71: The Right (and Cheapest) Way to know if you have a mold problem

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, everybody, what's going on? It's Brian. We're back in action. Today we're gonna be talking about sampling and specifically mycotoxin sampling and kind of how and when you use it.

And the gaps it could leave in a sampling plan if you're only using that, right? So the reason I want to talk about this is because I had a client that we just got results for a little while ago. I had a results call with him maybe a couple weeks ago, going over it. So I wrote this note down for us to talk about this because he did something interesting. So a lot of you.

Will go and maybe do your own ERMI in your house, right? And that's, you know, a lot of the doctors recommend that you do that. If you're looking around, you know, for mold information, that's usually one of the first things that you'll find when you. When you start diving beyond the, you know, the basics of.

Information that's put out there about mold, which a lot of it is wrong, right? So if you start, like, kind of diving in a little deeper and trying to find, like, the real truth about mold, the first thing that you'll probably find is something about doing an ERMI in your.

For those of you that don't know what an ERMI is, really quick. ERMI is a sampling method you could do in your house. It's a dust collection versus doing an air sample in the middle of a room. The reason you want to collect dust instead of doing air samples is because dust gives you a historic view of what's going on in your home over an extended period of time. An air sample is just a snapshot in time for the five minutes that your air pump is running. And, you know, different things are popped up in your air at different times, Right? So that's one of the big reasons. There's some other reasons, too. Ermi's just way more sensitive and accurate when it comes to testing as well. We have an internal study that we've done on air samples in the middle of rooms. And the short of it is that 80% of the time, they give you or 70%. I forget 70, 80% of the time, they give you a false negative, meaning there could be a mold issue literally three feet away in a wall. And you put an air sampling pump in the middle of the room, three feet away from that. And it would tell you there's no problem when there actually is. Okay? So that's why you do dust testing, and that's why a lot of people are driven to doing ERMI for dust testing for the house. And so ERMI is testing for mold species. And sometimes people get confused on kind of what it's testing for, because sometimes I'll have people reach out and they'll have done an ERMI and they'll say, okay, I have mold toxins in my house. And that's actually. There's no way to know that from an ERMI test. So ermi's just telling you the mold types that are there, certain molds have the ability to produce what's called a mycotoxin. That is the toxic chemical that molds can produce. You actually have to test for them differently. You can't do one test, and it's like, showing you all of it. Right? You have to test for them separately. And so then on the flip side of that, some people will think, well, the mold toxins are the bad thing, right? Like toxic mold. That's the bad thing. So why don't I just test for mycotoxin toxins everywhere and not even worry about testing for mold? And if the mycotoxins come up and there's nothing there, then I probably don't have a problem in my house. Or if we see it, you know, in one place and maybe not somewhere else, then it's probably just in that one place or whatever it might be, right? And so that was kind of the thought that this client had. So he went through his place, and he actually did, like, six or seven mycotoxin samples in different areas of his house, and had done that before he even called us. And so he hadn't done any other testing. There was no ermes. There was no bacteria testing. He had not had an inspection or anything. He was trying to use the mycotoxin samples as a screening test to see what's going on in the house. Okay? So here's the problem with relying on mycotoxin samples as your screening test. The thing is, is that mycotoxins are a defense mechanism of certain mold types. So certain molds have the ability to produce these toxins. There are other molds that don't. They Literally just can't even create them. Right. So, you know, you're kind of completely missing out on that end of the boat. But even if you. Even if they have the ability to produce them, they don't always do it. We've run hundreds and hundreds. I think we're over a thousand of these in our internal study. I don't know. It's been a minute since I looked at it. But we're. We're picking up mycotoxins about 55% of the time in houses that we're in. Okay, but that doesn't mean that the URMI tests are all fine. In those other 45% of the times when we're not picking up mycotoxins, actually, it's kind of like. It's kind of opposite of that. Like, we're, on average, we're picking up mold load issues. So let's just say ermi issues. Now, there's a whole. The whole thing on how to interpret ermi. I'm not going to get into it on this episode, but I have previous episodes that I've talked about it. I think we did episode 44. I'm trying to do it off top of my head. There was an episode with me and Corey Levy, co founder of We Inspect. We did an ermi breakdown. I think it's episode 44. It's in that range. So if you really want to understand how to break it down and know what it means, you could go check that episode out. So I'm not going to dive into that piece of it as much.

