Hurricane Flood Mold
Hurricane, Flood, Mold,
and Health Damage
Mold may menace
health
By Travis Dunn
Current News (Disaster News Network)
December 16, 2002
COLUMBIA, Md. (December 13, 2002) — Long after mud and debris
are cleared away after a hurricane or flood, survivors may find
an insidious, almost invisible force lurking in their homes --
mold.
Soaked sheetrock and soggy insulation can quickly become mold
incubators, and the spread of this mold can present a real
cleanup problem, especially for the disabled and the elderly.
Anna Belle Verrett of Broussard, La., for example, saw the roof
of her house torn off during Hurricane Lili October 3, and
watched as a deluge of rain soaked the interior of her home.
Verrett, a disabled 71-year-old, mopped up the mess herself. But
without the help of local United Methodist volunteers, there is
no way Verrett would have been able to exterminate the mold
sprouting all over her house.
Mold can emerge without the help of rain or floodwater, and it
can sometimes prove not only smelly and annoying but dangerous
as well.
Two people in Columbia, Md., however, recently reported
neurological problems they believe were caused by mold.
The pair are employees of the Baltimore-Washington United
Methodist Conference Center, which had to be closed while masked
workers tore moldy sheetrock and carpeting from the building.
The building was infested with aspergillus mold, said the Rev.
Erik Alsgaard, spokesperson for the conference. Alsgaard blames
the emergence of the mold on a bad construction job-the
building, he said, was built on top of a spring, which over the
course of a decade eroded through the masonry and into the
building.
Some of the conference center's 55 employees had been feeling
somewhat ill for the past year, he said.
But it took a heavy November rain to really bring out the mold,
he said. When a maintenance worker went to investigate "a
strange smell" in an office, he inadvertently released a cloud
of mold spores. That's when people really started to get sick,
Alsgaard said.
"They didn't know what they were going to stir up in the
building when they tore the walls out," Alsgaard said. "They
discovered a much bigger problem than they originally bargained
for."
About 25 employees in the building reported some sort of health
problem.
Martha Knight said her health problems were definitely "a
mold-related reaction" that eventually caused short-term memory
loss.
Knight said the baseline symptoms ("burning eyes, burning
throat, postnasal drip") grew to chest congestion, then to the
neurological effects, which also included severe headaches and
"tingling in the hands and the feet and numbness."
"At first it didn't seem like a mold situation," she said.
"Early on it just kind of seemed like an odd smell."
But when the wall was torn down November 8, Knight said her
headaches got so intense that she no longer had any doubt about
what was causing them.
Knight is feeling better now, but she's also working from home.
Ed MacMahon blames mold for the untimely death of his dog,
Muffin. Johnny Carson's erstwhile sidekick sued his insurance
company for $20 million, claiming that a botched plumbing job
caused a mold infestation in his mansion, which, in turn, led to
the death of his dog.
"Different species of fungi have probably been present in human
suffering since the dawn of time," according to Toxic Mold and
Tort News Online. "However, it wasn't until relatively recently
that the scientific community has identified mold and other
fungi as a possible cause of human's adverse health effects.
Today, certain fungi and mold are known to the scientific and
medical world to be responsible for allergies, hypersensitivity
pneumonitis, humidifier fever, infections, mushroom poisoning,
mycotoxicoses, mucous membrane irritation, and many other
ailments."
Several mold species-penicillium, aspergillus, stachybotrys,
paecilomyces and fusarium-are known for producing harmful
mycotoxins, or poisons.
The extent of the adverse health affects, however, is still a
matter of considerable scientific and legal debate.
A huge controversy is erupting over the question of toxic mold.
Some call toxic mold the next asbestos, while others claim
"toxic mold" is a phantasm conjured by trial lawyers out to
extract big money from insurance companies.
Much of this debate centers on massive lawsuits stemming from
mold infestation.
A similar case occurred in Texas-mold spread through a mansion,
and the homeowners blamed their insurance company for failing to
fix a water leak fast enough, thus providing a perfect mold
breeding ground. A jury awarded the couple $32 million in
damages.
Thanks to incidents like these, mold is causing hysteria-and
leading to congressional legislation and major changes in the
insurance business.
