28: Part 1 - ERMI vs... HERTSMI-2?

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.

Hey, good morning, everyone. Before we get started today, I was just going to tell you I'm going to try a little something out, and I want to let you know how it goes afterwards. So over the weekend, I got sunburned. We went out and did this socially distanced picnic with some of our friends because we are moving in a week. Our moving day is a week from today. And so it was our last weekend that we were gonna be here. So anyways, we go do this picnic. And so I, like, hate the sun. I just, whenever we're at a beach or we're out somewhere, I, like, always want shade. It's just something. I've just always been like that, which is weird because I used to be a lifeguard when I was a kid and I was always in the sun, but maybe that's why. So anyways, so we're at this picnic and. And I have this pretty massive tan line, like, where my T shirt is on my arms. And so. And my wife jokes with me about it sometimes. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to do like 10, 15 minutes without my shirt on, and I'm going to try to even it out a little bit. And I put sunscreen on all of me except my back because I couldn't reach it. And, like, my wife wasn't there yet. And then I forgot about it. Right? So fast forward. I now have this, like, got this massive sunburn just in, like, the middle of my back where my hands couldn't reach with the sunscreen, which is pretty ridiculous. So anyways, the reason I tell you that is because as a lot of you know, I do these recordings most of the time while I'm standing in front of my red light machine, which I'm doing right now. One of the benefits of red light therapy supposedly is helping to decrease the pain and kind of speed along the process of. Of burned skin, you know, sunburned skin, because it helps increase the collagen and kind of get the blood flowing back to the area. So I'm trying it and I'm gonna see if it works. Last night was a rough sleeping night. So I'm gonna see if that works today. So anyways, maybe in a few days, if I remember, hopefully I will let you guys know how it's doing. But I hope it's doing well because we have another weekend where we're gonna be in the sun, so it needs to get together. Anyway, outside of my personal sun problems, there was a couple things that I thought would be cool to talk about today. So I've kind of gone back through and I'm looking at some more of the questions that I've gotten over time, and I'm going to go back through and answer a few more of those. And one of them, I get asked this question all the time, and I actually don't think I've answered it yet. So. So I wanted to make sure I did it. And it's, what's the difference between an ERME and a Hertz ME2? And is it better to do one versus the other? Right. And, you know, a lot of times. So real quickly, the ERME is a panel of 36 molds. The Hertz ME2 is a panel of 5 molds, and the Hertz ME2 is cheaper. And a lot of people want to run the Hertz Me.

