I never imagined I would need to learn so much about mold. The last several years have been challenging to say the least. Most of the members of my family have been affected by toxic mold that has been difficult to completely eradicate in our home which made its first appearance in early 2017. But a closer look shows that this house had a problem with mold before my husband even purchased our home in 2008. Part of his purchase agreement was to have the garage mold remediated before the closing and certainly before he moved in. He joked for years that he got some money off the purchase price because of the mold, “mold is gold” he would say, and that statement may be true in real estate investing if you plan to do a lot of work to fixer homes.
A few years before we got pregnant with my daughter we looked under our mattress for some reason, I can’t recall, and saw a little mold under there and cleaned it with bleach. I have seen and cleaned a little mold off walls in the past and it always seemed to go away never really to be a problem to me again. The house my father lived in, in Manhattan Beach was sold before any real big problem could start. That is where I had cleaned small amounts of mold from the walls as well as in one apartment I had, there was mold in the corner of the shower stall. There was never any big problem from those things. I have also been told since we live in southern California near the beach there is more moisture in the air than other drier places and two friends recently told me about these little plastic cups you put in the closet to collect moisture and they have collected quite a bit of water.
The County of L.A. public health gives a little history of mold, “Over the last century, the subject of mold has received its fair share of media attention. It made headlines back in 1929, when scientist Alexander Fleming observed that certain types of molds were capable of killing bacteria. His observation, which led to the discovery of the antibiotic penicillin, revolutionized the practice of medicine. More recently, mold has garnered media attention again. However, the headlines are of a very different kind. Beware: Toxic Mold warns Time magazine; Toxic Mold: A Hidden Health Hazard reports Newsweek.” http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/eh/safety/mold.htm
In the first bout of mold in our home, my daughter who was between 9 and 12 months old, had nasal congestion, rashes, low grade fevers that went up to 100.2. she also got one virus after another in succession. At one point my husband was concerned about her lack of weight gain.
During our second bout of mold my son had an ongoing sinus infection and still has sinus pressure to this day after a year of getting out of the mold, treating for mold toxicity, and changing his diet. He had what looked like “allergies” with bouts of sneezing” as well as he was susceptible to COVID and then he got the beginning of long COVID.
During the first bout of mold, I had headaches, nausea, and then I started getting symptoms of eosinophilic esophagitis which had been diagnosed ten years earlier but I had no symptoms during that time that I was aware of. The 2nd time we had mold, I got a very strange symptom of vibrating or pulsing or like a hot flash that ran up and down my spine. I saw that symptom of mold toxicity listed in the book by Dr. Neil Nathan Toxic; Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and chronic environmental illness.
Then at the public health website it lists many different mold toxicity symptoms and say that not everyone develops symptoms from toxic mold exposure and that there is little evidence to support these claims, “Although molds have been accused of causing a wide array of medical problems everything from headaches and asthma to moodiness and rashes there is evidence to substantiate only a few of these allegations.
Allergic responses are believed to be the most common reaction to mold exposure. Most reactions are relatively mild and are limited to hay fever-type symptoms, such as sneezing, runny nose, cough, burning and itching eyes, and skin rash. In people with asthma, however, an allergic response to mold can cause shortness of breath or even trigger an asthma attack. A rare but serious allergic condition called hypersensitivity pneumonitis can be caused by exposure to very high concentrations of molds. Not everyone develops allergic symptoms in response to molds. In fact, while some people react to relatively small quantities of them, others can be exposed to large amounts without a problem.” http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/eh/safety/mold.htm
The last sentence from above is what is so baffling about mold and toxic mold exposure. While my son, daughter, and I have had bad reactions all in different ways, my husband has seemed to escape any nasty symptoms except that he does have toenail fungus that has gotten worse and his podiatrist has suggested that he start taking an internal antifungal because he was not getting the results he had hoped with the topical antifungal and shaving the toenail down every so many months.
Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker author of multiple mold books one being Mold Warriors; Fighting America’s hidden health threat. He talks about many discoveries he made in clinical practice where patients had been exposed to mold had multiple different health symptoms including, “…fatigue, obesity, memory problems, chronic joint pains, chronic abdominal pains and many more…” pg. xxv.
Dr. Shoemaker says many, what could be considered inflammatory statements including that most of the mold wars are about money, some doctors are suppressing the truth about mold, and one statement that you can find on the CDC or other public health website, “…there is no local Federal health policy, based on sound science that establishes a mechanism for detection and treatment of mold illness.” pg. xxix.
