Can My House Be Full Of Toxic Mold?

Posting Date: 03/27/2001

Originally broadcast on March 12, 2001.

Joanne: Last week, the real Erin Brockovich testified before a California state senate committee about toxic mold dangers, which she claims her house is full of, and she said that she has mold in her blood.

Dr. Dean: Movies make a hero out of someone and whether she is or not, there are a lot of folks out there who have problems seeing the difference between a movie and reality.

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We see movie stars who advertise pharmaceutical products to us as if they?re experts somehow. Now comes this woman, who seems to have accomplished miracles in the area of toxic waste and now is suddenly an infectious disease expert.

Toxic mold may be what America needs in order to go off on a new health new panic. We need something to be upset about because life is just too damn good for us and we cannot handle it! We cannot handle what our forebears have handed to us and we have proven it with our rates of unhappiness, depression, drug abuse, alcoholism, worry, neuroticism and anxiety. We just can?t handle it. We need to go back 100 years and struggle where people had to fight their entire lives to put a roof over their heads and to feed themselves.

The toxic mold story is the following: There is a species of mold, stachybotrus, that may have the ability to release spores in high amounts that may be toxic in the lungs of young children and infants. But it takes a huge amount of these spores. And this huge amount would not come from an old, ordinary, moldy basement.

Well, the other problem is, people become confused because they know that when they go to their allergist they?re often tested for molds and spores and fungi, etc. There are people who are allergic to mold, but it is not a toxic thing -- it?s an allergy. And those people of course have hayfever and other more commonly known maladies. So this toxic mold thing is a symptom.