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Mold may menace health
By Travis Dunn
Current News (Disaster News Network)
December 16, 2002
COLUMBIA, Md. (December 13, 2002) — Long after mud and debris are cleared away
after a hurricane or flood, survivors may find an insidious, almost invisible
force lurking in their homes -- mold.
Soaked sheetrock and soggy insulation can quickly become mold incubators, and
the spread of this mold can present a real cleanup problem, especially for the
disabled and the elderly.
Anna Belle Verrett of Broussard, La., for example, saw the roof of her house
torn off during Hurricane Lili Oct. 3, and watched as a deluge of rain soaked
the interior of her home.
Verrett, a disabled 71-year-old, mopped up the mess herself. But without the
help of local United Methodist volunteers, there is no way Verrett would have
been able to exterminate the mold sprouting all over her house.
Mold can emerge without the help of rain or floodwater, and it can sometimes
prove not only smelly and annoying but dangerous as well.
Two people in Columbia, Md., however, recently reported neurological problems
they believe were caused by mold.
The pair are employees of the Baltimore-Washington United Methodist Conference
Center, which had to be closed while masked workers tore moldy sheetrock and
carpeting from the building.
The building was infested with aspergillus mold, said the Rev. Erik Alsgaard,
spokesperson for the conference. Alsgaard blames the emergence of the mold on a
bad construction job-the building, he said, was built on top of a spring, which
over the course of a decade eroded through the masonry and into the building.
Some of the conference center's 55 employees had been feeling somewhat ill for
the past year, he said.
But it took a heavy November rain to really bring out the mold, he said. When a
maintenance worker went to investigate "a strange smell" in an office, he
inadvertently released a cloud of mold spores. That's when people really started
to get sick, Alsgaard said.
"They didn't know what they were going to stir up in the building when they tore
the walls out," Alsgaard said. "They discovered a much bigger problem than they
originally bargained for."
About 25 employees in the building reported some sort of health problem.
Martha Knight said her health problems were definitely "a mold-related reaction"
that eventually caused short-term memory loss.
Knight said the baseline symptoms ("burning eyes, burning throat, postnasal
drip") grew to chest congestion, then to the neurological effects, which also
included severe headaches and "tingling in the hands and the feet and numbness."
"At first it didn't seem like a mold situation," she said. "Early on it just
kind of seemed like an odd smell."
But when the wall was torn down Nov. 8, Knight said her headaches got so intense
that she no longer had any doubt about what was causing them.
Knight is feeling better now, but she's also working from home.
Ed MacMahon blames mold for the untimely death of his dog, Muffin. Johnny
Carson's erstwhile sidekick sued his insurance company for $20 million, claiming
that a botched plumbing job caused a mold infestation in his mansion, which, in
turn, led to the death of his dog.
"Different species of fungi have probably been present in human suffering since
the dawn of time," according to Toxic Mold and Tort News Online. "However, it
wasn't until relatively recently that the scientific community has identified
mold and other fungi as a possible cause of human's adverse health effects.
Today, certain fungi and mold are known to the scientific and medical world to
be responsible for allergies, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, humidifier fever,
infections, mushroom poisoning, mycotoxicoses, mucous membrane irritation, and
many other ailments."
Several mold species-penicillium, aspergillus, stachybotrys, paecilomyces and
fusarium-are known for producing harmful mycotoxins, or poisons.
The extent of the adverse health affects, however, is still a matter of
considerable scientific and legal debate.
A huge controversy is erupting over the question of toxic mold. Some call toxic
mold the next asbestos, while others claim "toxic mold" is a phantasm conjured
by trial lawyers out to extract big money from insurance companies.
Much of this debate centers on massive lawsuits stemming from mold infestation.
A similar case occurred in Texas-mold spread through a mansion, and the
homeowners blamed their insurance company for failing to fix a water leak fast
enough, thus providing a perfect mold breeding ground. A jury awarded the couple
$32 million in damages.
Thanks to incidents like these, mold is causing hysteria-and leading to
congressional legislation and major changes in the insurance business.