After 7-year-old Melina Walker of Southfield, Mich., allegedly
lost 70 percent of her lungs to Stachybotrys chartarum, a mold
species that can produce powerful mycotoxins, Rep. John Conyers,
Jr., introduced "the Melina Bill" in Congress.
"Home ownership is part of the American Dream, but for many,
toxic mold has transformed that dream into a nightmare,"
according to Conyers' Web site. "It's time to stop toxic mold
from robbing Americans of their health and their homes."
But scientific studies to date have come to contradictory
conclusions on whether mold is "robbing Americans of their
health."
Perhaps the most sensational mold case occurred in Cleveland.
"Over the past seven years in the Cleveland, Ohio area there
have been 45 cases of pulmonary hemorrhage (PH) in young
infants. Sixteen of the infants have died," according to the
Case Western Reserve University Web site. "Thirty-two of the
infants have been African American. Most of these cases have
occurred within ten contiguous zip codes in the eastern portion
of the metropolitan area. In November/December, 1994, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) led a
case-control investigation on the first ten cases. This study
found an epidemiological association of PH in these infants with
water-damaged homes containing the toxic fungi, predominantly
Stachybotrys."
The CDC, however, after a reevaluation of this data, said that
the study's conclusion was wrong.
The CDC now says that any causal link between severe health
problem and mold remains unproven.
"There is always a little mold everywhere -- in the air and on
many surfaces. There are very few case reports that toxic molds
(those containing certain mycotoxins) inside homes can cause
unique or rare health conditions such as pulmonary hemorrhage or
memory loss," according to the CDC Web site. "The case reports
are rare, and a causal link between the presence of the toxic
mold and these conditions has not been proven."
A study published in the January 1999 edition of Pediatrics,
however, concluded that there was a causal link between mold and
pulmonary hemorrhaging in the Cleveland infants.
Even more controversial is the notion that mold can cause
neurological problems.
Some scientists, like Dr. Gailen D. Marshall, an epidemiologist
at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, say that science does
not support these claims.
"There is no credible scientific evidence linking the presence
of mold ("toxic" species or nontoxic) and neurological disorders
when the individuals are breathing in airspace with mold
contamination," Gailen wrote in an e-mail.
Dr. Gailen is skeptical of claims from people who think mold is
responsible for their maladies.
This confusion is certainly not reassuring to insurance
companies, who are seeing an explosion in claims and lawsuits
dealing with mold.
Gordon Stewart, president of the Insurance Information
Institute, testified before a congressional subcommittee July
18, and he advocated some sort of federal intervention to
prevent the explosions of damage claims and lawsuits coming from
people claiming to have suffered at the invisible hands of
"toxic mold."
"The year 2001 was the worst in the history of the
property/casualty industry...We estimate that in the homeowner
sector, the loss is about $9 billion, $8.9 billion. Mold is a
major factor in these increased costs," Stewart testified.
"Conditions have reached crisis proportions in Texas, and mold
has become a serious problem in several other states, including
California, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada."
Stewart noted that Texas in particular has seen an explosion of
these claims, but there is no scientific evidence to indicate
there is "a new plague abroad in the land."
"We have more court cases and accusations of severe and
permanent health damage, and there's no peer-reviewed,
scientific research to back this up. Health claims are coming
under property policies that were never intended to cover health
claims. And now, fearing bad faith law suits, which is an area
where you can really build up the legal costs, insurers are
tending to throw money at mold claims because they don't want to
be accused of not doing everything they could and having a very
expensive law suit," he testified. "The net of it is we've got
these exploding costs, and the only thing to do is cut back on
coverage and pass on costs to policyholders. These measures are
going on in state after state, and so we have a kind of
insurance crisis as a result of the shock of this relatively
recent occurrence."
Interestingly, the scourge of mold dates back to biblical times,
according to Leviticus, 14:39-17: "On the seventh day the priest
shall return to inspect the house. If the mildew has spread on
the walls, he is to order that the contaminated stones be torn
out and thrown into an unclean place outside the town. If the
mildew reappears in the house after the stones have been torn
out and the house is scraped and plastered, it is a destructive
mildew and the house is unclean. It must be torn down -- its
stones, timbers and all the plaster -- and taken out of town."
Posted December 16, 2002 10:59 AM
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