

In 2001, the proportion was about 14% but by 2008, with electricity prices rising faster than incomes, it averaged 25% across the main centres and was 47% in Dunedin.