Humans move in in fume mystery

Humans move in in fume mystery

BANGKOK (AP): Human "sniffers" will be employed where technology has failed to trace the source of toxic fumes plaguing a school in Thailand's Eastern Seaboard industrial area, a newspaper reported yesterday.

The team will try to determine which factories at the Mab ta Phud industrial estate, 75 kilometers southeast of Bangkok, are responsible for polluting the air of the surrounding community, sickening dozens of students daily at a school there, the newspaper The Nation reported. The school hopes to move soon.

"As scientific instruments have failed to prove the source of the pollution, we have chosen to return to the basic natural instrument by using humans to prove it," the deputy governor of the Industrial Estate Authority of Thailand was quoted saying.

Sarawoot Chayovan said last Friday that a yearlong investigation failed because there were no standards by which to gauge the problem and scientific instruments had trouble distinguishing smells, the newspaper reported.