Myths and Misconceptions About Mold

The misinformation about mold is absolutely rampant, and some of that is intentional. I mean, there are people that intentionally put out bad information because it may have a financial interest for them as well.

Hello, everyone. My name is Kendra Seymour, and I'm joined today by Michael Pinto of Wondermakers Environmental. And today, we're going to clear up some common misconceptions that many of us might have about mold. And the problem with misconceptions is they can lead to bad decisions, which puts your health and your checkbook at risk, and we don't want that. So thank you, Michael, so much for joining us today to talk about the 15 mold myths.

It's absolutely an honor to be here, and I'm thrilled to be able to share this information with your audience.

You are just an absolute legend in the field. So I am so glad you're here to just share your wealth of knowledge and everyone watching, like, take notes. You're going to want to. You're going to pay attention to this, share it with your spouse or your loved ones or the landlord or your contractor, whoever. So, Michael, why don't we go ahead and take it away if you want to, you know, start your presentation.

Right. Well, as you heard, this is myths and misconceptions about mold. And there'll be some additional information about B. That's just a vanity slide. Don't worry about that. This is really what it's all about, is that the misinformation about mold is absolutely rampant, and some of that is intentional. I mean, there are people that intentionally put out bad information because it may have a financial interest for them as well. So I just. I kind of like this picture of a peach here. I thought I would share that with you. But really what we're here to do is talk about these myths and try and replace them with facts. And so, in some respects, we're going to be the mold version of the mythbusters, if you're familiar with that TV show. So let's just start with one of the big ones here, which is this whole idea that because it's natural, mold can't be harmful or it's not harmful or it's only mold. That's probably the best way I hear it is that it's only mold. And, yeah, it's only poison ivy and it's only wasps and it's only alligators. But I think we all, you know, take some precaution around natural things that can be dangerous to us, and in those sorts of items, like you see up on the screen, There you have to put in different types of mold. Aspergillus, stachybotrys, there's different types there that can cause real problems. And best of all, when you hear that, when it's, oh, it's only mold or it's only natural, just remember that, you know, everybody is different. Every situation is a little bit different and it has to be evaluated based on the potential hazard and the individual. So I don't particularly like getting stung by a bee, but, and I have in the past, on, you know, numerous occasions in my life, but I'm not, as far as I know, at life threatening risk from being stung by a bee. But there's lots of other people in this world, we're being stung by a bee. If they don't have an EpiPen or some sort of counteractant, it can literally be fatal. And when you take that same approach and understand everybody's different and your exposure to mold can be something similar to that, up to and including very serious illnesses, I think it puts a lie to that misconception that it's not harmful. Here's another one that I hear all the time. I kind of run in these, just in order of frequency that we end up addressing these myths and misconceptions is that there should be no mold inside. This is in essence the opposite myth to the one that we just heard, which is it's just natural, so don't worry about it. Now we end up going from the people who are mold minimizers on one side of the equation to what I call fungiphobics. These are people who are just deathly afraid of mold. And so they want to live in a mold free environment, or they think they do. And the reality is, no, it's not a mold free environment. It wasn't a mold free environment before the water came into the home or to the building and caused the mold to grow in the building. We don't like that part of it. But to think that you're going to live in a mold free environment essentially would mean that you're just in a bubble suit. And even with some of my most sensitized individuals, that's not the case. And the best way to tell that, of course, is if they feel better when they go outside than they do on the inside. There's plenty of mold outside. It's just generally it's just different molds than what's inside. So here's just a good example. When people say, well, they want a mold free environment, when you actually take a sample and look at what's in the air. There's all sorts of stuff. There's mold spores, there's fibers in there, there's different plant particles, there's soot, there's skin cells. It's all over the place. And to think that somehow you're going to have 100% clean air in your living environment just is not the case. This one I thought I did pretty well on, because you get two myths for the price of one here, and that is if the mold growth is black, it's dangerous because it's Stachybotrys. And then the flip side of that is that Stachybotrys is the only dangerous mold. We'll deal with the second one first. Stachybotrys is not the only dangerous mold that's out there. I've got another slide coming up on that in a minute, but I just wanted to show you this. This is a series of petri dishes where these are ideal conditions, and they're growing the Stachybotrys mold. So starting there from the right hand side, you can see it starts out like a little white or gray colony and continues to progress. And you don't really start to see any black until you get, like, into the. Maybe a little bit in the third one there, but certainly in the fourth, and then the fifth and the sixth, as you move to the left, you can start to see it's getting different colors. So the fact of the matter is, the color isn't as important as the type of mold. And as you can see here, the Stachybotrys, depending on the nutrient source and a number of other things, the thyme can be different colors as well. So let's follow up on that one. As I said just a moment ago that, you know, Stachybotrys isn't the only dangerous mold, but blessedly, there's a relatively smaller number of molds that are considered to be, and I use the word noxious as compared to dangerous, because just about anything in a high enough concentration can be dangerous. But