For that reason. You know, I'm not a big fan of only running the Hertz Me because it is such a limited panel of mold. So real quick, just to kind of give you the background on each one. So the ERMI stands for Environmental Relative Moldiness Index. It was Created by the EPA at this point, I want to say maybe like 12 years ago. I don't know off the top of my head, but there was 1100 homes in this national study that they did. Some were water damaged, some weren't. The goal of the study was to try to create some scoring system so you could compare your house to this index that they made and essentially, like, know if it's moldy or not, I guess, based off of this index. Right. So that was the piece. So that the whole URMI really hinges on this URMI score. However, the army score has this very, like, significant flaw in how it's scored. So I don't really rely so much on the score. I mean, I look at it, you know, anecdotally, I guess, and directionally to see just, like, quick picture, like, how do things look really bad or not. But the. The problem with the URMI scoring system is that it can make something that is a worse situation look not so bad. And the reason is because the. The way that the score is calculated, it subtracts so before that, the ERMI is split into two panels of molds. When the report comes back to you, there's group one and there's group two. Group one are water damage molds. Group two are more common molds that are found that were found indoors during the study. So that's the way that they're split. And so what they do is that they subtract group two from group one to give you your ERMI score. So, for example, if group one was 10 and group two was 5, they're going to subtract 5 from 10. They're going to tell you ERMI score is 5. According to the ERMI scoring system, anything 5 and above is considered high relative moldiness. It's the highest ranking on their scoring system. However, if you flip those numbers and you say, now group one is five and group two is 10, so you're subtracting 10 from five, you're gonna end up with negative five, and then that score is gonna look like you have the cleanest, least moldy house that's ever been made. Because Anything under negative 4 is considered level 1, which is the lowest level of mold issue. Which, by the way, I don't think I've ever seen a level one on one of these tests. Maybe if I have, it's been a handful of times. But anyways, you can see how switching where the mold is in terms of what species of mold it is, can greatly impact the scoring system. The other thing is that the amount of mold isn't taken into account at all in the scoring system. So I just gave you an example where I said group one was 10 and group two was five. And, and so five minus or 10 minus five, excuse me, is five and that's high. So you subtract five from 10 and that gives you five. Well, what if those loads were 195? Right. So let's say group one was 100, group two is 95. You'd be subtracting 95 from 100, and it would still say that your score is five. And it would look exactly the same on a scoring system as, as when it was 10 and 5, except the amount of mold that you're finding is 10 times higher. Right. So that it really has. It really doesn't help you understand, like, overall load in the house, like, how much is actually here. It's not really good at doing that for that reason, because the scoring system takes all of that out. You know, like, in that same scenario, I could say the, that the load of group one was 100 and of group two was 99. Let's just. Which, by the way, those numbers are humongous. I've never seen 100 on any of these, but let's just say 100 group one, 99 on group two, you subtract 99 from 100 and your score is one. All right? And then if you just look at the score, you would think that that house is a better mold situation than the one where the score was 10 and 5, which is totally not true, because there's way, way less overall mold in that in the 10 and 5 house than there is in the 199 house. So hopefully that helps you wrap your head a little bit around the math on the ermi. So for that reason, I'm not. I don't really rely on those scores that much because they could be misleading. And if you just look at the score, you really don't know at all what the ERMI is telling you. You literally have a score that can mean anything. And so when I report results to clients, I'm not only showing, you know, what the score is, although I have language in the report that says, you know, the score could be misleading. But I'm actually showing, like, what mold types are there, how many mold types are 10 times higher than what the average the geometric mean was on the original study. Like, all these different things to really help you interpret what's going on there, because it's the mold types, the number of molds that are getting picked up, understanding their comparison to the original. To the original ERMI study the EPA did to see is mold by mold, is it higher than what they were picking up or not? So those are different ways to interpret it. All of that said, the ERMI is a great sample to understand what is basically moving through your house, what has settled down on your surfaces and in your dust reservoirs, and then from that point, what is popping up in your breathing zone. The ERMI test in your living space of your home is really your more direct pathway to exposure. It's a way, way better interpretation of. Of mold load and what you're being exposed to then doing an air test. An air test. Honestly, guys, it's like a waste of money and a waste of time if you're doing it in the middle of a room to try to understand, quote, air quality, which a lot of mold inspectors will come and tell you, oh, we're gonna do some air quality testing. We're gonna stick an air pump in the middle of your room and take a sample for five minutes. Those bring back false negatives all the time. So the ERMI test is way better for that one. You're getting a more historical view on what's going on. You're. Because you're getting dust settlement, right? So it's not just what happens to be floating in the air during those five minutes, but you're actually seeing like what was, what has been going on for a longer period of time, what has settled down on the surfaces. And if you could find areas of dust that aren't cleaned very often, then you're able to actually get a really long term look at the exposure that's been moving through that house. So that part's good. The other part that's good is it's showing you the species level of the molds. So it's a much more sensitive task than let's say an air sample, where an air sample is only looking at spores and spores are just a very small piece of the overall mold colony. Where an ERMI test, it's using an analysis that's a DNA formatting analysis, which means that any part of the mold colony, not just spores, but any part of the colony is getting picked up in an ERMI test. And so you're getting a much better understanding of the overall load of, of your exposure. Because what happens is that those fragments that break off of those colonies, they get smaller, much smaller than the size of a mold spore. And because they're so much smaller, we could breathe them in easier. Like our body has a natural defense system in our nose, in our throats, to protect our lungs. That's why it's there. But these particles get so small that they can like maneuver through that defense system and get into our lungs. And that's where a lot of problems happen. So the ERMI is absolutely a, a go to test for me. I do it literally in every house. But it's not the only thing that I do. And I'm going to talk about that a little later because the next question that comes up is kind of talking about using ERMI with other samples and things like that. So that is the background on ermi. Alright. So I wanted to give you that full background because the Hertzme 2 testing panel and sampling is exactly the same as Ermi, except that the amount of molds on the Hertzme 2 panel is only 5, but as far as 5 of the 36 molds that are included on the Ermi. So you could actually just look at the ERMI results that you have and you could calculate out the Hurts Me Too. So it's not like a whole separate thing. The data is there. You just have to calculate it out. So that's like the first little difference. Now.

