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Wed 28 Sep, 2005 12:48 am
Monster Mold Threatens Health in the South
By JULIA SILVERMAN and MARILYNN MARCHIONE, Associated Press Writers Tue Sep 27, 8:02 PM ET
NEW ORLEANS - Wearing goggles, gloves, galoshes and a mask, Veronica Randazzo lasted only 10 minutes inside her home in St. Bernard Parish. Her eyes burned, her mouth filled with a salty taste and she felt nauseous. Her 26-year-old daughter, Alicia, also covered in gear, came out coughing.
"That mold," she said. "It smells like death."
Mold now forms an interior version of kudzu in the soggy South, posing health dangers that will make many homes tear-downs and will force schools and hospitals to do expensive repairs.
It's a problem that any homeowner who has ever had a flooded basement or a leaky roof has faced. But the magnitude of this problem leaves many storm victims prey to unscrupulous or incompetent remediators. Home test kits for mold, for example, are worthless, experts say.
Don't expect help from insurance companies, either. Most policies were revised in the last decade to exclude mold damage because of "sick building" lawsuits alleging illnesses. Although mold's danger to those with asthma or allergies is real, there's little or no science behind other claims, and a lot of hype.
"We went through a period when people were really irrational about the threat posed by the mere sight of mold in their homes," said Nicholas Money, a mold expert from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and author of "Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores," a book about mold.
"If you give me 10 minutes in anybody's home, I'll find mold growth somewhere," he said.
Mold is everywhere. Most people have no problem living with this ubiquitous fungus. It reproduces by making spores, which travel unseen through the air and grow on any moist surface, usually destroying it as the creeping crud grows.
Mold can't be eliminated but can be controlled by limiting moisture, which is exactly what couldn't be done after Hurricane Katrina. Standing water created ideal growth conditions and allowed mold to penetrate so deep that experts fear that even studs of many homes are saturated and unsalvageable.
In fact, New Orleans is where mold's health risks were first recognized.
A Louisiana State University allergist, the late Dr. John Salvaggio, described at medical meetings in the 1970s what he called "New Orleans asthma," an illness that filled hospital emergency rooms each fall with people who couldn't breathe. He linked it to high levels of mold spores that appeared in the humid, late summer months.
"These are potent allergens," but only for people who have mold allergies, said Dr. Jordan Fink, a Medical College of Wisconsin professor and past president of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
Molds produce irritants that can provoke coughing, and some make spores that contain toxins, which further irritate airways.
"The real pariah is this thing called Stachybotrys chartarum. This organism produces a greater variety of toxins and in greater concentrations than any other mold that's been studied," Money said.
Doctors at Cleveland's Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital blamed it for a cluster of cases of pulmonary hemorrhage, or bleeding into the lungs, that killed several children in the 1990s, but the link was never proved.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is no firm evidence linking mold to the lung problem, memory loss or other alleged woes beyond asthma and allergy. However, the sheer amount of it in the South could trigger problems for some people who haven't had them before, medical experts said.
"The child who didn't have a significant problem before may be in a much different scenario now," said Dr. Michael Wasserman, a pediatrician at Ochsner Clinic in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie whose office and home were flooded and are now covered in mold. He plans to tear down his house.
Even dead mold can provoke asthma in susceptible people, meaning that places open to the public ?- restaurants, schools, businesses ?- must eliminate it.
This is most true for hospitals, where mold spores can cause deadly lung diseases in people with weak immune systems or organ transplants. Such concerns already led Charity Hospital's owners to mothball it.
Tulane University Hospital and Clinic's cleanup is expected to take months.
"The first floor's got pretty much mold. It's going to be pretty much a total loss," said Ron Chatagnier, project coordinator for C&B Services, a Texas company hired by the hospital's owner, HCA.
"It might be difficult or impossible to reopen some of these medical centers," said Joe Cappiello, an official with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
"It's not just the physical destruction that you see," but ventilation systems and ductwork full of mold, ready "to seed the rest of the hospital with spores" if the heat or air conditioning were turned on, he said.
As for houses, "anything that's been submerged probably will be a tear-down," said Jeffrey May, a Boston-area building inspector, chemist and book author who has investigated thousands of buildings for mold problems.
Clothes can be washed or dry cleaned, but most furniture is a loss. Ditto for carpeting, insulation, wallpaper and drywall, which no longer lives up to its name. Mattresses that didn't get wet probably have mold if they were in a room that did.
"Anything with a cushion you can forget about," May said.
The general advice is the same as when food is suspected of being spoiled: when in doubt, throw it out.
When is professional help needed?
"It's simply a matter of extent. If you've got small areas of mold, just a few square feet, it's something a homeowner can clean with 10 percent bleach," said Anu Dixit, a fungus expert at Saint Louis University.
She studied mold after the Mississippi River floods in 1993 and 1994, and found cleaning measures often were ineffective, mainly because people started rebuilding too soon, before the surrounding area was completely dry.
In the New Orleans suburb of Lakeview, Toby Roesler found a water line 7 feet high on his home and mold growing in large black and white colonies from every wall and ceiling on the first floor.
Wearing goggles, a mask and rubber gloves, he sprayed down the stairwell with a bleach solution. A crew will arrive soon to gut the lower floor.
"I think it's salvageable," he said, but admitted, "It's going to be some gross work to get it ready."
Others won't try.
Dionne Thiel, who lives next door to the Randazzo family, was only 7 when Hurricane Betsy raced through her neighborhood 40 years ago. Returning on Monday, after Hurricane Katrina, something was instantly familiar.
