173: Avoid These Common Mistakes in Remediation: Why Symptoms Persist

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

So one of the perks of being part of my email community is that I will occasionally send out, you know, every like couple weeks or so, send out an email prompting for questions that I can help answer. Some of them are answered here, some of them are answered in other places. So this is, this is one of those email responses that came in from someone who is on our email list in our community. So just a heads up if you want to be a part of that, there's a link in the show notes where you can click the link and go join so you can start getting these emails.

So with that said, I'm going to read this question and kind of talk through it. I feel like I've heard versions of this a lot over the years and there are some things that I immediately think of that might be what's going on. And so we'll talk through it. All right. So says I've done all the right things for remediation. Fogging during and after containment with negative air. Removal of contaminated building materials. HEPA vacuuming multiple times throughout the entire home. Wiping again and again, including HEPA vacuuming with the walls with decon 30. The H vac and most of the ducts were replaced. By the way, Decon 30 is a cleaning product. Benefect Decon 30.

H Vac and most of the ducts were replaced. But I still have symptoms throughout the home. Is it lingering? Mycotoxins testing showed air levels were completely remediated. A mold, even an even low to begin with, but still kind of went forward. I'm going to pause there. Okay, so as far as.

Let, let me take a step back. So usually.

And I'll preface it, there are some times that a house just might not be fit for someone even if they go through and do everything right. With that said, I feel like most times, most clients that we work with, we're able to get the house to a point where they can kind of go back and not be incredibly symptomatic. So just keep in mind that as I talk through this, it's not like a definitive every single time thing, but most of the times there's something that was either missing or something along the way that might be an explanation of what's going on. So we started here with a really big description of every step that was taken for remediation. Then we got into testing. So I understand why they wrote it this way. Right. They're saying, hey, we did all these things for remediation. My first question is, well, how did you know what to remediate in the first place? Right. So there really wasn't anything in here about, well, how did you determine where the containments were going to be? How did you determine what was going to be removed? This, for me, is usually the biggest reason that a remediation doesn't work. Like, there's actually only two reasons. The first reason it doesn't work is you didn't do it properly. The second reason is that you didn't actually find everything that needed to be remediated. So you didn't actually remediate everything. You maybe did a portion of it, but there's still stuff left over that got missed. Those are really the two big reasons that remediation doesn't work. So, you know, as I'm looking through.

This description here, what's going on? So let me just go back through the steps of what, you know, they had identified in here. If you do all the right things, which is fogging during and after containment. So again, where does that happen? Right, so there's like different pieces of this containment with negative air. That's good. Yep. Gotta do that. Remove contaminated building materials. Yep. You got to do that HEPA vacuum multiple times throughout the home. Okay, so here's where there's like a switch between source level remediation and full home cleaning remediation. Okay, so let me do a quick pause here. I want the differences. So at the beginning here, we're talking about containments. We're talking about removing contaminated material. This is the first step in any remediation. There's two parts of it. First step is removing the sources. Second step is then cleaning up the whole house in its entirety. So let's say, to clarify that a little more, let's say I have five mold sources in my house. Let's say there's, you know, a bathroom, a kitchen. I know. Let's just say three, just for conversation sake. And. And a bedroom. All right, so let's say in these three rooms there are mold source level issues. Right? Like there's something behind the wall or in the ceiling or in the wherever. Right? That's source level remediation. That's where you're containing. You're doing negative air. You're removing contaminated materials. Right, That's. That's great. Now, in this process, one of the biggest things that I see that is overlooked is while we might be removing contaminated material. So think of it this way. You have a wall, right? You have drywall. Your drywall goes up, but your drywall sits and is attached to two by fours that are behind the drywall, right? So you have this sort of wall cavity. So there's an open space behind your drywall. And if you take the drywall off, you have these studs, these two by fours that are there. A lot of times what I see happen in remediation is they'll remove the drywall and then they'll be like, okay, I removed everything. But then inside the wall cavity that was exposed, either the framing itself still has mold on it, or there's like debris and contamination that's still in there. And a lot of times what will happen is you will go in and do a post remediation inspection, and the framing also has mold all over it. And so then you build the back and you put drywall over the front of it because you think you remove the contaminated materials, which was the drywall in this case. And you did like, that's good. But you put drywall back over wood that has mold all over it. You still have a source problem back there. So you went through this whole process, yet there's still a source mold problem back there which can then prolific. Proliferate. Proliferate. Yeah, again. And all of a sudden you can get mold that starts growing back in there. Right. Because you still have mold in there. So I would say here at this point of the. Of the equation, we're in the source level piece, just from the description that's being read here, that if all we did was remove materials, but we didn't actually remediate the structural materials that were not removable, meaning you. You get the mold off, the mold growth off of those things, you clean, you sanitize those areas. Then that's possibly a reason that there might still be something going on. Okay, now backtracking even more. What if there's more source areas that you didn't know of? Right. So then my question le, going back to the very beginning of all this is how you. How did you determine where you were doing remediation? Okay.