which ones are dangerous in the smaller quantities, potentially. And the statistics are pretty impressive to me. And the numbers are particularly. The green bullet point is going to jump around a lot, depending on who you talk to. But it's pretty clear we've got about 100,000 identified molds in the world and in the United States. It's also pretty clear we've got about 1,000 of those that are just very common. We see repeatedly in air samples and surf samples and things like that. The green number is A little bit more soft from the standpoint that a lot of people estimate that there could be as many as half a million. Some of the estimates I've heard of different types of molds that could be out there that we just don't know about is a million to a million and a half. But regardless, these are all like really large numbers of different types of molds that are probably out there that we don't know about. But of the ones that we do know about, that hundred thousand, it's kind of an interesting round number. About 1/10 of 1%, 100 of those are what we would consider to be, as I said, noxious or going to be more dangerous at lower concentrations. Which leads us right into this next. This is not a misconception. This is a flat out myth that people think that killing mold is enough. And there's an entire part of the industry, unfortunately, Kendra, that's growing up around this, that says that we don't have to remove it, all we have to do is do some sort of treatment for it. And we'll get into those specific misconceptions in a minute. But what I wanted to show here is that there is a difference between dead mold and live mold spores. And you can see the live mold is bad because it can cause infections. If you get a viable mold spore and you breathe it in, or you get it on your skin and under the right conditions, it can actually cause a blister on your skin or start to literally be an infection, a sinus infection is quite common. People who have lower immune systems can be a lung infection and things like that. The odor that the mold produces when it's alive is that musty, moldy odors, really volatile organic compounds that it's releasing. But if we just treat the mold and somehow kill it, and the assumption is, even for the companies who say that they can somehow reach it all and kill it all, even if they could, we have to understand that the other two properties of the mold can be just as bad. For us, it still is poisonous and it's still allergenic. The spores themselves, whether they're dead to spores or live spores, can cause people to have asthma, like symptoms and allergies and things like that. And for the people who say, well, yeah, but that stuff isn't as important, just look up a term called organic dust toxic syndrome ODTs. I've worked with that a number of times in my career. It can be a life threatening illness from a large exposure to an organic material. And most of the Time it's mold or something along those lines. Some of the fungus, sometimes yeast and things as well. So that then leads us to the guidelines that are out there, and people looking at different guidelines and saying, okay, if some of these things aren't acceptable, like maybe just trying to treat it instead of remove it, where does that come from? And what I would say the biggest myth out there is that if people start to get into the industry and really want to learn about a little bit, they almost always come across one of these documents that's listed there. The EPA document, the OSHA document, New York City guidelines, iicrc, which is the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification, say that three times fast. But the fact of the matter is, all of these are out there. They're voluntary. There isn't any real standards other than a handful of states that have licensing rules. So if you really are going to know about molds, you need to be familiar with all these different documents and realize where they come together and where they differentiate between one another. And if you're still worried about that and say, well, you know, if there's all these different documents, it must mean that there isn't anything that's set in stone. The answer is that there's attorneys that are going to help you realize that it is, in some respects, set in stone in terms of what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And that's why we talk about it as a standard of care rather than a standard that's actually a legal term. That's what the lawyers and stuff use. And unfortunately, having had to serve as an expert witness in this area on more than a few occasions, you know, we kind of get to know some of these things. But ultimately, one of two things happens to people who do remediation work that are outside the standard of care. Either they're slapped down by the legal system through a lawsuit somewhere along the line, or if their process or procedures or chemistry or whatever it is really is effective, it will eventually get looped into the standard of care through these different voluntary documents. Which then of course, leads us right into the next misconception here that somehow cleaning or stain removal can be done instead of physical removal. The best example of this, quite honestly, is the mold around your shallow grout lines and stuff. If you actually, not to use a specific product name, but if you take like Clorox in their tub and tile cleaner and spray that on the discoloration in the mold that's growing in your grout lines, it tends to lighten that it essentially bleaches it. It gets rid of that for now. And what that's doing is killing the surface or impacting the surface. But it doesn't necessarily get down to the hyphae, which is the technical term for like the roots of the mold organism. And so it's going to come back. As a matter of fact, it's a great marketing deal for a lot of these tub and tile cleaners because it looks good for a few days or a week or two and then it comes back and, and if it looked good for two weeks and now it's back, what's your standard response is to use that same product to make it look good again. So it just, it's a recurring cycle and that's unfortunately what we see with some of these actual mold, professional mold remediation problems. So these areas where people like you can see there where they say spray and pray or foam it and go home it and things like that, that's just not acceptable by the industry standard of care. And some of them are actually, you know, advertising that they're different and they can save a lot of effort. So