But the point that I'm getting at is that even if your mycotoxin result is negative. Right. So 45% of the time that mycotoxin is going to be a negative, we're still seeing in all the tests that we do that most of those times, there is still a mold problem in the house. And so what's happening by only relying on mycotoxins is that you're actually not understanding the true issue in the house. Like, yes, you're kind of getting one piece of it. But the thing is, it's not just the toxins that can impact us, especially if you're somebody who is mold sensitive. And, you know, I just want to put clarity on, like, what mold sensitive is. It's a lot of us think that the number is 25% or 24%, if you really get into it, of people that are mold sensitive. And the reason that we think that is because there's a genetic predisposition of The HLA gene that basically makes us not able to detox properly. So if you fall in one of those 24% of people, then you're going to be mold sensitive. But a lot of us think that it just ends there, but that's not true. Right. I did a presentation in February last year before the world shut down in Florida for the Indoor Air Quality Association. And we're talking about remediation for hypersensitive people. And the first thing that I wanted to do was to try to illustrate that this is not just a very small subset of the population, but it's kind of the majority is kind of what I was trying to show. And so what I did, I didn't know the numbers yet, but I knew that it was more than that. So what I did is I went and I pulled just the four health conditions that I kind of see my clients have the most. And I just pulled up stats of those in the country, like how many people have those? And it was Lyme disease, chronic inflammatory response syndrome, PANS and PANDAS and autoimmune issues. And you put all four of those together and you're at 40% of the US population. And that's not including a bunch of other things that make you susceptible to mold. Right? So the reality is, if you fall in that percentage, it's not just mycotoxins that are the problem. It's mold in general. And it's. It's going to be, you know, the way that your body deals with is going to be different than everyone else. So it's not like super black and white. Like you need X amount of mold or not X amount of mold in the house, and you're gonna be fine or not fine. It's not that black and white. But the thing is, 40% of the US population, just off of that number, I think it's like 130 million people or something, are sensitive to mold, to the way that it's gonna impact your health, right? So, and it's mold, it's not mycotoxins, it's mold. Right? Two separate things. So if we're just going through and looking for mycotoxins, and we know that more than or about half of the time, it's gonna come up negative. And then we use that to basically determine, like, if our house is a problem, but we're really, really gonna miss a lot of stuff, right? And so that's what happened with this client. So he did, like I said, six or seven mycotoxin samples in the house. And only one of them came back with a positive result. And it was in kind of the lower level storage kind of subgrade space in his place. And that was it. But he did them on the middle levels, he did them on the upper levels. He did them in bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms. I mean, he kind of split the house into a lot. He was trying to figure it out, right? And, and so, okay, so, so he thought that that was the only problem. And so basically when we kind of did our onboarding conversation with him, he kind of broke it down. He's like, hey, I've done all this. I think the problem is down here. But.

I know that you guys want to go through the whole house, so let's do it. So we go through the whole house and we find five other source areas of issue in his place.