Because of Dr. Shoemakers years of clinical work with patients he found labs that can show if you’ve been re-exposed to mold within hours. You would look at those labs after getting a baseline. One of the main reasons I bring up Dr. Shoemaker is because he has found that genetics play a role in people who get very sick from moldy buildings or toxic mold anywhere. He says, “Genetics decides who will develop a chronic illness following exposure and who won’t. People are exposed to biotoxins all the time, and mold toxins are the most common. Most people won’t get sick from mold because their immune system’s response genes make antibodies to the toxins, but there are those—the genetically susceptible—who lack this antibody-making capability, and that’s where the trouble begins.” Pg. 62
Because of multiple infections last year our pediatrician ordered labs to test for allergy to mold. She also had mold allergy testing in 2017 when she was first exposed to mold and all of them were negative for IgE antibodies.
Dr. Shoemaker suggests multiple lab tests like MMP9 which if high shows high toxin load. Cytokines cause white blood cells to release MMP9 so we know that high MMP9 means high cytokines. Pg. 76. There is a list of the labs and their explanations at his website here https://www.survivingmold.com/resources-for-patients/diagnosis/lab-tests. Dr. Shoemaker published his Mold Warrior book in 2005 and had been doing work many years before that, so some of those labs and ways of figuring out if your toxic for mold could be expensive and some of those labs are time consuming.
I would like to get the HLA DR genetic test done for myself and daughter and son if he wants to just to see if we all fit the profile, it would just be interesting at this point and possibly necessary. But even if it showed we all this genetic profile it may not matter in the face of medical pride, arrogance, and truth suppression. We have had other genetic tests showing issues with methylation which is affected by toxic mold and we also have labs showing certain deficiencies that could have something to do with the exposure to this toxic mold.
This is what Dr. Shoemaker says about the genetics test, “Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLAs), are found on the surface of nearly every cell in the human body. They help the immune system tell the difference between body tissue and foreign substances. The immune response genes are found on chromosome six. Patients could have two alleles, copies of genes (for each gene, one allele is inherited from a person’s father, and the other is inherited from a person’s mother), out of approximately 10 possible, as part of their genotype. Based on Dr. Shoemaker’s data, in normal populations compared to international registries of gene frequencies of HLA DR, we know the frequency of mold illness-susceptible patients approximates 24% of the normally distributed population. Almost a quarter of the normal population is genetically susceptible to chronic mold illness. Three quarters isn’t.” https://www.survivingmold.com/resources-for-patients/diagnosis/lab-tests
This is what Dr. Nathan says about the 25% population and their detox systems and genetic makeup, “…if a person has the right genetic makeup (which exists in 75% of the human population), he or she can make antibodies to these toxins that will help bind the toxins so that the body can get rid of them. But for the 25 percent of the population that is not genetically engineered to make these antibodies, the only means to deal with these toxic molecules is to bring them to the liver, our major organ of detoxification, or perhaps to utilize other systems of elimination, including the skin, gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, lymphatic system, and lungs, which have the important job of finding a way to move the toxins out.” Pg. 26
Dr. Nathan points out a few things about urine mycotoxin testing which have shown to be a quicker, easier and more accurate way to determine if one has mold illness. He says that combination of RealTime labs and Great Plains lab which show different things is the best way to make diagnosis. He says, “Elevated levels of any mycotoxin indicate a clear diagnosis and allow us to proceed with treatment immediately.” Pg. 62
There are multiple products and ways to detox which we are still working on and I will have to talk about later. It should go without saying in my mind that children would be the most vulnerable to mold toxicity and in Dr. Shoemakers book Mold Warriors, “…scientific evidence has revealed that young children’s lives are most at risk when exposed to toxic mold.” Pg. xvi There are three reasons the authors of Children and Environmental Toxins; What everyone needs to know, (one of the authors is a pediatrician and epidemiologist and the other is a public health educator) say about a few reasons why children are more vulnerable:
• Children experience greater exposure than adults based on their body size – pound for pound children inhale twice as much air as an adult, they also eat more food and
drink more water per pound of body weight than adults also.
• Children’s metabolic pathways are immature – they do not detoxify like adults; the toxins can stay in their bodies longer than adults.