there's a picture from an advertisement at the bottom there where they show, yes, you know, you might have to tear up all of this building material to get rid of the mold. On some of the poorest materials. We, or in their mind, you could just fog it or spray it and somehow it's all going to be good. And we already talked about the fact that the allergens and the mycotoxins could still be present. I'm not really trying to pick on anybody, but you do have to understand that this myth is gaining in some. It's just becoming much more prevalent in the industry right now. And I do call it a myth because there's even books out there about people who are saying, well, the standard of care is a 40 year old standard and ours is so new that they don't even understand it and blah, blah. All I would say is be very careful if you're thinking about going in that direction for two reasons. One, there's a liability issue there, but there's also a property value issue there. So if you have have mold in your property and you have non traditional remediation done and it may even be effective, it may be effective for you, it might make your life a lot better. But when you go to sell that property, you still have to disclose potentially that you had water infiltration and mold and then people start digging into it. Well, how did you take care of It. And depending on how these things end up in the industry, it may or may not be something that, you know, has an impact on your property value. So I would just be leery of people who suggest that they're going to come in and somehow that's going to take care of the mold problem. Just, I mean, I know we're going through this fast, but there's just lots and lots of these misconceptions that are out there. We just hear this one all the time. People call us up and we're still not feeling well, and what could it be? And et cetera, et cetera. And then as we dig into it, we realize, well, yeah, there's that mold up in the attic, but we never go up there, and we never even store anything up there anymore. So how can that be impacting us? Or, yeah, we have a crawl space, but we've never looked down there. Or, you know, the water leak from the washing machine that time that we had it, you know, possibly got behind the wall cavity, but we dried it all out or, you know, we got rags on it right away or something like that. And in each of those cases, you really could have molded, hidden inside. The two pictures on the left of the screen here actually are quite telling for us. When you've got mold that's visible, like the bottom photo there, and it's on the painted corner of the wall, either got wet or condensation in that corner or something like that, that's a pretty obvious sign that you've got the mold issue going on. And people tend to respond to that. The one up above there, though, if you look closely, you can't see a lot of indications of water damage or mold growth on the outside of the drywall. It was a water migration coming from the other side of the building or from the exterior side of the building. But that hidden or trapped mold is actually eventually going to go airborne. Because just because it's hidden from view doesn't mean that it's airtight. And the big thing that I wanted to finish this slide on is that the IICRC, their S520 standard, which is their voluntary guidelines for dealing with mold remediation, is very clear in how they describe it there. They talk about actual growth at the bottom line there includes growth that is active or dormant or visible or hidden. So they understand that when you're going to deal with a mold remediation project, sometimes you have to go deeper than just what's on the surface. And again, kind of a follow on misconception here or myth is that you can put it a lot of different ways. If you've got the mold in some of these unoccupied spaces, again, crawl spaces, attic space, basements, wall cavities, and you're not going there or disturbing it, you're going to be okay. And the assumption there is that somehow the mold spores stay put, and that's just not the case at all. You can see from the diagram I've got on the left hand side there that I know they're talking about vapor intrusion there, but it also carries true for the air infiltration and the spores and everything that go with it. And yeah, you can actually have air diffuse through some of these different building materials, but it's the gaps and the crevices and the holes and everything that's really going to cause a problem. There's one other thing I wanted to mention real quickly about the diagram on the right hand side there. If you look up in the attic and there's a lot of homes and things where they put the air conditioning units in the attic, or even just run the ductwork in the attic, you'll notice most people think, well, if there's pressurization in the ductwork and there's a leak in the ductwork, that it's going to be air moving out. So you can see those red arrows on the left hand side of the ductwork in the attic. But what they don't understand is that a lot of times when there's a leak in the ductwork, as the air is traveling down through the ductwork, it creates what they call a venturi effect, and it will actually pull air in from the outside. And so if there's mold in that attic, for example, and they're running the ductwork through it and there's just a tiny little gap. The next thing you know, you're moving a lot of the mold spores from that unoccupied attic that's not supposed to be bothering us, right into your H Vac system and then right into your living area. So there's a lot of interesting dynamics that go on in terms of how the houses breathe, if you will, and how that forces the mold to go around. This is getting to the heart of some of the things we were talking about earlier with the different treatments, if you will. Some people think that remediation is only removing the source material. And they've had these remediation projects done and they still don't get better. And to really help answer that myth, I wanted to bring up not Just condition three again from the IICRC guidelines, but they also have another one called condition two, and those are areas that are contaminated from the physical growth. And so what happens a lot of times are people come in, they see the mold on the wall, or they identify where the. Or it's on the rafters in the attic or on the subfloor in the basement or something like that. And they do take care of that. But two things happen if they're not controlling it carefully. The very fact that