And that's not in here. So there's no way that I can really talk through it. Right. And kind of have an idea of like what their thought process was on all of this. But I would say, beyond process, having challenges and maybe not being the most comprehensive all the time, kind of, maybe even the bigger thing I see is that somebody remediated, and then we go in to look at their house and we find 10 more things. And so they're like, well, there's no. I can't remediate. It's not good enough. It'll never be good enough for me. And is the feeling that someone has. Right. Which is. Which makes sense off of what, you know, at the time. But then when we come in and say, well, I mean, there's six or seven more things in here, so you're still reacting because maybe you remediated three things, but there's another four or five things that are going on that, in fairness, you didn't know about. But now all of a sudden, we have an explanation for why you're still reacting in the space, because there's still problems and probably maybe even a significant amount of problems in the space. So remediation can only be as effective as your upfront inspection and assessment is. Right? They can only remediate what was found. They can only remediate what they were told to remediate. Right. Just like a surgeon can only perform surgery in an area where they know there's a problem. Right. So if you go in and you have surgery for a particular issue, yet you have an issue somewhere else in your body, and they fix the one area, but then the other area wasn't touched, and then you still have symptoms. It's not the surgeon's fault necessarily. They could have been the best surgeon and fix that one area perfectly. But if you had two other things going on in your body that also needed surgery that they had no idea about, then they're not going to go over there and fix that and clean that up. Right. And that's kind of what happens in this process, because there's two.

Two parties involved. They both have to be really good. You have to have one that's really great at finding, identifying all of that, and then you have to have another one that's really great at taking the protocols that are provided and executing those protocols and maybe even having expertise beyond that to help guide in specific, you know, corner cases that might come up during the remediation project. Right. So that's always one thing I think of as a reason if somebody's still having symptoms after you go through a full house cleaning, for example, well, you might have cleaned the whole house, but are There still sources going on. Right. Then the next question is, okay, so for the areas that you did remediate, let's say you did find everything, did you actually remediate everything properly within those areas in phase one of remediation, which is source removal? Right. So did we actually, you know, get the mold off the two by fours and, and under the flooring and these other areas where there might be things going on? Right, because what happened in this email, reading through it, they said we did all the right things for remediation. We did fogging during and after. Okay, well, fogging, in my opinion, in our protocols, doesn't happen during the source level remediation. It happens after. Right. So it makes me wonder, like, okay, if we're fogging before and after, like, why were you fogging before? Was that meant to be some, some sort of blanket solution for cleaning the surface levels and for removing mold? Right. I see this happen a lot where a company will come in and they'll be like, hey, we're going to fog everything and it's going to kill all the mold. They're like, okay, I mean, that's cool, right? And honestly, for somebody who doesn't know any better, it sounds, sounds like it makes sense, right? In a lab, scientifically, you take this fog and it will kill the mold. I want the mold dead. The mold is making a problem for me. I want the mold dead. Right. So that all makes sense. The thing about it though, is that our body reacting has nothing to do if the mold is alive or dead. And that's the thing that I think a lot of people don't totally get about this process. If we breathe in a, quote, dead mold spore, or we bring it, or we breathe in a living, quote, living dead mold spore, they're both going to trigger an immune response for us. So it has nothing to do with dead or alive as it does with present or not present. Meaning are there any spores or fragments floating around and it's decent enough volume for you to react to, or have you removed all of the spores and the fragments to the point where there's not a whole lot floating around in the first place? And if it doesn't come into your body, then your body won't react? So that's always my, you know, question on fogging, which is, what was the purpose of fogging? Where did you do it in the process.

