Mold exposure can pose serious health risks, but how do you know if it’s affecting you or your loved ones? In this episode, we explore the health impacts of mold exposure, from respiratory issues and allergies to chronic symptoms linked to toxic mold.
Learn how to recognize the signs of mold-related illnesses, protect yourself and your family, and safely address mold issues without compromising your health. Whether you’re dealing with mold in your home, workplace, or rental property, this episode will provide essential tips to keep you safe and healthy.
TRANSCRIPT:
Today's topic is health and safety.
So what are the symptoms of mold exposure?
What common ones, course, sneezing?
Interesting one is skin irritation.
When I first started going to courses on doing mold testing and mold inspections, and they talk about health effects, I had a good teacher.
Skin irritation is because it's a particle.
Just like anything itchy gets on your skin.
If there's a lot of mold in your house, it's actually one of the biggest pathways for workers doing mold remediation.
It's not breathing the air and the mold in the air.
It's not wearing their gloves.
Fatigue and asthma and immune systems.
It's a complex thing.
Symptoms of mold exposure.
There is no one symptom that is just mold because that's like saying, well, I have a runny nose and a cough.
Well, do I have the flu?
Do I have bronchitis?
Do I have COPD?
Like, what is it?
It could be anything.
No symptom correlates exactly to mold exposure.
Next question, how can I tell if mold is making me or my family sick?
It's an engineering strategy.
It's a little difficult for you to do sometimes because it takes planning or resources, and it takes some time.
If you go to work and you feel better and you come home, you don't.
Or vice versa, you go to work and you have your mold symptoms, your breathing trouble, your asthma, your runny nose, something within the end or equality is a factor.
If you go on vacation, you can go away for a week or two and you come back and you're sick.
Before you jump to the conclusions, it's your house.
It could be something else with your town.
Could be you went to some place there wasn't as much allergens in the air, pollen or mold, or it could be the altitude, especially if we're talking about places like New Mexico, Colorado.
You get better because you go to a lower altitude and you're more sensitive to altitude.
You thought those are ways you can tell not if mold is making you sick.
Don't jump to that conclusion.
You can't.
It's not logical and it's not it's not frequently automatic that way.
It could be something in your house is making you sick.
It could be mold.
It could be a gas leak that you can't smell because you have a bad nose.
Could be other things.
If you have questions, go to healthylivingspaces.com.
Book a consultation.
I would love to help you one on one.
Can mold exposure cause long-term health problems?
This is an interesting question.
I'm a big skeptic on everything.
I challenge everything.
Show me the data.
Does it make sense?
Well, just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's true.
With mold, it's organ damage.
Now, again, a lot of mold exposure is from the food you eat.
So it's like alcohol.
You drink a lot of alcohol, bad for your liver.
It's got to detoxify.
Same thing with mold, but we're talking huge mold and long-term or long-term exposure.
There's no one size fits all because as we talked about earlier in another episode, maybe it's individual dependent, meaning if you're predeposed to allergies or something, your body can't detox or adjust to as much, it's a lot of stress on your body.
Maybe long-term, it's going to hit you sooner than somebody else.
The short answer is yes.
But before you panic, panicking does no good.
I have clients who they start panicking, and I understand it.
I do the same thing.
I test their house, find a huge amount of mold, or teach them how to test their own house with my courses.
They find a huge, a huge bit of mold, and they've been sick forever and are panicking.
My experience actually is most people, as soon as they get rid of the mold or leave, they get better fast.
Number one, get out of the house.
If you're that concerned, what's the most important thing in your health?
Find a way to leave.
And number two, if it is your house, clean it up.
It's likely that you will be okay.
Is mold dangerous for pets?
These questions, being an engineer, kind of, when I read them, like what does the word dangerous mean?
I mean, it's not dangerous.
Your pet's outside all the time with bare feet sniffing the grass where there's mold.
What you mean is, can pets suffer the same symptoms?
Respiratory issues, being lethargic if you have a lot of mold in your house.
I don't think there's any really good data on that.
It's hard enough for humans.
Humans go to their doctor.
We don't really have too much on pets besides if a veterinarian were to say, well, the animals have a similar metabolism and similar organ structure and a similar way to detoxify the liver and the kidneys, get rid of toxins or allergens that accumulate.
But still, they're going to be different.
And what do we mean by pets?
Probably mean cats and dogs.
And those could be different.
The short answer, in my opinion, is yes.
