Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome: Testing Your Home

Welcome. Welcome everybody. This is part three of our series on mold wars where we discuss controversial topics in chronic inflammatory response syndrome and mold related illnesses. And today's topic is testing for your home. Not personal testing, but testing for your home. So we're going to talk about a couple different testing things ranging from sport trap testing to dust testing to a whole bunch of things. And hopefully by the end of this you'll appreciate some of the complexities to environmental testing and what you can do to make sure your house is a safe place. But I'm here to remind everybody as well that you were made for health. And part of this process is learning how you can improve your health through understanding your environment, detoxification and a whole host of things. Also, another thing just to remind you before we dive into the mold testing, environmental testing is that these are complicated topics. So if you haven't read our post on our website, we have multiple posts on our website that delve into chronic inflammatory response syndrome and, and mold related illnesses. So you really should read those first because this takes a deeper dive and further explains all those topics. So let's begin. So today's thing is mold testing. So I'm going to start on one one side of the spectrum, which is sport trap testing. So what sport trap testing is, it's when you take a little, little plate or tape and you actually collect spores of mold, they're floating in the air that kind of settle down. This is used by a lot of mold inspectors when people typically have their house evaluated for selling to buyers, et cetera, real estate stuff. This is the kind of testing that's typically done. The issue with this kind of testing, it's not very sensitive. If your house tests positive with sport trap spore testing, then you've got a big issue in your home. For every 500, for every one spore there's about 500 particulates. And when you understand water damaged buildings and what that means as far as stuff in the air, chemicals, toxins and a whole host of things, you can really appreciate why just trapping spores. When one spore can be rep. For every 500 particulates there's one spore, you're really, really, really not super sensitive. So a lot of times I'll see patients will have their houses tests, they'll bring these reports and say, oh look, it's normal, but it's not a very sensitive test. On the exact opposite spectrum of things there is ERMI testing, Hertzme 2 testing. I'm not gonna delineate too much between the two of those there are important nuances. I'm going to speak mainly to ERMI testing. ERMI testing is a type of quantitative PCR where they actually look for the DNA of mold and particulates. This is so sensitive, it's on the opposite side of spore trap testing. It's so sensitive that you can actually pick up stuff from a water vent from years and years ago. The analogy I use for that, it's almost like a house fire. If you have a house fire, say one room catches on fire and the smoke goes into your entire house, it might be just in one bedroom, but those particulates are in your entire house. In order for your house to be remediated, you have to paint the whole thing. You have to throw furniture away, it's really bad. And that will hang out for years and years and years until you actually do that remediation for a fire. That's the way mold, when you have a water vent in your house is. And that's how sensitive the, the ERMI testing is. It'll pick that stuff up. So you could have actually had an event, maybe a water leak in a bedroom, remediated it, taking care of it, but and actually have it in a safe environment. But the ERMI will pick it up and still look like if your house is unsafe. One thing I mentioned in the other the previous videos about 80% of Sears being actually water damaged buildings. And within that 80%, 80% of that 80% is actually endotoxins and actinomyces, which none of these tests actually even address. So that's one talk I want to talk about next is checking for actinomyces and endotoxins. And actually these two, especially actinomyces, represent the vast majority of water damage building the culprit for people with water damage, building issues. The thing is the REME testing does not check for that and spore trapping does not check for it. You actually have to do a different test that looks for endotoxins like tinomyces. The thing that's tricky about these two things is that humidity by itself can raise the endotoxin levels in your environment. And just having a crawl space that's unencapsulated by itself can raise the tendinomyces in your house. You can have a pristine house, never had a water leak, no mold anywhere, and still have people in your house who have chronic inflammatory response in there because you have an unencapsulated crawl space, or you're not controlling the humidity in your house accurately and you're Growing these endotoxins in your house. So if you're going to do a test, you need to do something that takes all these into account, which typically is it. Ermie hurts me too, with actinomyces and endotoxins, because then you can get an idea of what's going on throughout your whole house as well. Looking at the other