they're doing that remediation can spread spores and other fragments and things through the house or through the building, or it's already been spread there. And okay, I'm taking care of the source, but am I cleaning up all the rest? So, you know, the fact of the matter is if you get rid of the source, and I'm talking about all the sources, so you had a flooding in the crawl space and we actually get that dried out and we actually remove the mold in that crawl space, but we don't do anything in the rest of the house. People can still be suffering from that. And if you just leave it, as I say, down at the last two purple bullet points there to air movement only, eventually, if you get rid of the source material in a building, the spores and everything will get out of there and you'll revert back to what we call a normal spore level in your house. Because your eyes can have some from the inside, outside and all of that. But your, if you want to do that on just a normal basis, let the house breathe on its own and get rid of the extra. You can bet it's going to be at a minimum six months and probably a year or two for that to happen. So if somebody is not feeling well, do you want to wait two years and hope that they feel better after two years, or did they get so sick during that two years that now they can't get better? Or do you want to invest, generally for a regular sized house, a one to three days worth of deep detail cleaning to get rid of the residual spores that were there from the mold that occurred in the first place. And that leads us on to a couple of the last ones here. A lot of people think that, and you see a lot of this on the Internet, man, oh man. You go on the Internet and talk about mold remediation or mold cleanup and there's all sorts of stuff that tells you how you can do it yourself. And somehow people get the idea that this is a fairly simple do it yourself project. And I would say for the most part, it is if somehow do it yourself means that you can put up airtight barriers and have pieces of equipment that can create negative pressure, like you see down there on the bottom right, and you have HEPA filtered vacuums and you're willing to go at it and literally, you know, clean every square inch of that work area and maybe even the whole house afterwards, like we talked about in the last slide. So if you think you can do all that as a do it yourselfer, you know, have at it. But this is the sort of stuff that we see in the Internet and, you know, particularly if it's a small amount of mold, some of the guidelines talk about, well, less than 10 square feet, you can do it yourself. Our experiences, both what I would call regular people and sensitized clients, almost always the sensitized clients got that way because there was some level of bad remediation that got done. Either they did it themselves and hurt themselves, or they brought somebody in who didn't do a very good job or didn't do the whole scope of work, like cleaning up the other areas, things like that. Again, I like to think of myself as a pretty handy person. I like to do projects around the house and stuff like that. Could I do a do it yourself project at my house? Well, sure, because I could get the equipment and the supplies and actually teach people how to do it for a living. Would I do it myself? And the answer is no, because I'm smart enough to know that the contractors who do it every day know how to do it even, you know, in a practical sense, even better than the guy who teaches it. So, you know, you probably have heard the old saying, those who can't do, teach. That might be me on this. Who knows? The last one I want to deal with here kind of jumps to a slightly different arena. And that is on the contents. Because I get these questions all the time, Kendra, about can the contents be cleaned? And people have told me I had to throw everything out and their heart broken. And the first thing I tell people is anything can be cleaned. If it's got mold on it or it's mold contaminated, anything can be cleaned. The question is, is it worth cleaning? Because depending on what it is, it may take a fair amount of time, effort and money to clean it. So I know it doesn't look like much, but that photo on the top there on the left is a before and after of a painting which is actually was very valuable to the people in the house. It wasn't necessarily because it was a relative. It wasn't necessarily something that was famous and was worth billions of dollars or anything like that. But to them, it was a family heirloom. Not quite a wedding photo, but just like I said, a fairly heirloom. And got that white mold on it and it had to be taken off. And unfortunately, the way it had to be done is with some of the tools that you see in the bottom there, very carefully wiping and cleaning and making sure they got it off of the backside of the canvas as well as front side where the paint was and all of that. And it was fairly expensive. But for the people who were told initially that this family heirloom had to be thrown out, you know, the dollars weren't as important as the. What I call the intrinsic value. And I just end by telling people that when we're talking about contents, we use the term decluttering all the time. Segregate things, declutter. Just because you have something in your home or in your office doesn't mean that it should be cleaned. If it's a mold contamination situation, it means that it should be looked at. And then you need to make a determination whether it's worth the financial and the effort to actually do the cleaning of it. Those are a fair amount of myths and misconceptions, and I ran through them very quickly. Anybody who's watching this, you know, probably has some questions, may have questions. The fact of the matter is we spend a lot of time at Wondermakers just answering questions from the general public. And you don't necessarily have to be a client to email or call us and have us provide a quick answer. We generally tell people It's a free 15 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes. I mean, if it takes longer than that, then we may want to talk about it. We are consultants, after all, so. But the fact of the matter is, if you have a brief question or you have a situation that you want to discuss, there's the email address for me and the telephone number for the office, and we're happy to try and handle those. So, Kendra, I can't thank you enough for having me on and allowing me to share some of this information in terms of old myths and misconceptions.