That actually required remediation, removing ceiling or a wall or something like that. So we found five other source areas of issue that was not that storage area. And we also, we also ran Ermes testing in the house. We also did actinomycete, which is bacteria testing in the house. And both of those came back really high. And it wasn't just in the storage area, it was in the other places of the house. Right? So if you only relied on the mycotoxin piece that he did, his thought process was we just really need to handle the storage area, figure out, you know, why there's an issue down here, remedy that, clean it, and everything's going to be fine. And the reality is that we had five other places in the house that had to get remediated and then we had to clean the whole house because throughout the whole rest of the house there was a high mold load and a high bacteria load. Both of those things that were not going to get picked up on a mycotoxin test, right? So this is why building a sampling plan and understanding the goals of what someone is trying to achieve and filling in the gaps of where samples have strengths and weaknesses is so important. There is not one catch all sample that's going to tell you everything, right? It all starts with the inspection. You have to be doing the inspection the right way. You have to, you have to know what you're looking for. You have to know where to look for it. You're trying to find these hidden sources of mold and that is, that is so, so, so important. Like you could test all day, but if you're testing in the wrong place, then it doesn't matter, right? So you have to have an idea of where to start, right? And beyond that, you then have to look at what you're trying to achieve and what you're trying to find out, right? So, like, for me, whenever I go into a house, the goal for me is, one, where. Where do I think the mold's hiding? And two, how do I think it's moving and spreading throughout the house? And not only the living spaces, but also maybe the heating and air conditioning system, if you have one of those. Right. So the thing is that mold doesn't just stay hidden behind a wall. If it's behind a wall, if that was the case, nobody would ever get sick, like, because it just stay behind the wall. It's such common sense. I've actually said that in court when I was, as an expert witness, the. The. The defense was like, well, if it's behind the wall, then. Then it's not causing a problem.

I was like. I was like, if mole just stays behind walls and never comes out of walls, then why would anyone ever have a problem? And I was in front of a jury, and I looked at the expression on the jurors faces, and they were like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Like, I feel like there's a big winning statement because, you know, when you're doing a jury trial, you're like, you're talking to people, right? This is. This is the thing that I learned about doing these court cases. Like, yes, you have to. You have to know what you're talking about. You have to have proof and validation behind it. But at the end of the day, you're kind of putting on a performance for the jurors, too, right? Like, you're. You need to convince the jury that what you're saying is right. And by sticking so hard to stats and stuff like that, sometimes it's like, over their head. So sometimes you just got to drop a line or two. That's just super common sense, and the light bulb goes off. Not that I'm giving a coaching session on how to do expert witnessing cases, but anyway, so the point was.

Like I said, if we were only relying on that other piece, then we would have been missing a lot. Right? So you have to understand strengths and weaknesses of samples.