two, but I failed to mention VOCs in this whole conversation. You know, volatile organic compounds, these can be from bacteria and Fungus we call MVOCs, but they can also be from your construction materials. So the glues, the fibers in your house, all these things can actually off gas. If you have carpet, that can off gas as well. And so all of a sudden, now some people will do testing for that. So as you can see, there's not one test that looks for all of these. And then the bigger question is, where in your house is the problem? Are you going to put a testing plate in every room in your house or a test dust every room? That can be incredibly, incredibly expensive. Which is the reason why in my career, I've gone more to now having indoor environmental professionals. IEPs come. There are people that are specifically trained to know what to look for, not just molds. They can actually test your air handler, check your corals. They can actually use an infrared light and look at your walls and see if you have air penetration or water in your walls to check the humidity. And not just in the air, but in wood and dry drywall. You can have 12 to 15% humidity in your wood, and that's fine. Anything over 20% humidity in your wood tells you you have a humidity issue behind that door or whatnot. They actually can look at all that. They can also look and say, hey, you've got chemical issues in your house because you're. You have an attached garage. The attached garage is where I've had patients have this, where they store paint or solvents or whatever. And the way your house works, it's almost the same. There's a thing called a Bernoulli effect. And so when your house heats up in the summertime, air rises and you actually pull stuff from your wall and your stitching, but as well from your garage into your house. So you might have an issue where your house is fine, but you have chemicals, you're storing gasoline in your garage, and there's fumes being pulled into your house. So having an indoor environmental professional come look at your house, not just look at your crawl space, not just using infrared gun for your walls, not just check visible mold, but Also get a big, big picture. Some of them actually will even look for electromagnetic field, EMF energy to see if you have issues with that in your house. So as you can see, it's kind of complicated. We start looking at the cost for actinomyces, testing endotoxins. Ermi hurts me too, all these things. It's actually more affordable and actionable. Typically, when an IEP looks at your house, they give you about a 40 to 50 page readout. It tells you if your house is healthy or not. They also walk. This is something else that's really important. They also walk your house. Sometimes you can have water penetration into your crawl space, your basement. And people don't realize it's actually a grading issue, the way your house isn't lifted up a little bit. You don't have water going away from your house. You don't have gutters on the house. So what happens is when it rains, the water comes up to your house and actually comes through your crawl. A lot of people forget that concrete and brick are both porous materials. So if you actually have water constantly hitting on them, it will eventually penetrate those. So that's where having a professional coming and look at your house can actually be more beneficial than just personally testing. And then you have to figure out which room is messed up or you have to figure out what's going on. So that's kind of the way I've moved over the last several years of my career, having more patients have IEPs come look at their houses. And I've done all these from all these tests I mentioned to have an IEP come to my home to actually take a look at. And that's, that's the battle. That's this week, actually last week's, but this week's discussion lab about testing your home. What's the best test, you know? And so in conclusion, the best thing to do is just have a professional come look at your house. The tricky thing is ideally that the professional will use the technologies I talked about, an infrared gun to look at your walls. They will actually check the humidity in the walls. They will actually do your crawl. They'll pull off the. Almost like the H Vac people who do your air conditioning pull off the air handler plate to look at your grills. They see any molding where they'll check it. They also walk out through outside of your house. Typically, this type of evaluation will take anywhere from as little as three hours to as much as six or seven hours. So the person comes and look at your home is not taking that much time, you may not have had a really good evaluation. So that's this week's Mold the Battle discussed personal testing and internal testing. We've now discussed external testing and we've also discussed what other things can cause Sears. And so next week we are next topic in the mold wars, controversies of mold illness and what you can do to educate yourself to know what to do to keep as healthy as possible, especially if you or a loved one is dealing with chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which again, remind people about 23 to 25% of population has the gene related to this. So it's actually quite common. Take care, be well, and we'll talk to you soon.