On my other podcast, The Daniel Stih Podcast, I had Andrea Hermbroff, owner of Align Mold Consulting on as a guest. Her company helps people with environmental health issues, find professionals to treat and diagnose them.
She also works for a company that sells a new type of mold test, one that tests the air for mycotoxins. The company's test is called AMEA, A-M-E-A, short for Airborne Mycotoxin Environmental Analysis.
What's collected in the air sample is actually analyzed using ELISA, E-L-I-S-A, it's enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.
ELISA is actually commonly used every day in the food industry to test things like milk for aflatoxins because cows can eat contaminated grains and the mycotoxins stay in their blood and end up in the milk.
This company found a way to theoretically do it from an air sample. The test is quickly becoming known in the mold community.
So if you're having a mold problem, there's a chance your friend, a doctor, a mold inspector, the mold remediation company, they might mention the EMEA and even suggest you use it. If that's you, keep listening.
Today, I'm going to actually summarize some key points from a discussion I had with the owner of the company and Andrea after the podcast that Andrea and I did to ask some more questions about the test. So first, it's kind of like the ERME.
When ERME came out, I was at a conference chasing down the EPA and I asked everybody in the room at the conference, all the mold professionals, mold inspectors, has anybody, whether this is a good test or not, if as a mold inspector, a mold remediator, you didn't use it, would you have missed something? And nobody raised their hands.
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My first question to this testing company for the EMEA was, have you done the classic Anderson cultured air samples side by side when you had a mold problem and the classic Anderson sampling did not pick it up, but your mycotoxin test did?
And the short answer is no. Now, there's a lot of reasons for that. They're both real expensive, not super expensive test.
The EMEA is probably more or the same.
Mainly if you do the classic, the classic test to test for mold, by the way, almost no mold inspectors do anymore because they got pulled into the cheaper, faster, not better, not bad, but not better, but cheaper, faster, spore traps.
Spore traps have their place. Wall checks, great for spore traps. You're not looking for small amounts of mold.
If it's growing in the wall, there's billions of spores. And mainly the issue with spore traps is an analyst is looking at those under the microscope, the spores, literally looking for tiny needles in the haystack.
The classic way before spore traps came about, which they've only been here probably 30-ish, 40 years tops, was you grow it in a culture plate, not a settling plate you put out from Home Depot. I talk about this on another episode.
If you do that, my question to Amea was, would you not see it in that classic test and only see it in the microtoxin test? Don't know, haven't done it. So hopefully, we'll try to get some of that data.
I suspect the main attraction of this new test is the main attraction of the ERME test, the EPA ERME test. It's one test, the homeowner can do it.
Moving on, my next question was about the way this test works is you're going to get a pump, the same kind of one they might use in the asbestos industry or hazmat kind of place, a workplace where there's hazardous materials to measure worker
exposure. It's a small pump you wear and you attach something to your clothing that collects air all day long at a slower kind of the rate you would breathe. It's trying to emulate an exposure.
So what they've done this company is they've taken that equipment and used it to collect what's in the air. And then they have their own process for, okay, how do we take that, what we just collected from the air?
They found a way to subtract the mycotoxins from that sample and then test it for mycotoxins using ELISA, the enzyme test. That is actually has been validated for food, testing for mold, mycotoxins and food.
My question to them was the pump, because I've owned these bug pumps and air check pumps and every kind of pump you can imagine for similar type of test in my business, not for mold.
For the VOCs, volatile organic compounds, the chemicals, the other kind of weird particles, I even had one client who they moved into a marble shop and we used this to test is a residual contaminant, a silica, silica dust is a big one right now.
So they're using the same pump to collect the air. The question was how do you calibrate it? These things are low-volume pumps.
Low-volume means a small change now can make a big difference. The classic way I've been taught to test, even for the sport traps with mold, you turn it on even though you calibrated the pump before you started to use it.
When you turn it on, you look to see is it's still at the same flow rate you calibrated the pump at. And right before you think you're done taking the sample, when it's still collecting the sample, you check it then to make sure what is it now.
It makes sure that you don't make the assumption, how do you know it didn't a few minutes after you turned it on, stop working, had a short or battery failure, and then right before you turned it off, an hour before you turned it off, it didn't go back on. That's how you make sure. And then you average those two. It's never the same exact.
Their answer was at first, if you buy one of these pumps or they send you one, they're not sending you a calibrator. There are primary calibrators you can buy if you really want to do this really tight. They're expensive.
