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This is a good reason to make sure your office -- and home! -- is well-ventilated. Keep your tower as far away as possible and "downwind." As plastics heat up, they do outgas. Flat-screen monitors are supposed to outgas less, so that's a help.
That awful smell from photocopiers and laser printers isn't exactly safe, either. You should use those only in well-ventilated areas.
Let's not blame everything on computers, though. I'd bet that many here have homes that have toxic soup for air.
One allergy group I know has taken to sending a staff member to the home of pediatric asthma patients when the usual control methods fail. They nearly always find the homes tightly closed up, always running either heat or air-conditioning with no ventilation. The homes are often very clean, too, with moms using lots of cleaning products, powdered carpet deodorizer, toilet bowl deodorizers, fabric softener, scented detergents, bathroom sprays, potpourri, fragrance candles, and insect sprays. In most homes, the big offenders were those plug-in air-fresheners and scented oil diffusers. Some homes had carpet that were shampooed constantly with non-professional units, so that they were soaked with dried detergent and growing mold underneath.
The moms felt that they were doing good to "clean" everything to keep away the "dirt" that was causing their child's asthma and they didn't understand how something that smelled nice would make their children sick. They replaced the carpet in the kid's bedroom with linoleum and thought that was enough.
Very few were willing to stop smoking or even to go outside to smoke. They were in utter denial that their behavior was harming their children, and even if they admitted it, they didn't care to stop even when offered free medication. Nearly all of them had ashtrays and cigarette butts in the house, even though they told the doctor they didn't smoke there. Most of them burned air-freshener candles thinking THAT was going to help, when all it did was add MORE toxic chemicals to the air and make their children sicker.
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Good ventilation! - sm