"The mold and the water," she said. "It's the exact same smell."
Mold covered her dining room walls, snaked up doorframes and even found its way into the candles she sold for a living. She and her husband salvaged his golf clubs but left the rest. They'll move to Arizona.
"I would never want to live here again," said her husband, Don Thiel. "It's not going to be safe."
___
Associated Press writers Julia Silverman and Allen G. Breed contributed reporting for this story from Louisiana; Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione reported from Milwaukee.
Thanks for the article, bobsmythhawk..
We are not the only organism in the gulf releasing toxins.
Isn't it amazing what you discover if you pause to read rather than sluff over articles. Famous Bob quote (or infamous): There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Thanks for that site Noddy. While posting media hysteria a common ailment occurred to me. I haven't seen the charter but my understanding is that writer's tools are now required to include embelishment. Writer's without this tool need not apply.
Have you passed through a supermarket checkout line lately? The tabloids infect us all, including mainstream journalists.
Reality is sordid enough without borrowing mutations that haven't happened yet.
I've always wondered who reads these tabloids. Apparently they have money to throw around to paparazzi so someone must buy them. Literature it's not; sensational it is. The number of people who go to them to use for reference is really small. The thirst to attract the public's eye I'm sure has swayed many an otherwise prudent reporter to wander from their usual path to add "color" to their stories. The ferreting out of truth is left to our own devices.
The people in the check-out lines who pick up the tabloids add the "newspapers" to carts heavy in convenience food and snack items.
Part of the problem is the gradual blurring between news and entertainment that started with radio and television and is now infecting the print media.
The mess in New Orleans is mess enough without adding murders, raped children, killer molds....padding the scripts as though Katrina was a sit-com that needed a little more oomph to sell convenience food or snack items or new cars....
The times are out of joint.
various kinds of flu
hi all,
That was quite informative and interesting to read about molds .. The ohter big news is the avian flu which is also assuming pandemic proportions.. This can be controlled by taking the right medcations on time.. What about the human flu called influenza. Has anybody heard of this.. how can this be treated.
Just what we need after 87 years, a sequel.
Killer 1918 virus re-created in bid to avert next pandemic
By Jacob Goldstein
Miami Herald
Using tissue fragments from two World War I soldiers and a woman buried in the Alaskan permafrost, scientists have reconstructed for the first time the flu virus that killed an estimated 50 million people when it swept the world in 1918.
The breakthrough shows important genetic connections between the 1918 virus and the Asian bird flu that has killed at least 60 people and millions of birds since 1997. An upsurge in cases in recent weeks has prompted concerns among President Bush and other world leaders.
''We have been able to unmask the 1918 virus and it is revealing to us some of the secrets that will help us to predict and prepare for the next pandemic,'' said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which supported the research. The re-created virus is stored in a high-security CDC lab, Gerberding said.
In 1918, microbiology was in its primitive stages -- scientists did not even know what caused influenza. In order to reconstruct the virus, modern researchers had to retrieve lung tissue from victims of the 1918 flu, isolate virus particles from the tissue and decipher the genetic sequence of the virus.
During World War I, Army doctors used paraffin wax to preserve lung tissue taken from autopsies of soldiers who had died of flu. These tissues, stored in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, provided samples. Scientists obtained another sample by exhuming a woman buried in an Alaskan village, where the permanently frozen ground had prevented her body from decomposing.
''Over the last nine years, we've been able to piece together the entire genetic coding sequence of the 1918 virus using tiny, tiny fragments of genetic material we could fish out of the 87-year-old tissues,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, who led the project.
The genetic sequence provided a blueprint that allowed a second team to reconstruct the virus in the lab and study its effects on human tissue and mice. The virus infected lung cells of the mice, cells that normally would not be affected by ordinary flu.
''This is amazing, amazing stuff,'' said Dr. John Treanor, a University of Rochestor microbiologist working on an avian flu vaccine who was not involved with the project.
Understanding the 1918 virus is important because pandemics continue to arise every few decades, when a flu virus that has infected animals develops the ability to pass easily from person to person. The 1918 pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu, was the deadliest of the 20th century's three pandemics.
Experts worry the new Asian bird flu, known as H5N1, could become the next pandemic.
A bird virus can become a pandemic in one of two ways. It can infect a person or animal also infected with a human flu virus and swap genes with the human virus, creating a deadly and contagious disease. Or it can gradually change its genetic code over a long period of time, as happened with the 1918 virus.
In the reconstructed virus, researchers identified a series of key mutations in each of the virus' eight genes that made it both lethal and highly contagious among humans. Those mutations should provide a road map for scientists tracking H5N1, according to Treanor.
Scientists also created hybrid viruses that had some but not all of the mutations found in the 1918 virus. The hybrids were far less deadly than the pure 1918 virus in lab mice, suggesting that an avian flu has to undergo an extensive series of mutations before it can launch a deadly pandemic.
''There wouldn't be a single mutation that suddenly changes a virus from being inefficient to being a killer,'' Treanor said.
While some strains of H5N1 have shown a few of the mutations found in the 1918 flu, the mutations have been scattered among different samples -- one mutation in one sample, a different mutation in another, according to Taubenberger.
''They share the same changes as 1918, but where in each protein of 1918 there may be as many as four or five or six changes, the H5 viruses only ever show one change or so per protein,'' he said. ``So it suggests that . . . they're early on in this process.''
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