Thank you so much. I have heard every single one of these, believe them at some point myself. I talk to people every day and have for years. This comes up over and over and over again. So thank you for. For helping that. Because I think what happens sometimes we want to believe some of these myths, right? It's easier to think I can just do X or I can just do it this way. And you know, when you have the right information and it's factual and reliable, you can make the best choices. And so I everything here. I have a feeling this is going to be shared a lot with, you know, hesitant spouses and other people who are, you know, or even just people who are wanting to learn. But thank you so much for this. I have a couple follow up questions. People, they'll say toxic mold or I should say probably toxigenic mold. What is toxigenic? Mold is all mold toxic. That's a word that gets thrown around all the time. Can you help us understand that a little bit more?

Sure, yeah. So officially toxigenic just means poisonous. But for a mold to be poisonous, it has to produce or somehow create poisons. And that's where the term mycotoxins come in. That's the official term for molds, produce poisons. Remember I had a slide there, talked about like a hundred different molds that, you know, we would consider noxious or most of those are going to be the ones that actually produce poisons under the right circumstances as they're growing. So toxigenic molds are the ones that can produce poisons. Those poisons can be dangerous. Blessedly, as I said before, that's a small number of molds. And no, not every mold is considered to be toxic. I'm just gonna leave it at that.

That's wonderful. And you touched on this before, but I want to circle back because it's kind of an important point. Bleach or bleach like products. Can you just high level go over one more time why that is not the best solution when it comes to treating? Because sometimes we'll get calls like my landlord wants to just put bleach on it. Why is that not the path people want to take?