Mycotoxin samples, ermi samples, actino, you know, bacteria samples. That's all dust collection throughout a house or maybe in your air conditioning system. It's not telling you where the sources are, but they each have strengths and weaknesses of their own. Right? So like I said, you know, mycotoxins half the time are gonna come up negative Even though you might have a mold problem in the house. Right. So if you only rely on that, then you're not gonna know if there's still a mole problem in the house. If you're only doing ERMI and you're not expanding beyond that and looking at the biotoxin portion of things, which is mycotoxin endotoxins, then you may be missing a piece of the boat too, because the ERMI might not come back very bad. But if you have toxins in the house, that now moves it into a bad situation. Right. So there, there's data that you can get that there's no way to know just from looking around a house. There's no way for me to walk into a house and say, oh, yeah, there's definitely mycotoxins in this house. It doesn't work. I try, I guess, in my own head. I never tell the client, but I play the game in my own head. I'm like, I think this place definitely has it. And a bunch of times I'm wrong. And other times I'm like, nah, I don't think this place probably has a mycotoxin issue. We test it and bam, there it is. Right. Like you don't know. There's no way to know. There's no way to know without testing it and testing it the right way. And so the point of all of this is, yes, there are screening tests that you can do to give you an idea of what's going on. If you're going to be doing a screening test, there's kind of two ways you do it. So like when we do these dust tests, I explain it this way. You have mold and mold toxins, and you have bacteria and bacteria toxins. Those are kind of the things you look for. Right. So water damaged buildings. Most of what's going on in a water damaged building is either mold or bacteria. Yes. There's some other little things that other things that we're going on, but the large portion of what's happening is mold and bacteria. If you have water damage issues, if we know that and then we understand that you have mold, which is the organism, and then you have mycotoxin, which is the toxin it creates. And then you have bacteria, which is the organism, and endotoxin, which is the toxin that certain bacteria types can create, then you say, okay, do I want to look for the secondary piece? Right. So if you think about mold is the first thing, the toxin is the second thing. Right. Or bacteria is the first thing, the toxin is the Second thing. So for me, if I'm doing just a basic screening test, I want to be testing for the first thing, right? I don't want to be, like, one step removed from the core of what's going to be showing more of the problem. So if you're coming in and testing for the second thing, you're, like, one step removed from mold. You're at the mycotoxin piece, and then you're going to get a lesser result on that because of that. So I want to be testing for mold, the organism, and I want to be testing for bacteria, the organism. That is the screening test. Like, if you're doing it on your own, those are the two things that I would be doing. I'd be doing a mold test. I'd be doing. It's called the actinomycete test, which is the bacteria test. I'd be doing those two things. And you just do a screening throughout the house. Don't do every single room of the house, all right? It's a waste of money because even if you find, like, one room is higher than the other one, it doesn't matter. You have to clean the whole house because that's just at that point in time when you did it, right? Like, airflow moves. Things move. Did you swipe every particle of dust in the house? Probably not. It's impossible to do that, right? So you're getting, like, a representative sample of what's moving around through the house. But if we rely on that super hard and just assume that air stops at every doorway of where we sampled and think that we only need to clean within this one particular room, but not this other room, then you're going to be missing the boat. You know, the. The example I kind of give to illustrate this airflow thing is think about, like, if. If someone is cooking in the kitchen and you're a couple rooms away, you can still smell what they're cooking in the kitchen. You know, I mean, if it smells good and it's, you know, I guess it could smell bad. I guess if it's just, you know, smelly, I suppose, is more the answer, right? The closer you get to the K, the more the smell you notice, right? Like, the stronger, the more concentrated the smell is. But, like, if you've. I know that I've been, like, upstairs and I smell something, my wife is cooking, I'm like, man, that smells good. Well, if air didn't move throughout the whole house, this means it's moving from my kitchen all the way upstairs into the loft. And into my office. If air is moving that. Right. That's not just the smell. But then all the mold stops at every door threshold. Right. That's not how it works. Right. Everything moves throughout the house. So going through your house and sampling every single room separately, when you're just trying to do a screening test on your own to figure out what's going on, it's a waste of money. So all you do is you take your sampling media, which for the ERMI and the Actino micete test, you can use one Swiffer pad. The lab will send you one Swiffer pad. You could use that if you want to. And you basically do dust collection from the whole house. Just go to areas that don't get cleaned as often. On tops of door frames, on tops of TVs, fan blades, underneath furniture pieces, on tops of baseboards, in the corners, behind stuff like areas where dust collects. Because that's going to give you a more historic view of what's going on. And then you're going to get a sense of what's happening. And you'll have a better idea of what's happening from those two things than you will from just doing a mycotoxin test or an endotoxin test. Because, again, those are like one step removed, right? So you want to do those types of screening tests first. And listen, if either of them come back and they're an issue, then there's sources in the house somewhere, and you got to figure that out. Right? And so then that's like the next piece where you really dive into it. And so either you have, you know, someone like. Like us come out and look at it, or you, you know, you get into mold Finder's method and you learn how to do it yourself. Like, whatever it is, you pick the option that makes the most sense for you. But then you got to figure out where the sources are coming from. Because if you just try to clean the house, it's all going to come back. Because if it's behind the walls or in the ceilings or hidden somewhere, cleaning the house doesn't make it go away. Right? Just like the Titanic. Like the. The. It wasn't the tip of the iceberg that broke the Titanic and made it sink. It was all the stuff underneath that was hidden. You know, you could have chopped off the tip of the iceberg and the Titanic still would have sunk because it still would have hit the problem. You know what I mean? So, like, that's the thing with a house. Like, by you cleaning everything and not Actually finding and removing the source. That's the same as you just cutting off the tip of the iceberg and thinking that the Titanic's not going to hit the rest of it. It doesn't work that way. Right. So I hope that all this, like, makes sense. Right. So I definitely think you should be doing screening tests on your own to get a feel for what's going on. Right? You should. But I want you to be doing the right screening tests. I want you to be collecting them the right way, and I don't want you to be blowing a bunch of money doing a whole. A whole boatload of them when you don't really need to. Right? So if you. Again, to recap, stick with the organism and not the byproduct, right? So the organism is mold and bacteria. That's where you start on your screening test. You just need to do one composite collection across your entire home or living space. Now, listen, if you live in, like, a compound or a mansion or something, and you want to split it up into wings of your house or something like that, like, yeah, you could do that if you live in a really big place. But most of us, we can do one test. Upstairs, downstairs, combined. It doesn't have to be split. Right. Again, air is moving everywhere. And you get that, and you get the sample back, and you look at it, you're like, oh, man, this doesn't look good. Okay, next step. Now I need to know. I got to figure out what's going on. All right? And so that's kind of the. That's kind of the introductory way to kind of do your own home screening stuff and getting a sense of what's going on. So.