• Children are undergoing rapid growth and development, and their delicate developmental processes are easily disrupted – the processes are orchestrated with clockwork
precision during the nine months of pregnancy. they continue after birth, through early childhood, and even into adolescence and adult life. pg. 27-29
Another quote from the above authors says, “This great complexity of early human development creates windows of vulnerability, periods of heightened sensitivity to toxic chemicals that exist only in early life and have no counterpart in adulthood…most vulnerability occur during pregnancy, and others occur during early childhood. Exposures to even minute quantities of toxic chemicals during these sensitive periods—levels that would have no adverse effect on an adult—can lead to permanent injury to the brain, reproductive organs, immune system, and other organ systems.” Pg. 31
So, with our mycotoxin tests according to Dr. Neil Nathan and common sense in my opinion its important to begin detox. While our family has exited and remediated the mold in our home, and my son utilizes sauna to detox himself, myself and my daughter remain somewhat vulnerable because we are not using sauna. I just had a CAT Scan today ordered by my doctor because of severe abdominal pain which is completely normal. In spite of that I still have bouts of severe abdominal and severe bloating. I also had a recent RealTime urine mycotoxin test which showed much lower levels from four years ago with the first exposure but still not normal. According to the doctors and labs, a healthy person should not have any mycotoxins in their urine. Jessica continues to get fevers from extremely small amounts of sugar and/or dairy, evidenced by her 101.7 fever yesterday and 101.2 temperature today because of eating one tiny Hershey’s kiss candy.
Jessica has been on binders and antifungals and I am awaiting another Great Plains test result to see how much we have already eliminated. This process seems like it could take a while since Jessica is so young and I cannot utilize everything necessarily and it costs a lot of money to keep running lab tests and purchasing many helpful things like air purifiers, home sauna, supplements etc.
We are doing the very best we can with what have to work with and I pray for God’s help regularly as this situation feels overwhelming most of the time and I can only do very little things at a time.
The following website although entitled for seniors had a lot of really helpful information about mold illness/toxicity https://www.seniorcare2share.com/how-do-you-prove-mold-illness/.
Megan Graham and 10 things she did to heal from Mold is also very helpful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjSaECgTfHc.
Mold toxicity and mycotoxins can be extremely damaging to that small population of people who are overly sensitive to toxins. I want to leave a list from the Great Plains labs of damage that these toxins can do, this is just Aflatoxin, and there are many other toxins that have an even more damaging effect when they are all together, “AFLATOXIN M1 (AFM1)
Aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) is the main metabolite of aflatoxin B1, which is a mycotoxin produced by different species of the genus Aspergillus. Aflatoxins are some of the most carcinogenic substances in the environment. Aflatoxin susceptibility is dependent on multiple different factors such as age, sex, and diet. Aflatoxin can be found in beans, corn, rice, tree nuts, wheat, milk, eggs, and meat. In cases of lung aspergilloma, aflatoxin has been found in human tissue specimens. Aflatoxin can cause liver damage, cancer, mental impairment, abdominal pain, hemorrhaging, coma, and death. Aflatoxin has been shown to inhibit leucocyte proliferation. Clinical signs of aflatoxicosis are non-pruritic macular rash, headache, gastrointestinal dysfunction (often extreme), lower extremity edema, anemia, and jaundice. The toxicity of aflatoxin is increased in the presence of ochratoxin and zearalenone.” https://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/gplmycotox
These are some of the effects of Gliotoxin, “Gliotoxin (GTX) is produced by the mold genus Aspergillus and perhaps Candida species. Aspergillus spreads in the environment by releasing conidia which are capable of infiltrating the small alveolar airways of individuals. To evade the body’s defenses Aspergillus releases gliotoxin to inhibit the immune system. One of the targets of gliotoxin is PtdIns (3,4,5) P3. This results in the downregulation of phagocytic immune defense, which can lead to the exacerbation of polymicrobial infections. Gliotoxin impairs the activation of T-cells and induces apoptosis in monocytes and in monocyte-derived dendritic cells. These impairments can lead to multiple neurological syndromes.” https://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/gplmycotox
These toxins are no joke and could have dire consequences to a young child, and should not be ignored. It is folly to dismiss this information and negligent on the part of the medical community to ignore, dismiss or worse people who are struggling greatly with their health and need help. I hope and pray that doctors would at least have enough intellectual curiosity to do their own investigation so they can help and not hinder their patients.