RODALE’S Allergy Relief

Toxic Molds can Ruin Your House and Your Health

   We’ve been looking at ventilation grilles with a suspicious eye ever since we saw Larry Foster’s photos. Specifically the ones he took at a well-known hospital that, for obvious reasons, prefers to remain anonymous.

   These photos show massive fields of mold living in the hospital’s ventilation system, growing and thriving in the warm, safe, hidden confines of what easily becomes a forgotten component in many buildings.

Out of Sight But Up Your Nose

   Hidden from sight-but not from sensitive noses and respiratory systems. When the forced air of a heating or cooling system breezes across that mold, it’s as if maniacal scientists had turned on a machine designed to put as many high-allergy spores into the air as possible.

   And now that heating season’s here, many allergy sufferers will be the unwilling - and unknowing - victims of that onslaught.

   "Some people call this time of the year the cold and flu season." Explains Larry Foster, president of Air Duct Decontamination (ADD), a company that specializes in wiping out the unwanted squatters living in dirty ductwork.

   "But I call it the ‘furnace season,’ because it’s the time of year when the mold that’s been growing in the ductwork all summer long gets blown all through the house and everyone gets sick."

Allergy Symptoms By The Pound

   There’s quite a lot of mold just waiting to blow around the average house, it seems. Foster reports that his company routinely removes pounds of contaminated dirt and debris from the ductwork of people’s homes.

   When they go in for a big job, like lowering the infection rate in a hospital, putting and end to workers’ symptoms in an office, or curing other types of "sick buildings," the gunk that comes out of the system can often be too heavy for one man to carry away without help.

   Foster’s interest in the problem began 25 years ago when he was part of a team cleaning industrial air conditioning systems. He noticed that many of the men he was working with became ill on certain jobs. Often, the people working in those buildings weren’t feeling so hot either.

   He took some of the mold they removed from the heating system of one of those buildings to a lab to be analyzed. It turned out to be high in penicillium and aspergillus cultures. These molds are well known for causing allergic reactions and are also implicated in such allergy-related diseases as hypersensitivity pneumonitis and allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA).

   When the contaminated ducts were cleaned, reports Foster, everyone felt better.

   One of the reasons his company is so busy, Foster told ARN, is that much of the ductwork used in homes is not insulated to keep moisture out - and moisture leads to mold. In addition, some central air conditioners drain so poorly that we’ve actually seen mushrooms and toadstools growing inside people’s homes!"

   Such visual evidence isn’t all that uncommon. Foster says that he can see actual mold on vents and registers in 30 to 50 percent of the cases. His company always digs for samples first to find out exactly what’s inside the system, visible or hidden, before they start to clear it out. That information is then passed on to the home-owner’s physician so that they know exactly to which varieties of airborne allergen the patient’s been exposed.

   ADD’s service doesn’t stop at ductowork, however - workers methodically wipe out every trace of mold they can find. Carpets, well known for harboring dust mites, also seem to be excellent havens for mold as well. In fact, Foster urges that "people with allergies should never have their carpets steam cleaned. The carpets stay wet, and you couldn’t invent a better way to grow mold."

Too Much Moisture Is Great - For Mushrooms

   "We recently cleaned up a house where a little girl had very serious eczema." Foster explains, "And found both aspergillus and penicillium in the carpeting as well as the duct-work. The girl’s skin improved after the molds were eliminated."