The Minnesota Department of Health wants to make sure that residents whose homes flooded recently get cleaned up right away, to avert any health related consequences of mold exposure.

Dry it up ASAP. That will help avert damage. When you think it’s dry, you might check around for a mold inspector with specialized equipment to search for hot spots.

Depending on what your mold inspector suggests, you may have to rebuild or retrofit with water-resistant construction materials.

Once you get it dry, keep it dry. If it takes dehumidifiers, a new roof, or regrading of your property to channel water safely away, it is worth the expense to keep your property safe from water intrusion. Water intrusion=mold intrusion.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to buy now, if you’ve got some money set aside to invest in a home. There are a lot of empty properties out there, needing to be purchased, and sellers are very motivated these days. So if you decide on one of these properties, make sure to be on the lookout for flaws. You’re not Prince Charming, and all those houses out there aren’t going to be your Cinderella and automatically fit the glass slipper. There are going to be problems, especially with foreclosures that have been unoccupied for a while.

Be on the lookout for mold.

Before you sign your name on the dotted line, send your inspector on a witch hunt for mold. If he does find mold or fungus, it’s up to you and your real estate agent to at least try to convince the seller to fund remediation with a qualified mold remediation company. Even better if you can choose the contractor yourself–if you’re going to do the footwork to find someone who is legitimately qualified. You don’t want to get those repairs done by that guy who lives in his truck who’s gonna give you such a great deal. It won’t be such a great deal when it starts raining and you find out that leaky roof he neglected to fix has dissolved the plaster, your new ceiling has melted all over your floor and the mold is growing so fast behind the walls that you can hear it.

Eight months pregnant, Kathleen Levesque is uprooting her family to move out of state to a house known to be safe. 709 Rollotrend Lane, their former residence, has failed a series of health inspections, leaving the family with no option but to move. Their landlord apparently did not deal with the problem, as City officials gave the landlord until Jan. 28 to resolve the mold situation–and here it is April and it has not been resolved yet. City officials have covered the outside of the building with “DANGER” signs.

However, the landlord has replied that he has hired an agent to handle the remediation, and a certified mold inspector so that eventually perhaps all mold issues will be resolved.

The $250 million parks and recreation bonds approved by voters last November did not cover the renovation or replacement of the 521 Recreation Center. Which is too bad for Mecklenburg County residents, because their so-called 521 Recreation Center is closing due to mold. Almost a hundred people daily will have to have their youth and adult programs, including art and piano classes for children, basketball, Jazzercise, afterschool programs, and physical education classes someplace else, until the mold issue is solved. No one is sick, but I wonder if they’re going to put a sign on the door:

“Closed due to mustiness.”

Hopefully the contractor will be able to provide a solution.

Is there mold in your mattress? This couple purchased a mattress for $1,081.19 in 1999 and now their mattress has mold.

Apparently the mattress is being replaced.

A ten year old mattress is going to have more living dust mites crawling around eating dead skin cells than it is going to have mold…

Time to get a new mattress people.

Read More…

It is legally difficult to pin down mold as a cause of illness, even though there is clear cause and effect evidence, scientific evidence and medical evidence.

Medically, mold has been found culpable in affecting the health of the immune-deficient, infants, or asthmatics, but the case is out for otherwise healthy individuals (even though they do tend to develop allergic responses when they are exposed.) The courts are still hammering out the connections, but that process is still somewhat derailed, largely because of the flawed ACOEM Mold Statement.

In spite of that malicious little piece of misinformation, some cases still find justice. Or attempt to.

The biggest irony in all of this is when inspectors–those individuals most frequently subjected to mold exposure as part of their profession–became ill from mold exposure their own government 1.pays them to inspect 2. denies that it is unhealthy 3. allows to grow in their own inspector’s offices.

In the archives of this blog, you will find a case of a florida inspector/gov’t official who died after working in a mold infested government building. And now there’s a case in the news where it is happening again in this Las Vegas Case. involving Southern Nevada Health District Inspector Dan Pauluk, whose job-related contamination brought death to himself and illness to his family.

Because St. Dominic’s Catholic school is hosting mold in its ceiling, walls and floor, its kindergarten class may be hosted at a portable building at Mills Elementary School, at least that is what seems to be going on here. The government may be splitting the approximate $7400 cost of remediation of the school’s portable and a bathroom for the use of the kindergarten; and St. Dominic’s is looking for a portable of its own for use next year.