Yeah, that's what I got for you on that front. So I hope that all of that explanation was helpful for you.

So just one more thing before we're done for the day. For those of you who have not attended my free webinar that I do every now and then, how to find the hidden mold that's making you sick without having to hire a mold inspector.

For this next webinar, I'm doing something a little different at the end. There's, like, a big surprise at the end that I haven't done before. And I don't know if I'm going to do it again, honestly. So I'm just kind of, like, testing it out to see how it works and see what people think about it. So if you haven't registered for it, today is Tuesday, webinar is tomorrow on Wednesday. So you still have Time. So if you listen to this today, then you can go register. It's moldfindersmethod.com you can go grab your seat for the webinar and you'll be able to kind of see this new little surprise that I'm putting at the end. And if you have seen it already.

And you kind of know what's going on, I would still check it out because it's going to be different. And I think it might be something you might be interested in. And, you know, if you have seen it and you don't want to sit through the whole thing or whatever, I totally get it. I understand it's a teaching thing and I'm going to be replicating a lot of the same stuff I've been teaching. So I know a lot of people who've actually taken it multiple times and they pick up different things every time that they go through it because it is a lot of information. But if not, you don't have to sit through the whole thing, but maybe pop in towards the end because you have an idea of when that's going to be. And you can try to.

Take a look at this fun little thing that I'm adding in here for everybody. That's the deal. It's tomorrow. It is at 12 Pacific, 3pm Eastern. It's molefindersmethod.com and you can register there for that. And I'm actually like super, super pumped for this one. Even more so than I kind of have been already. We've only done, I think, three of these, so. Or three or four of these, I don't remember. So it's all still really fun for me every time that I do it. And the engagement has been really awesome within the rooms and it's been cool. Like, I just. So you guys know, I did a survey out last week for everyone who's attended and I got responses from about 25% of people of everyone that has attended so far. And one of the questions was, you know, how many of you found the. The training material valuable? And 98% of people said yes, which was amazing.

So, yeah, basically everyone who's been in this thing has found the training valuable. There was three options or there's two options yes and it was no. And everybody said yes, basically. So if you haven't done it, I would definitely go check it out. Put a lot of time into it. I really enjoy doing it. And you kind of get my A game in there. I'm really on when we do these. So I'm interacting with everybody and I'm super pumped about sharing stuff. Anyways, new surprise at the end of the webinar that I have never done before. So come check it out if you haven't done it. And that's all I got for you guys today. Hope you enjoyed the episode. We will talk to you next time.