Experts highlight missing links in mold claims

Government scientists and university academics have established the relationship between water damage and mold growth. What is less clear is a causal link between mold exposure and severe illness.

By Amanda Price
BioNews

Fogleman describes the consequences of water damage and how mold can grow indoors. Producer: Amanda Price
Stachybotrys, a type of black mold, under the microscope.

“Mold is everywhere,” said Stella Fogleman, public health nurse at L.A. County Department of Health’s Toxics Epidemiology Program.

“Mold is what they call ‘ubiquitous,’ so you can’t escape it,” she said. “Outside, inside, wherever you are – there’s going to be mold.”

Despite its ubiquitous character, mold has been blamed for serious illness. But both the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency say there is little evidence that mold causes anything worse than allergic reactions.

"Scary toxic effects?"

"For the vast majority of common molds that people see inside their households or maybe in a workplace where there’s water damage or even in a school, your number-one health effect is always going to be allergies,” said Fogleman.

Ten percent of the population has mold allergies, said Fogleman, and for these individuals, mold causes sneezing, watery eyes and other hay fever-like symptoms.

“Chronic diseases of a certain nature may be exacerbated by mold, certainly,” said Dr. Adrian Casillas of UCLA’s Division of Clinical Immunology and Allergy. “For example, allergic disease – if an individual is truly allergic to mold, then contact with mold may incite symptoms.”

For those with immune systems compromised by chemotherapy, AIDS or immunosuppressive drugs, developing a mold infection is possible, said Fogleman, which could cause more serious health effects. “That’s not something that would happen to somebody unless they had a severely compromised immune system,” she said.

Fogleman said inhalation is the most common way people experience indoor mold exposure. “Certain types of fungus can produce what is called mycotoxins,” she said. “There have been effects with people being harmed by mycotoxins. But that data comes from people actually eating them through contaminated cereal grains or through poisonous mushrooms.”

Fixing buildings with mold contamination

Mold litigation and a 1994 study linking Stachybotrys and infant illness, later retracted by the CDC, have exaggerated the health hazards of toxic mold, said Fogleman. “Certain buildings were shut down because they thought that that type of mold was in that building, lots of things happened,” she said. “And before they were able to retract it, there was already a chain reaction of damage that had happened.”

The link between mold and illness must be carefully examined, according to Casillas. “You can test for mold, and chances are, maybe you’ll find some – it’s everywhere,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that it causes all illness just because you find it.”

Minimizing mold growth is still important, said Fogleman. “You don’t want a poor-quality working environment,” she said. “But the scary toxic effects that people are hearing are not the message that we try to give.”

“If they see a little bit of mold in their bathroom, all of a sudden it has different implications than it did before, when people would just take some Clorox to it, which is a perfectly fine way of cleaning up a regular mold problem in a home,” said Fogleman. Experienced contractors can be hired to fix more severe water damage.

Yet in the end, mold is a simple substance, needing only moisture, an organic food source and a favorable temperature and pH to survive. “You just need to cut off those sources, especially the water, and it needs all of those things to be able to grow,” said Fogleman. “If you cut off one, then you’ll cut off the mold growth.”

CDC Health Topic: mold

NYT: Panel finds mold in buildings is no threat to most people

Multimedia:
NPR Morning Edition: Texas insurers assess toxic mold threat

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