And the calibrator, if you did that, is a BIOS, primary standard. What they told me is EMSL, a company, made them something different and special to calibrate their pumps, and they calibrate them before they go out.
Now, this is great and wonderful, but they don't calibrate them when they come back. They calibrate them when they're gonna send another one out. And they're not the only company that does this.
There's a company that does VOC testing. Same thing, you can rent a pump from them. You get it pre-calibrated.
And I've been so frustrated with the same thing. I check it and I'm like, it's not exactly that. I check it afterwards and it's not exactly going back the same.
Sometimes there's big problems, sometimes there's no problems.
The reason I'm mentioning it on this show is if you're gonna use this test and you're only gonna do one because it's several hundred dollar test and it's a couple hundred dollars, not because they're greedy and trying to make a lot of money.
If you knew how much chemistry was involved in the steps and the QA and the processing behind this at the lab, you would wonder how they ever get anything done. It'd be a miracle if I worked for that lab, if I get three or five samples done per day.
There's a lot to do with chemistry, so which also leads to possible error. I'll get to talk about that, which is why I generally if you're testing for mold, why are we doing a chemical process?
If we can actually use the classic microbiology way and test, how do you know your pump is calibrated perfectly or not?
If you're really going to do this and your health is really on the line and you're going to be 1000% sure, I suggest you get your own calibrator. Number one, get your own calibrator. Now number two is kind of interesting, false positives.
That means the test suggests there's microtoxins in mold, but there's not, there's neither.
This is not just with this test, this is what the PCR with ERME, the same thing happens because it's a chemical test and other things react with the chemicals. I was even reading one study about the test that they use for food every day again.
They use it for food. There would be false positives in one study for strawberries and some other kind of food. Who knows why exactly?
There's so many different reasons, but it basically comes down to some chemical and then the mold remediation business, it turns out to be the sanitizers and the cleaning agents, can interfere with the chemistry.
They can either destroy the enzymes and the thing that you're trying to see is there, make it more difficult to detect, or with the false positives, mimic it. And there's so many variables. You're like, well, how do we know when it happens?
So lab managers had a great response to this. Basically, they run a control that should show nothing detected. So it's supposed to show a non-detect.
And if something they're doing makes your thing show a detection, that non-detect is supposed to theoretically also show a detection, meaning something went wrong with the chemistry, so that they're both showing detection when the non-detect
shouldn't. But that's not perfect because your sample could be affected with something that the non-detect wasn't coming in from the get-go. That only works if your process itself does something off-kilter, which would affect both samples.
If you get your sample, though, and it's been sprayed with some chemical from the remediators or even a household cleaner. Key point to remember, do not clean your house before you do this test. How long?
24 hours? 72 hours? Rule of thumb is 24.
Another rule of thumb is 72. And people ask me, where did you get the 24 hours from? Senior scientist?
Long time ago from a senior scientist? We don't know. And if you don't clean your house, don't fog because these chemicals are definitely going to affect the test.
The lab has told me that. They do also say that if they notice that, they'll rerun your sample. They have a key number in mind, 72 hours, to which they find things go back to normal.
But this is not something you want to do with one test. So think about one test again. It's expensive because of all the chemicals in the lab process.
If you really wanted good science and really wanted to make some of this stuff more credible when you get your data, you'd do an outside and you would do two inside in the same exact spot, just like we do with the spore traps and other types of
tests. These are more buddy checks. But then they get you up to $1,000 more and that's, you know, defeating kind of the idea.
So no fogging, no chemicals, because what happens is some of the chemicals bind to the antibodies and mimic a true positive, especially cleaning compounds.
Now, one of the reasons that I'm even known to ask some of these questions is I had a client using PCR. I didn't do the test for him. They sent me the report.
They called me because they had mold. They said, we have these stocky botrys and this astragillus in our house, so high levels we can't find it. And I did my own testing using the classic methods.
I told you, I couldn't find anything. I did wall tests, turned the house upside down, sucked air out of all the walls, couldn't find any mold or bacteria or anything. And so I'm like, you know what?
Maybe I'm wrong. Let's, though, to be sure, collect some more samples. And this time, we're going to send it to three different labs for PCR, which is what the IRM uses.
It's like a DNA test. A lot of chemicals, complicated process, just like the ELISA we're talking about. Two out of three labs agreed with me, no mold, clean.
It was still that third lab that started it all. It took me two months of study in the PCR process to know intelligent questions to ask the lab manager. It took a lab manager kind enough to actually speak to me about them and not to even talk to me.