Well, first of all, if you look at a lot of the bottles of bleach, they don't call themselves a fungicide. They're not listed in that. So that's the first thing is are you using it according to the label direction and generally you're not. But more importantly, it's not effective. So bleach is designed to remove colors. You know, you're bleaching things to get rid of the colors. And just because you're removing the color on the mold, the green or the black or the whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that you're killing it or somehow disabling the spores or removing the mycotoxins or anything else. That's there. So bleach has been shown to be a particularly ineffective product for mold because it tends to have an impact on the surface and remove the color. And in doing that, it can actually kill some of the surface mold. But it leaves, as I talked about previously, the underside of it. And as the bleach then deteriorates, what we find is a lot of molds enjoy using the previously bleached mold as a food. It turns it into a nutrient source, so it comes back in even greater measure the second time and the third time and that sort of stuff. So, no, when you're just treating it, particularly when you're not treating it with a chemical that's designed specifically to remove or to kill the mold, that's way outside the standard of care. And more importantly, it's not going to be effective.

Yeah, so don't listen to your grandmother on that one. If she says just put bleach on it. And it's mostly water too, with, you know, so you're literally adding more moisture to a, you know, the source. And that's the opposite of what you want to be doing. And I do have. I do have just one more kind of high level, let's say someone knows they have mold or water damage or suspects, what is the first thing they should do? Because it's not panic. What's the first thing they should do, in your opinion?

Well, you know, and this is tough, and I was going to mention this, you know, you mentioned that you've heard and lived through all these myths and misconceptions. And unfortunately, a lot of us that are specialized in the industry, we tend to think that these things, that we've gotten rid of all these and we've talked about them so much that we think that, that certainly people can't believe these things anymore. But what happens is that people really don't pay a lot of attention to mold until they need to pay attention to mold, and then they go looking for information. So in answering your specific question, what's the first thing they should do? They should be careful about the information they're looking at. There's so much stuff on the Internet, there's so many YouTube videos where people claim this is what you can do with it and this is what you should do with it, and things like that, it's very difficult to actually paw through some of that and get to the heart of the matter. So the addition to that is look for good information. And generally with mold, just start from the standpoint that it's probably not A do it yourself. And if you do get to a situation where it is something that you can handle yourself, consider that a blessing. But most mold situations, to do it right is going to take a professional. I could probably tinker on my own car or tear apart the washing machine when it goes bad. Or I can. There's certain things I can do. I can change the windshield wipers, right? But I don't try and do a brake job on my car because that's something that a real professional needs to get into. Because your life depends on it. And I think the same would hold true for mold. I mean, if it's super simple, just some condensation mold that's on a painted surface and we can wipe it off, that's great. But if it's into a porous material and needs to be removed and you need to remove the porous material, that really is like putting brakes on your car. There's only a handful of people that have the expertise to be able to do it and do it right.

So I would add to that too, like, because I get it as a mom, I have young kids and I see this all the time. People panic and then they throw something on it. Just don't disturb it. Leave it be, do some research, get a professional in there. Don't attack it immediately because you panic. Because I know that's an impulse. I can relate to that, that a lot of people have. So just take a breath, make a plan. Michael, thank you so much for being here today.

What a blessing. And just appreciate it very much. And like I said, if you have additional questions in the future, you want me back, just let me know. We'll be happy to come and educate some more.

I love that and I know we will definitely want to have you back because I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of emails with a lot of follow up questions too. So we want to make sure we get that answer to people. For everyone listening, thank you so much for joining us today. If you found this helpful, do me a favor, head on over to changetheirfoundation.org Sign up for our newsletter because it really is the best way to get great information like this directly to your inbox. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.