Apparently, Wailuku county in Hawaii has been paying about $75,000 per year to lease a moldy building owned by Honolulu-based Kalama Land Co in a contract that runs through 2026. A study recommended they buy the property and convert or rebuild as office space on the Wailuku campus. The problem is that the building is mold and asbestos infested. The county is talking about buying the property for 1.5 million.

No one seems to be discussing the landlord’s responsibility to provide a safe environment. In fact, why is the landlord not being held to standards to make the place habitable? Who in their right mind would pay $75,000 yearly to lease an uninhabitable property? Until 2026? That’s $1,257,000.

I’m in the wrong business.

At the very least, someone should be using the condition of the property to bring down the asking price. Last year, the property appraised for $1.5 million. Property values are falling as dramatically in Hawaii as everywhere else.

They’re going to have to demolish the building, dispose of the mold and asbestos and start from scratch anyway.

A Critique of the ACOEM Statement on Mold:
Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest in the Creation of an
“Evidence-based” Statement
JAMES CRANER, MD, MPH, FACOEM, FACP

Int J Occup Environ Health. 2008 Oct-Dec;14(4):283-98.
That’s a .pdf worth reading.

I’ll give you the conclusion first:

The ACOEM Mold Statement jeopardizes the “health and safety of workers, workplaces, and environments that ACOEM purports to champion.”

If you’re not familiar with the ACOEM Mold Statement, it is a document that is used in court to disprove the damaging effects of mold on health.
The doctor and author, James Craner is an expert on the adverse health effects of indoor mold exposure in water-damaged buildings, and has
been a co-investigator in US government-funded research on indoor
environmental quality and building energy efficiency. This doctor explains clearly what is wrong with the ACOEM Mold Statement. Click on the header to read the full article.

The author makes several points:

• “The purpose, balance, and focus on clinical and public health, epidemiology, exposure assessment and control,and disease prevention, as well as recommendations for taking a leadership role in controlling the
  environmental hazard, and calling for additional research that were addressed in all of these previous ACOEM position statements and guidelines were conspicuously absent from the ACOEM Mold Statement.” The very elements of earlier position statements that make those statements balanced and professional were not included in the mold statement

• “ACOEM members with credible training, qualifications, and clinical,
  epidemiological and/or original research experience in indoor air quality (IAQ), sick building syndrome (SBS), and indoor fungal bioaerosols (mold) [were not solicited ] to serve as the authors.” The authors chosen to write the ACOEM Mold Statement were not experts in the field;

• A claim is made of peer review by “over 100 physicians.” The article points out that there is evidence of fewer than 20 peers actually reviewed.
• “Despite Dr. Borak’s call for a “meticulous” and “meaningful” peer review, only two of the reviewers had previously published on mold-related topics. Medline literature search reveals that none of the other reviewers had previously published any peer-reviewed articles.” Those chosen were clearly lacking authority in the topic area.

The article goes on to points drawn from critiques of the ACOEM Mold Statement and to make suggestions about how to fix what ails statement procedure so that the results accurately portray legitimate conclusions.

There was a time when spring cleaning became an essential annual ritual because homes were heated with wood fires, and later, with coal or oil-burning stoves. This left a house covered in soot and grime, plus, of course, the stale air from having windows and doors closed against the cold. (Not that those older dwellings were impermeable. )

Now our sources of heat are much cleaner, though air can become stagnant since buildings now are much more impervious to fresh air intrusion. Sick building syndrome is a part of life–because today’s careful construction traps toxins and VOC inside. But if someone wants to guard against the mucus-membrane irritation, neurotoxic effects, respiratory symptoms, skin symptoms, gastrointestinal complaints, and chemosensory changes that are the result of sick building syndrome, then we are stuck with spring cleaning–whether or not we do it actually DURING Spring.

This also means checking for leaks, to prevent mold intrusion.

Undoubtably, mold is harmful–in fact toxigenic molds like Stachybotrys chartarum have been linked with cancer in a Swedish study of school systems a cancer cluster based in Swedish schools that had a serious concentration of viable airborne mold fungi. (This study links mold with pulmonary issues, concluding that “acute transient pulmonary function deterioration suggests the existence of deleterious effects in a moist environment with growth of microorganisms or other unmeasured exposures quantitatively related to the microorganisms.” Translated into plain English, this means mold can hurt your heart function. And of course,
molds like Aspergillus fumigatus are a known human pathogen.

So…before the floods, and especially after the floods, even though we live long past the age of “spring cleaning,” do it anyway. Your health will thank you.