And even better to actually go look at what I was telling him. Mainly it's because I shared all the data with him. I said, look, keep it confidential.
I'm going to share everything I have. Tell me, are you right and all of us are wrong? I'd love to know.
And this was a big lab by the way in California, one that everybody uses for PCR. And so I was like, well, maybe they're right and we're all wrong.
Meanwhile, also the one of the other labs that was doing the ERME PCR, genius lab manager or consultant working in the lab knew so much about the process. She helped me figure out what to ask the other lab manager. Let's all work together.
Let's figure this out. Two months later, I got a phone call, started with the lab manager saying, Daniel, I must start by apologizing. The calibration curve has been off by a factor of 10.
We didn't right away figure out everything because there was more than the calibration curve involved to bring it back in line with what the other two labs were reporting. So that's my long story. It's a chemical process.
If you're interested specifically in mycotoxins, this would seem to be the test for you. I'm interested in, can I tell a client, yes or no, there's mold in your house.
Oh, and by the way, I'm sure you get one out of this if you're paying me a lot of money. But I can't if I only do these, I can't tell you where it is. You can't walk into a room and do an air sample and say the mold's in that room.
Then they're done that, it floats around the air. If you do the mycotoxin test one, believe that, that's fine. Don't ask me to tell you where it is, which wall.
If I knew that, we wouldn't need to do any testing. I prefer to start with the wall test, not even do any air testing.
But I get it if your doctor and you want to understand, well, I'm more interested in is there a match between the mycotoxin there and what's in my blood.
Also occurs to me, though, you can't do a one-to-one like that because the same mycotoxins are in the food we're eating, which is where the test came that the same labs using to test the air in your house from old, the food industry is using, the
same exact test. So how do you know it wasn't from something you're eating in your food? As it turns out, it's probably pretty easy looking at these studies, but expensive.
You can find the same, find a lab, use the same lab, use the same test to test the food you're eating. If you commonly go someplace and eat a certain diet, I'd imagine you can run your food for that same mycotoxin panel as well and do comparisons.
I would definitely take more than one sample in my house to duplicate, get some of the air down. There's always air.
Scientists that I work with, leading EPA scientists once, I was working on a huge commercial project as the mold guy under his wing, under his company.
He's like, Daniel, and I'm worried about air because we're calibrating everything and this is a big project and he's a big scientist and he's like, Daniel, there's 10% air in everything.
So more or less, there is at least 10% air in any lab results you get from anybody, anywhere. Well, if you take two and average them, then maybe theoretically, you're getting down to 5%. And let's say in reality, one is like 20% air.
You get the idea. Always take two and take an outside one. And of course, this is going to get expensive then.
And I would also, if I was you, encourage you to do the classic Anderson sample with the cultured ones. Skip the spore traps, save our money there. That's a couple hundred dollars.
We don't need that. It's always been the case that if you do the Anderson sample, it'll show mold where the spore traps don't. If there is mold and you trust Anderson or the spore trap, of course.
It will be really interesting and we all agreed and I even offered to pay for it. I'm really curious to do the Anderson in-house with mold and compare that to the Mycotoxin. The trick is we have to do the test before we cut the wall open.
If we see the mold, that's kind of not realistic. And we got to pay for both of them before we do it. And if there's no mold, we just paid for it all and there's no mold.
Myself, I've spent tens of thousands of my own money testing for different things besides mold, chemicals, you know, electromagnetic fields, what kind of equipment can I rent to do more sophisticated EMF testing, particles, all kinds of weird stuff I
spend money on so that I know what works, what doesn't. So I did ask them if they take any outdoor samples. The answer is no. I also asked them, well, how did you get the numbers?
Low, medium, high. This is a little confusing on the report because there's yellow, red, of course, green, low, medium, high. As it turns out, I'm going to make this very clear.
There should not be any detectable mycotoxin in an indoor air sample. This is what they told me. I'm going with that.
It kind of makes sense. To me, it's fascinating how much mold it would take to even have a little bit of mycotoxin be detected in air. I'm so, why do you have the low, medium, high levels then?
Because here's what's happening. And it's kind of the same thing when you have a spore trap. And a lot of mold inspectors don't realize that they don't need to make it that difficult.
When you're a mold inspector and you do a spore trap and you're like, well, kind of can't tell. I mean, I'd like to say there's, but I'm not positive. What they don't understand is that's okay.
You see, no one ever seemed to tell these mold inspectors. Maybe it's because I'm an engineer and I work with engineers and other scientists. It's like your doctor.