After 7-year-old Melina Walker of Southfield, Mich., allegedly lost 70 percent
of her lungs to Stachybotrys chartarum, a mold species that can produce powerful
mycotoxins, Rep. John Conyers, Jr., introduced "the Melina Bill" in Congress.
"Home ownership is part of the American Dream, but for many, toxic mold has
transformed that dream into a nightmare," according to Conyers' Web site. "It's
time to stop toxic mold from robbing Americans of their health and their homes."
But scientific studies to date have come to contradictory conclusions on whether
mold is "robbing Americans of their health."
Perhaps the most sensational mold case occurred in Cleveland.
"Over the past seven years in the Cleveland, Ohio area there have been 45 cases
of pulmonary hemorrhage (PH) in young infants. Sixteen of the infants have
died," according to the Case Western Reserve University Web site. "Thirty-two of
the infants have been African American. Most of these cases have occurred within
ten contiguous zip codes in the eastern portion of the metropolitan area. In
November/December, 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
led a case-control investigation on the first ten cases. This study found an
epidemiological association of PH in these infants with water-damaged homes
containing the toxic fungi, predominantly Stachybotrys."
The CDC, however, after a reevaluation of this data, said that the study's
conclusion was wrong.
The CDC now says that any causal link between severe health problem and mold
remains unproven.
"There is always a little mold everywhere -- in the air and on many surfaces.
There are very few case reports that toxic molds (those containing certain
mycotoxins) inside homes can cause unique or rare health conditions such as
pulmonary hemorrhage or memory loss," according to the CDC Web site. "The case
reports are rare, and a causal link between the presence of the toxic mold and
these conditions has not been proven."
A study published in the January 1999 edition of Pediatrics, however, concluded
that there was a causal link between mold and pulmonary hemorrhaging in the
Cleveland infants.
Even more controversial is the notion that mold can cause neurological problems.
Some scientists, like Dr. Gailen D. Marshall, an epidemiologist at the Texas
Medical Center in Houston, say that science does not support these claims.
"There is no credible scientific evidence linking the presence of mold ("toxic"
species or nontoxic) and neurological disorders when the individuals are
breathing in airspace with mold contamination," Gailen wrote in an e-mail.
Dr. Gailen is skeptical of claims from people who think mold is responsible for
their maladies.
This confusion is certainly not reassuring to insurance companies, who are
seeing an explosion in claims and lawsuits dealing with mold.
Gordon Stewart, president of the Insurance Information Institute, testified
before a congressional subcommittee July 18, and he advocated some sort of
federal intervention to prevent the explosions of damage claims and lawsuits
coming from people claiming to have suffered at the invisible hands of "toxic
mold."
"The year 2001 was the worst in the history of the property/casualty
industry...We estimate that in the homeowner sector, the loss is about $9
billion, $8.9 billion. Mold is a major factor in these increased costs," Stewart
testified. "Conditions have reached crisis proportions in Texas, and mold has
become a serious problem in several other states, including California, Florida,
Arizona, and Nevada."
Stewart noted that Texas in particular has seen an explosion of these claims,
but there is no scientific evidence to indicate there is "a new plague abroad in
the land."
"We have more court cases and accusations of severe and permanent health damage,
and there's no peer-reviewed, scientific research to back this up. Health claims
are coming under property policies that were never intended to cover health
claims. And now, fearing bad faith law suits, which is an area where you can
really build up the legal costs, insurers are tending to throw money at mold
claims because they don't want to be accused of not doing everything they could
and having a very expensive law suit," he testified. "The net of it is we've got
these exploding costs, and the only thing to do is cut back on coverage and pass
on costs to policyholders. These measures are going on in state after state, and
so we have a kind of insurance crisis as a result of the shock of this
relatively recent occurrence."
Interestingly, the scourge of mold dates back to biblical times, according to
Leviticus, 14:39-17: "On the seventh day the priest shall return to inspect the
house. If the mildew has spread on the walls, he is to order that the
contaminated stones be torn out and thrown into an unclean place outside the
town. If the mildew reappears in the house after the stones have been torn out
and the house is scraped and plastered, it is a destructive mildew and the house
is unclean. It must be torn down -- its stones, timbers and all the plaster --
and taken out of town." |
