Indoor air quality level and sick building syndrome symptoms among office workers of a public higher learning institute in Selangor

The wellbeing, health, and productivity of office workers are greatly influenced by the quality of the indoor air. The health of the workers was observed to be impacted by poor indoor air quality. The study’s objective is to examine the level of indoor air quality and the symptoms of sick building syndrome among the office workers of a public university in Selangor. An extended questionnaire adopted by ICOP IAQ 2010 from the Department of Occupational Safety and Health Malaysia (DOSH) and Questionnaire ATS-DLD-78-A (1978) were distributed to the respondents to assess the sick building syndrome and IAQ were measured by air monitoring using laboratory instruments. The findings indicate that, excluding the temperature, relative humidity, and carbon dioxide readings, most IAQ parameters readings were in compliance with the Malaysian IAQ standard. Besides that, no significant symptoms of sick building syndrome were discovered between working types. Additionally, there were no significant association as well observed between IAQ and the sick building syndrome symptoms. However, only temperature was associated to symptom of irritated nose (X2 = 7.127, p = 0.01). In order to investigate the prevalence of sick building syndrome symptoms, the study recommended that future research in the same field implement lung function testing and full IAQ parameters monitoring (physical, chemical, and microbiological).