For our, how we set it up? Fogging happens in phase two of remediation, which is your home cleanse portion of stuff. So after you've remediated the sources, meaning remove the contaminated materials. Remediated. And remove the mold from any of the structural materials that may stay there. Clean up all the debris and stuff in the containments. Once all that is done, then the entire home gets fogged. And the purpose of that fog is to bring all the particles that are floating around in the air down to the surfaces. So then you can remove all the residual mold spores and fragments and potentially mycotoxins that are floating around through wiping processes. So you did say that you went through and you, and you wiped the home and you had the vac and you wiped and you did the wall. So like, it sounds to me like you really focused on the home cleanse part of it, which is really good. That's phase two. So as I'm reading this, it's like, okay, let's talk through phase one. Because if phase one wasn't completed either properly or we didn't find all the sources and you can do phase two cleaning all day long and it's not really going to have any sort of long term effect because phase one is kind of like that's the source, right? That's the factory that's creating the smoke that's coming out into the house. So if there's still factories you can clean all day, but they're still going to be producing smoke that moves through the space. Right? So, and then we got to the place where it said testing showed air levels were completely remediated of mold. And so this part also is a red flag for me because you said you tested air levels. So error testing is not the way to know if you have a mole problem or not. Not, not in the initial assessment of testing, not after remediation. Like error testing is not the move right now in post remediation testing you do, you do incorporate error testing because you're remove. So this is phase one remediation for source. You are, you know, removing walls and stuff. So you're creating really big disruption. That's why you put up containment. The purpose of the air test in that portion of the remediation is not to say, I've remediated and there's no mold in the air left. Right. Because we know air testing in that way doesn't tell us if there's a source level problem. Right. What it does do is say, hey, I created this huge mass explosion from removing walls and all this, that and the other. And now I'm going to air test in here to make sure that my air scrubbing machines and everything pulled all that out of the air in the current snapshot in time in this contained environment that we're in. So I know that there isn't residual mold particles, spores, fragments, all that stuff floating around. So you need it for that. But that is not going to tell you if you remediated all the mold at the sources. Meaning, like I'd been talking about, if there's still mold on the framing, you have to surface, sample remediated areas. And this even goes to the guidebooks, right? Like the art industry standard guidebooks even talk about having to do this. It's just nobody ever does it. But mold doesn't grow in the air. So if your purpose was to remediate and remove mold, right? Like. Like, remediation is meant to remove mold growth. That is what remediation is. Mold does not grow in the air. Remediation is meant to remove mold growth. Mold does not grow in the air. I'll say it a couple times, right? So that means if you're testing the air as a method to. To validate that remediation, which, again, the purpose is to remove mold growth worked, then you can't test the air where mold does not grow, right? You have to test surface where mold grows, which means you have to do surface testing. And this is a lot of times when we come into post inspections, listen, either visibly the. The framing has mold on it. It's very easy to be like, oh, you guys didn't remediate this properly, or sometimes it looks okay, but you still have to surface test, which is like a swab test that goes over the framing that was remediated to make sure the mold is all gone. Right? Because you can't always see them all, right? And so the thing here that kind of stood out to me was testing showed air levels were completely remediated. That doesn't mean that they were completely remediated. So if we're relying on air samples in the containment, that might be the issue. The issue might be that you actually didn't remediate the source levels properly. You relied on an error test in a containment to tell you that you did that. Listen, guys, an air test in a containment, if it fails, it's a huge problem because you're literally in a sealed room. You have an air scrubbing device that's literally cleaning the air constantly. Like, that air sample should pass. There's really no reason that it shouldn't pass. Unless they didn't clean the. You know, unless it's just a complete disaster in your Containment. Right. So it should be passing, but that doesn't mean that there isn't mold still on, on wood. Right. And I think that's the big difference. So I would call that out as a potential issue.

So I'm going to read through a little bit more.

So we did fogging at the very end after the house clean and we still have symptoms. Right. This is kind of what we're talking about. So now the question it looks like here is if it is the presence of mycotoxins, is it possible to get rid of them through a large commercial air grade scrubber running for a longer period of time or is the house just not habitable for someone who has cers? So again, I'm not going to beat a dead horse on what I just talked about. So let's just assume that all that is okay. Let's assume you remediated properly and all that stuff. We'll get to the next piece. If the present, if it is the presence of mycotoxins. Well, the good thing is you don't have to ask if you can actually test if mycotoxins are in the house. So if we went back and said testing showed air levels were completely remediated, a mold, let's just say, let's just take that at face value. Cool. Mold and mycotoxins are two completely different things. The way that you remove mycotoxins from a home is, is different than mold. Now the process that you went through is basically what we do for the mycotoxin process, which is fog, then damp wiping and all that stuff. So it looks like you went through that process. But removing mycotoxins, you know, it's not easy. It's possible you have to do that process more than once in order to get rid of it. That's why you need to be testing for mycotoxins. So the way you would test for that is after you do all of the cleaning throughout the whole house, then you do dust collection throughout your either your entire house. You could isolate areas if you want to get a better feel for what's going on in certain areas and you actually analyze it for mycotoxins and then that's going to let you know if they're still there or not. Right. So right now we're asking a question like if they're here, is that the thing? Well, not knowing the answer to that is, is a big issue. Right. Like if you, if you're assuming that it's there and you don't know for sure and now you're starting to make decisions off of an assumption like you can actually test for that. Right. So I would be testing for mycotoxins in the house. I would also be testing, doing dust testing just for your basic mold panel, which is like your ERMI mold panel, or using the dust test. Right. Because that's going to show you if your house cleaning was actually effective. You may think that you did a great job going through the house and wiping everything down. But if you do a dust collection through the house and you see there's still a high load of mold species, there's still mycotoxins, that means it's still in the house. So it means you might need to be doing more cleaning.