And this is based actually on pesticides.
There is significant data studies on pesticides, chemicals that are really bad for pets and for you.
And because the pets are playing in the lawn, that you treat, like with weed control, you treat your house for bugs and cockroaches.
You know this, because sometimes you're exterminated.
We'll tell you, do you have any pets?
Okay, well, I won't spray there, or don't let them outside for a day or two, because they got bare feet again, and then they lick their feet and so forth.
Next question, what's the best way to protect myself while cleaning mold?
Here's an ironic thing that most mold remediators don't realize, especially when they do the Smoke and Mirror show.
And you know, the podcast is called Mold Money, how to save money on mold remediation, because it's an easy buck those guys charge you $100 a day or more to rent air scrubber.
They're going to try to run that whole thing out a week, so they can charge you $1,000 to rent you this air scrubber.
And they don't even really use it properly.
And they don't know that it's not just to protect your house while they do the work, it's to protect them.
An air scrubber for mold remediation question is, how do I protect myself while cleaning mold?
It's like a big air filter.
It's sucking the air out of the room, and it's pulling clean air in from outside the work area.
It's helping clean the air.
That's as big as wearing a respirator.
If you wear a respirator, you're kidding yourself if you just wear an N95.
You really need a HEPA, and you really should get a full face, because one of the earlier questions I talked about answered was, what are the symptoms of mold exposure?
And we mentioned skin irritation.
If you don't have one that covers your eyes, a respirator, a full face one, your eyes are going to get it.
So full face respirator, HEPA.
You wear goggles if you have nothing else.
Am I answering this question?
The question is, what's the best way, the best way to protect myself?
Full face HEPA, it's a P100, for particle 100 respirator.
Your clothing, you could just wash after you're done with the work or throw it out.
Believe it or not though, if you just wash your clothes, like you'd normally wash clothes, maybe wash them twice because it's the rinse cycle you're worried about.
In wearing gloves, definitely wear gloves.
I wear rubber gloves, not work gloves because particles can get down through work gloves.
Plus if I'm washing the stuff with soap and water, cleaning up the mess after I clean up the mold, I wear rubber gloves and a full face respirator, something you can throw away or throw in the wash clothes-wise.
Last question, what type of mold is black mold?
And we've been speaking about health and safety today.
What type of mold is black mold and is it really the most dangerous?
Again, being the engineer, what does the word dangerous mean and why black mold?
Stockybotrys, which is what the newspaper story started to call black mold 20, 30 years ago.
It's actually white when it's infant.
When stockybotrys first starts growing in its life cycle, it's white on the back side.
And every mold can be a different color on the front and the back side.
And it changes depending on their growth cycle.
And there's only so many so many colors in the color chart.
And there's, I forget how many, half a million different kinds of mold.
Black is irrelevant.
You will see other black mold, Aspergillus, the common one, Alternaria, that's black.
So the least common ones are basically the same color as the most, if you want to call it the most dangerous, stockybotrys.
Can't tell by the color.
Is it really the most dangerous?
What does most mean?
What is dangerous?
None of the stuff is to play around with.
Let's presuppose we're to concede to the argument that the stockybotrys, the black mold, is the most dangerous.
Here's why you don't even want to consider this question.
If you see mold, if you see green mold or orange mold, and it's on the wall in your house, wherever you're looking, and that got wet.
When you cut that wall open on the backside, or if you go into your attic or your crawlspace, wherever you are, and you see some mold, I guarantee you, you have more than one type of mold, and you're just not seeing it yet, because you haven't taken everything apart, looked everywhere, tested everywhere, and you never will be able to.
The ironic thing is, when you go, what kind of mold is it?
And that's what you're really trying to get at.
You don't understand, there are five other types of mold hidden, and really what you're asking me is, is this something to worry about?
Is it black mold or not?
It doesn't matter what the answer is because on the reverse, it happens that the mold you see is not stocky botchers, it's aspergillus.
You cut the wall open, stocky botchers likes wetter conditions for longer period of time.
And of course, inside the wall, it's going to stay wet longer.
And there you find your stocky botchers.
Whereas when you were looking from outside, before you cut the hole in the wall to remediate, cut the wall out, you didn't see it.
So it's a question you really shouldn't engage with.
Whenever you hear the word black mold, just ignore it.
Whenever you hear anything regarding, is it this type of mold, is it that type of mold, consider what people really want to ask you.