You go to your doctor for a test, and the cancer test says, well, it's not definitive. I can't tell based on these tests if you have cancer or not. We're okay with that.
Why does the mold inspector have to be so perfect when it's not his or her fault? You simply need more data, to which the answer is, we need to do more investigating. So this can happen with a spore trap and it can happen with this mycotoxin test.
When it happens with this one, I think that's part of the low, medium, high level. Help you, but it really shouldn't be. The reason that they put that there is the other thing, a mold inspector for the spore traps and other tests should not be doing.
And what do you guess it is? When you do, when you have a mold inspector and they tell you, yes, there's mold, what's the next question? How bad is it?
The professional answer is, I know what you mean by that. Is it a little mold, a lot of mold? The short answer is, I don't know.
How could I know? I can't see the mold. I don't know how much is there.
I don't know your body, how it's affecting you, how much for you would be a little or a lot versus somebody else a little or a lot.
And yes, there are times I look at the lab results and like, wow, I was in there without a respirator for two hours and wow, yeah, you maybe should get out of your house.
But it's still really not the really best approach because you don't know if that's a one-time spike. You don't know what it averages over the day.
This is how these long-term samplers that these companies use in the test for mycotoxins, this is why they're used like this in industry. It's a slow all-day long test. Why?
Because there's ups and downs. You go for break, you go for lunch, you go out of the office, you leave and come back to work. But at the end of the day, this is your overall exposure.
It's just an exposure limit, not just a detect yes or no. And in this case, we don't have exposure limits. We have yes or no's.
So back to this mycotoxin test, why is it low, medium, high? It's because I believe when you get the test, it should be a non-detect, but it's not, so you got some numbers. And now you want to know how bad it is.
So you call the lab and you're over in the day in the lab with, well, is it really, really, really high? Is it the highest you've ever seen?
And even if it is, back to, you know, our false positives and all the variables in the chemistry, you got to be careful about what you say. It's the same thing back to why it's not the right thing to do with any kind of mold test.
Like if I was doing an Anderson sampler and it came back off the charts, I was like, is this the worst house you've ever seen? That presupposes that I have perfect data for every house I've ever tested to answer that question.
What if when I say yes, it turns out that the biggest number I ever saw was not as big as I thought because my calibration was off and I was pulling more air than I thought it was. Don't go there. But they are.
They're trying to help you a little more on that. So that's a work in progress. They may just go back to yes or no.
The key point in a conversation that if you watch the full episode with Andrea about what she does in environmental illness and mold microtoxins on my Daniel Stih Podcast, you'll hear the term IEP. That's Indoor Environmental Professional.
They will sell you your own kit, but ideally they'd like to work with the IEP. I think that's just because IEPs generally have some background and knowledge about this and easier to communicate with. Andrea is great, understands it.
IEP, I believe more came about from the IISRC who publishes the standard on mold remediation. The standard for mold remediation, S520, is a peer-reviewed document. IICRC publishes it, but they did not create it, but it has their logo on it.
They're publishing it. I believe they came out with the IEP at the time, the American Indoor Air Quality Association, which is now the American Council for Accredited Certification.
The agreement was, we'll do certifications, you guys write standards. And I think they're like, well, we don't want to be tied to the ACA. We don't want to put the ACAC in a standard.
So we got to come up with this new blanket term that fits everybody. Like you don't have to have a certification from so and so to be called an IEP in the standard. You're led to believe IEP means Indoor Environmental Professional.
You have some Education, Training, Background Certification? No. Anybody can call themselves an IEP.
That means absolutely zero, not a zip IEP. I would still suggest you go to the American Council for Accredited Certification. The only issue is, as you see when we talk to Andrea, her frustration, I got 10 certifications now.
It used to be there's just one top level one from old, which was and still is, Certified Microbial Consultant. Consultant is the keyword.
They will only give you a consultant after your initials, if you have the five or eight years experience, which is verified. They call the person you worked for, and you have to pass the test. That's consultant.
Anything less, it's an entry level.
There had to be some kind of entry level certification, but of course, the trouble is, I could just be an IEP, and now I got an entry level certification with the ACAC, and no one really understands all the differences, except now you do.
And if you go on the website, ACAC, there's a table. It will explain to you how you can look for somebody with the most experience. Thanks for listening.
Hope this helps you. If you listen this far, you probably have a significant mold problem. Feel free to reach out to my company, Healthy Living Spaces, or Andrea's Mold Consulting Company.
They will be in the show notes, and be sure to go over to my main podcast, The Daniel Stih Podcast, STIH. Thanks for listening.