Mold Avoidance 101

The point of mold avoidance is to remove something you can’t see, smell or taste, but you can still feel it. There are colonies, spores, toxins and super-toxins. It helps to find a way to understand them and conceptualize them in order to contain them.

 

Spores always originate in colonies, which are the motherships of mold. If you have an active colony, you have a mold factory spewing out spores. Colonies are what hide in wet places. In your walls, under sinks, etc. If you can find and get rid of your colonies, you have a chance of cleaning up the spores afterwards. But there is (almost) no point cleaning up spores til the factory that makes them has been shut down.

 

In the category of spores, there are benign ones that feel fine, mutated ones that make you sick and then the super-toxin spores which are so new, there is no scientific way to measure them yet. (The 5 worst mutated molds for health are represented in the HERTSMI mold test– Aspergillus Penicilloides, Aspergillus Versicolor, Stachybotrys, Chaetonium and Wallemia Sebi) The super-toxin spores make the HERTSMI spores look like cute puppies. They will make your life hell until you escape them which is difficult to do because they are insanely cross-contaminating. More on that later. Trying to eradicate spores can end up killing the spores and breaking them into pieces which does not solve your problem. Spore fragments of dead spores can no longer produce toxins, which is good, but they are inflammatory in and of themselves.

 

Toxins are the chemicals that spores produce. You may have already had someone give you advice that “all you need to do is bleach it to kill the mold and then you’ll be fine.” That is a sign to never take advice from this person because they don’t know the basics of how this works. Spores are less of a problem than the toxins they produce. Toxins are chemicals. You can’t kill chemicals. But if you come at spores or colonies with bleach or any other method intended to kill them, you piss them off and they… spew chemicals!!

 

I envision mold spores as like skunks under your porch. You want them gone, but you don’t threaten them with scary weapons. You coax them out, you trick them, entice them, cajole them, but under no circumstances do you crawl under the porch with a stick.

 

The toxins are way more difficult to remove than the spores are because they bind chemically to surfaces in a way that soap can’t get them off. This is why your belongings often can’t be cleaned if they have been inside a moldy house. (See The Toolkit for a list of things that people have used in the effort to clean their stuff.)

 

Everyone has different mold perception symptoms, but sometimes they overlap with other mold avoiders’ symptoms. As you go along, you might notice that you get different sensations for different microorganisms. My perception is that toxins sometimes feel different than spores. Different toxins give me different sensations, but usually cause tinnitus, and all-body sense of shakiness, like I am being poisoned. (They are neurotoxic. Think Sarin gas in the subway.) If I walk through a cloud of toxin, I may not need to decontaminate. If I walk through a cloud of spores, I will need to.

 

Erik Johnson, the grand poobah of mold avoidance, was trained as a chemical and biological weapons specialist in the US Army in the 1970s. He succeeded in regaining his health by dealing with mold and its toxins like a radioactive biological weapon. He pioneered extreme mold avoidance on this basis and it is helpful to think about toxins in this way.

 

Some people like Erik are Acute Responders, which means they have extreme symptoms like projectile vomiting or passing out in the presence of certain spores or toxins. Stachybotrys, which is the most toxic of the HERTSMI spores, can make people lose consciousness. For me, I get dizzy and vertigo with a headache and all-body swelling. But I don’t pass out.
Acute Responders develop MCS– multiple chemical sensitivity– in conjunction with mold illness. (Everyone has the potential of developing MCS with mold illness, but acute responders get it the worst.) They may be unable to use solutions from The Toolkit like ozone, quats or alkaline cleaners. They have to be more strict at mold avoidance because they have more disabling  symptoms and can use fewer tools to help them. They may need to use only organic, natural fabrics, avoid plastics or polar fleece or filter their water before they shower or do laundry.