by Jennifer Sergent
Scripps Howard News Service
It's black, it's green, it's alive and it's probably growing somewhere in your house. But is mold really dangerous?
The exasperating answer is, it depends.
The bottom line is undisputed: don't wait to find out.
Neil Sandler of Frederick, Md., was horrified when he casually dug into some moldy bathroom grout, only to find the problem was much worse than it first appeared. "As I started digging into it, I started discovering more and more black," he said. Then he popped a tile out. "I was absolutely floored by what I saw. It looked almost like a fern, a black fern."
And it extended behind all the tiles in the bathroom, including the floor. After ripping everything out, Sandler realized that the tiles were laid on top of wood and particle board that had been saturated over time with water from the shower—a perfect breeding ground for mold.
Sandler was lucky. As the spokesman for the National Institute of Building Sciences, he knew what to do: replace the wood backing and particle-board sub-flooring with material called Drycrete, a plaster-like substance that is inorganic and impervious to mold growth. But many homeowners don't know what to do.
With so many headlines about mold making people sick and rendering homes uninhabitable, the first sight of mold in one's house or apartment might invoke unnecessary fear, experts say.
In the history of building catastrophes, mold follows in the line with lead paint and asbestos, Sandler said. "It's the next asbestos."
Lewis Harriman, a humidity control consultant in Portsmouth, N.H., explains why: "Mold is certainly the next asbestos because there's so little science that tells us who is going to have a (health) problem and how."
There's widespread disagreement in the medical community over how sick it can make people. A basic consensus states that mold is most likely to affect people with allergies, causing respiratory ailments or exacerbating asthma.
The health effects are more likely to be pronounced in children, said Kevin Kennedy, environmental health specialist at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. Nonetheless, "people have a big misconception of exposure—of the potential for a health problem," he said. "People are not educated in proper house maintenance."
The health risks don't accumulate until lots of different molds start growing, and they emit chemicals in a competitive bid to kill each other off. Those chemicals are what make people sick, Kennedy said.
A cottage industry of industrial hygienists has cropped up to test the mold in people's homes, but experts agree: don't wait to find out what kind of mold you have—just get rid of it. Often a simple solution of soap and water will wipe the mold away.
The Environmental Protection Agency offers guidelines on how big an area mold should occupy before a homeowner must call in professionals to do the cleanup.
But basically, Kennedy said, "You don't need to test a large area of black stains that are fuzzy to tell you that you need to clean this up."
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