Theoretically, the way that it was built, ermi, was more of a way to compare your house to other houses. Hertzme, too, was created by Dr. Richie Shoemaker. So this was created with more of a medical mindset in mind. And so Dr. Richie Shoemaker, he's the one who came up with chronic inflammatory response syndrome. He's kind of like the godfather of mold, like, illness, I guess. So he really was the pioneer in finding a lot of this stuff. And he started, like, looking at things in 1997. Like, he was way a long time ago, before the curve. For a lot of people, he was kind of the first guy. So anyways, he did this study of, like, 738 patients. I think if I'm a couple off, bear with me. But it's definitely in the 730s, I think of different patients that he had already diagnosed with surg. So, like, first off, the caveat is that the Hurts Me 2 scoring system and study is actually based on people who have already been diagnosed with chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So it's meant for people with that diagnosis. All right? Now, from that time when he did it, there's obviously been this big kind of knowledge burst in the understanding of mold to all kinds of other illnesses, right? So Lyme disease or autoimmune disease or some of these mast cell activation syndrome, all these other types of environmentally impacted illnesses. His study specifically was for people with sirs. Now, that doesn't discount it for everything else. We just have to keep in mind that, like, you can't just take. Take it like, black and white like that. You have to understand, like, why it was made and what all the data was based off of. So that was the first thing. And so the second thing is that, like I said, it is only five molds. So what he. What he did when he was putting the panel together for the Hurts Me two, he took molds from the Group one ERMI panel. So group one is the water damage, molds, and buildings. Okay? So he. So he was really focused on those molds, and he was basically, like, looking at people's, like, clinical results and then looking at their URMI results, and then, like, trying to figure out, like, when they got into a house, like, where did they react? Where did they not react? And then he tried to create his own panel based off of his own research. So he had his 738 people. And. And he's looking at all their clinical testing. Then he's looking at their house testing through ERMI and looking for correlations and different things that he could use to try to figure out a scoring system to tell his patients that, like, yes, I think that this home would be a good home for you. And I, I don't. And I think your chances of reacting are lower versus a house that comes back and is high on his scoring system. And he's like, well, man, this house is a disaster. You're going to go in this house and get like, really, really sick. Right. So that's kind of the concept of why he put the Hurts me two test together. So it's about understanding if a building would be safe for occupancy for somebody who has this health condition. Like, that's what he was trying to figure out. So that's the core difference. ERMI is just like comparing your house to some sort of index. Like, is this house have more or less mold than the index is telling us? And then the hurts me too is trying to say, like, this house, you'll likely have a lesser reaction in this house than. Than you would maybe in a different house, you know, depending on the scoring system. So that's like the, the core difference between the two sampling methods. There's definitely flaws in both of them. You know, the hurts me too, it's because it's only based on like one set of people that had one health condition. And then it's being so specific and limited on the number of molds that are there. I found so many times that I'll go into a home and the Ermie high. Right. There's issues there. And then the HurtsMe 2 score comes back and it's like an 8, which means that the place would be safe for somebody with Sears based on the statistics. And I just know, like going through the house, there's no way that somebody could live in that house if they're mold sensitive. Right. So there's a lot of limitations in the HurtsMe 2 from that perspective because it's only looking at five molds. Specifically, it's looking at. And the five molds that he selected. What he was doing is he's trying to figure out molds because certain molds need different amount of water to grow. And so he was trying to pick molds that were kind of widespread across the water necessity for molds to grow. So if you start like researching mold, there's three types of water groups. There's zero philic Mesophilic and hydrophilic, and it's all based on the amount of water that they need to survive. So you basically have molds that need, like, 60 to 80% moisture. Those are your primary colonizers. So if you recall, I've said in a previous episode, like, certain molds only need humidity to hit 60%. It's those molds that fall into that category. Then you have molds that need 80 to 90% of water activity, and then you. There are molds that need, like, higher than that. Right. And so those are the three levels. So what he did is he picked one mold species from each one of those, and then he also picked Catomium and Stachybotryas, which are, you know, Stachybotrys is known as the black toxic mold. And Catomium is very, very similar to Stachybotrys. It's toxigenic. It's really potent. They grow in similar places, too. So, anyways, so those are the five molds that are picked. But if you think about, you start looking at, like, what molds were left off of the list. So, for instance, Aspergillus otris is not on the list. Well, Aspergillus otris creates otrotoxin A, the mycotoxin, Otratoxin A, which a lot of people test positive for when they're doing mycotoxin testing. So if you're only relying on a Hurts me Too to tell you if a house is going to be okay for you to live in, and you're not picking up the mold that produces the toxin that you have in your body, then you're doing yourself this huge disservice, and you don't really know. Right. And so that's kind of the challenge with the Hurts Me Too. So, for me, personally, I never run a Hurts me Too on its own. And this is getting back to the question, is it better to run ermia or Hurts me too? So now that we understand kind of how it all works, right? And the strengths and weaknesses of each one. So here's my answer. So I think the ermi's better, right? You get a bigger panel of molds. If we're doing clinical mycotoxin testing on ourselves, there are mold types that are absolutely not in the Hertzme 2 that we're going to want to know about. Right. Are they in the house? Are those producing these mycotoxins that maybe you have in your body? Hurts Me Too is not going to tell you that.

