Herstmi: Home Mold Testing

Hey, everybody, Dr. Diane Mueller here, your Lyme and mold expert, talking today about the Hertz ME test and about home mold testing. So I'm going to talk about why you want to use either the Hertz ME or the ERMI for home mold testing. And one of the problems with standard inspections, so standard mold inspections, like the mold inspections we actually get when we buy and sell our homes, what standard mold inspectors do, even the high level certified ones, is they simply take indoor air and they take a sample and they compare the mold levels of indoor air with outdoor air. They also run humidity tests. The problem is that humidity levels change. The other problem is that a lot of the really bad pathologic molds, the molds that cause headaches and pain and chronic fatigue and scary neurological symptoms, a lot of those molds and the toxins they produce are very heavy. Heavy. What that means is they don't suspend in air. They fall out of the air. They land on dust. When they fall out of the air and land on dust, you're not going to find very high levels in an air sample. So the reason for doing it hurts me or an ERMI test is that these types of tests actually will essentially test for dust. So you take a cloth. You take basically a cloth that the company mails you, and essentially it's in that claw. You'll just dust your house. You want to make sure dust has collected for a couple weeks, and you want to make sure you're not using old dust that could be, say, from years ago from a construction project you didn't know about from, say, a previous owner or something like that. So you want to make sure it's fairly new dust, but then it's that it's been collected over the past couple weeks. It's also a good thing to do before you buy or buy a home or before you move into an apartment or a rental. And typically in these types of places, you just have to do your best job to essentially dust places that you can. In these types of scenarios, I tend to recommend people dust things like tops of mirrors and door frames and bathrooms. I would stay away from things that are right next to the window, But I've definitely seen no problems with people being able to collect enough dust. And in rental situations, typically when you rent, the owners of the property typically don't like the idea of you testing for mold. So typically people will tell their, you know, tell the complex that they're just doing a. They're allergic to things like cats or other things, and they just need to make sure that there's not, you know, cat dander or those kind of things around in order to be able to effectively do that test. So the other really important thing is that once this test is done, the results can be typically a little bit challenging to interpret. So I have a calculator called a hurts me calculator on my website where you can take the results from the test and you can put them into the calculator and it will spit out an answer to tell you how severe the the mold actually is. So that's what I would recommend doing is getting a proper test done. I will link to my testing webpage. What you're looking for on this webpage is called the environmental home mold test. And so you can purchase that direct to consumer when you get the results in, then go below this video to the other webpage I'm linking below this video which is going to be that Hurts me test calculator for you to get the results in and then essentially put them in the calculator in order to see if the results are problematic for you and for the house that you are living in or looking to move into. If you need any help beyond that, would definitely recommend joining my low cost group programs where I am available to answer questions to help you with next steps to help educate you so that you understand what these things mean and help you feel empowered to have these types of scenarios not feel so overwhelming because they really can. So everything I talked about is in the show notes. Please do subscribe to this channel if this has been helpful. Again, I'm your lyman Mold expert, Dr. Diane. I'll see you in another video.