And the last piece here says, we're very clean people. I always see a lot of people say this, and I just want to say all of this has nothing to. Is no, like, judgment on how clean or not clean someone lives. Right. The stuff is hard to do. You can't see it. It's not an indictment on somebody's cleanliness. All right? So I just want everyone to know, like, if, like, don't feel, like, weird, like, oh, I must be a gross person if I have a mole problem. That is so not true. Fact is, most everybody has a mole problem in their house and they just don't know about it yet. Right. And some of us are lucky enough not to be as triggered on the health side of things to where maybe you'll never know about it. Right. And some of us are not so lucky and then we will know about it. So, you know, just, just. I always want to kind of say that when I see a comment like this, because I don't want it. I don't want people to feel like that. Right. I don't want you to feel like, oh, I must be a dirty person, or it's my fault or I should. It's. It's not. Right. It's not. This is a very common. But it says we're very clean people and we're fine outside in pollen season and in other people's homes that are not well taken care of. So not understanding what this can be in our home or what to do about it if anything can actually be done. Right. So that piece of it really says, like, hey, if you're good in other people's places, that there still is something going on in your space. My guess is there are still sources in the house. That would be my first guess on what's going on, because it sounds like you did A pretty thorough home cleaning process. Now there's no testing pre and post. I don't know if, you know, there's no surface testing of what was done in the containments and stuff. So there's a lot of like testing and data that is sort of missing from this. But that would be my guess. And this is what happens with most people, and I'll kind of wrap it up here, is that, you know, a lot of times people, they end up coming to us after they've had a couple inspections, even after they've had a remediation, two or two, and they're still feeling symptoms and it's because there's still problems in their house. Then we go in and we find a number of things. It's like, oh, well, this explains everything. Right now if I'm reacting to X, right? I'm reacting to mold. And I let's say there's 10 units of mold in my house. I'm reacting to and I found and remediated three of them. And there's still seven other units of mold in the house that I could react to. Then it makes sense that I would still be symptomatic. If I walk back in that house, even if in my mind I didn't think I had any more problems because I didn't know I had any more problems. Right. So that would be my guess. My guess would be that there's probably still mold sources in this space. And I was. So step one, I'd be doing like more of a full inspection of the whole place to really make sure there's no other sources. Step two, I would be retesting the areas that were remediated to make sure there's nothing left over. Like I said, if they didn't remediate and they didn't remove mold from the framing and the two by fours and stuff, there still be mold in those places. If the walls were built back, I'd actually be doing wall cavity samples in those walls that were already remediated to see if there's still elevated levels of mole counts in there. So that's the second thing I would do. So number one, I would do an inspection to see if there's anything new. Number two, I would be doing retesting of the areas that were remediated so I could see if there's still source problems that are going on there. And then based off that information, you know, we'd be able to create a plan off of that. So that would be. That'd be how I would approach it. But if you are someone who falls into this, because so many people do. I've just heard this version of this so many times.

Try not to be at the point where there's no hope for me in the house yet. Like, it may just be there's more going on that you're not aware of. Now, you might not be up for that. You might be like, listen, I've done enough of this. I'm done, right? And if I'm still reacting at this point, I don't care. I don't care what the reason is. I've spent time here. I've invested time here. I'm. I've done what I've done and I'm done doing it. And if that's where you're at, then that's totally fine. Then you get up and you go, right? And that's okay. So I want to make sure that you know that that's okay. Like, every decision that someone makes, it's a decision that they need to make, right? And if I'm right and there still are other things going on, it means there's going to be more investment, more cost. That's going to have to go into it. Maybe you're not up for that either, right? You're like, forget this. I've spent so much time. I've spent money. Brian might be right. There might be more things going on, but frankly, I'm over it and I don't want to do it anymore. And if that's the case, then that's okay too, right? And you can move on. There's nothing wrong with moving on, but I think that's where kind of the origin is. I think there's still things happening in the house. That would be my guess. So regular full inspection to see there's anything new, retesting varies that were already remediated. And then the last piece is. I would be doing mycotoxin testing for sure in the house, and I'd probably still be doing dust testing throughout the house to see if there is still that residual that's left in the home that maybe just didn't get extracted in the home cleaning process the first time. So those are the three things. Full inspection for new stuff. Retest areas that were previously remediated to make sure they're actually remediated properly. And then I'd be doing full house dust testing to just look at the mycotoxin piece, to look at those other pieces to see if there's anything else going on. So hope that's helpful. I know, a lot of people have a version of this story or this is going on. So, you know, take this and hopefully it's helpful.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating. Wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those.

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