Other than Stachybotrys which is there, and Cotomium, which is there.

Another. Another thing about the two of them. Oh, guys, I just blanked. I just had the. There's so many things going through my head right now that I want to try to get out.

All right, well, I guess I'll leave it at that because it. It escaped me. But when it comes to picking one of them from. For me, it's always the ermi. You can calculate out the Hertzme 2 from the ermi if you just do a Google search for Hertzme2 calculator. There's this little website that comes up. All it is, is a little calculator on a website. And then you can go in and put in the numbers that you pulled off of your ermie. For the five specific molds that are on the Hertzme 2 panel. You just put the numbers in and click calculate. And then it'll give you your Hertzme 2 score. Right. So that's such an easy way to do it. If you don't want to do it that way. You can actually look up the scoring model. It's on survivingmold.com because that's Richie Shoemaker site and it tells you how to assign the points for each of the mold species and then you can figure out your score that way. Doing it by hand also. So it's easy for you to figure out, it's not hard. And you could basically get all the benefit from a Hurts me too while you're running an ermi. Yes, it is a little cheaper, but for me, the amount of dollar value difference is. Is negligible compared to the amount of information difference that you're not getting. You know what I mean? Like, I actually would rather not even spend the. Whatever it costs to run a Hertz. Me too. Because yes, I'm going to get a couple molds, but I'm going to be missing so much. That's really not going to mean that much for me. Right. I want to see what everything else looks like. Like, and so that's. That's why I would be running the ERMI and then just calculating the hurts me out. And you can look what it looks like. Oh, I remember what I was going to say. So we have an internal study going on that we call the ERMI Mycotoxin project for our network of companies. And to this point, we have. I mean, I don't have it in front of me. I want to say we're probably pushing. We're definitely like over 500 ermi samples on this right now. And what we do is that we, we keep track of the median scores of every individual mold Type of the group 1 molds of the group 2 molds of the actual Ermes scores. But we also then calculate that out into the Hertzme 2 and we keep track of what's going on.

In terms of what the Hertzme 2 score was looking like compared to like the Ermes scores. Right. Because that was important to us. And.

For a very long time, what was happening is that the Hertzme 2 score was showing 8, which on their scoring system, anything below 10 is good. So the Hertzme 2 median score is showing 8, but then the Irme score is like pushing 10. Our median Ermes score we get is 10. And so if. Now keep in mind I said the ERME score is obviously relative. Right. But I just can't read you every single multip that's on there. So we're just going to go with the score for now. Just know that According to the EPA, anything over 5 is considered high. So I mean, if your Ermes score is a 10, there's probably something going on. So anyway, so with the ermi scores over 10 and the Hurts Me 2 score at 8, if you just did the Hurts Me 2, it would tell you that that house is totally fine to move into. If you look at the ERMI and you're seeing all the different molds that are getting picked up and you're seeing the levels the way they are, you can see that there's a mole problem in, in this scenario. Right. And so if you're only relying on the Hertz me too, you're just. You can miss the picture and you could get into a place that you can react in. Right. And it's just because it's not showing you enough data. Right. At least from our perspective. So.

Yeah, hopefully that's a good explanation between the, the Ermie and the hertzing. Why you guys? Or why we really want to be looking at the Hertz me instead of the urmi and then we can calculate all that out. So I just looked at the clock here. We're already at like 20 plus minutes. So here's what I'm gonna do. The next recording I do is going to be a continuation of this. So the next episode and what I'm. And I'm going to answer this question and let me pull it up. So the question is. Ah, I just had the question and it went away. All right, so basically what the question was was.

Sorry, I'm Trying to get to it. I want to see if. If I can actually read you the. The real question.

Bear with me. Bear with me. It wasn't that far away.

Here we go. Okay, so our ERMI shows multiple types of molds. The URMI is A. Is a 10. The Hertz me was a 22. Okay, so think about what I just said. So the Ermie is. Is looks elevated just from a score perspective, but The Hertz means a 22. There's only five molts on this point panel. Right. So we know that those are elevated. Now the question is, which molds are they? Right. But regardless, I'll tell you just from this, there's a mold problem happening in this house. Okay, so she says Ermi is 10 hertz, me is 22. But our inspectors only found two mold types with air samples and swabs. I'm not sure if we need to remediate or move. I'm going to tell you right now, there's a mold problem in the house, so there's remediation that needs to be done. The problem is that the people that came in to do the inspection didn't know where to find it. And that's. That's truly what the problem is here. So on the next episode, we're going to go through that. We'll talk about different testing methods, how you can use them together to help figure out where source is, how things are moving through the house, that sort of thing. So until then, I hope you guys have a great day. Thanks for listening.

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 who really need it the most.