BLACK MOLD : symptoms, remedies, treatment, elimination?

[MorningSong]

About 8 years ago, I got a bad case of asthmatic bronchitis caused by black mold and its toxins, which, after my diagnosis I found growing in my bedroom..under the bed where I had stashed things in plastic storage bins, inside the bins on leather goods and things that I had stored there, on the wooden parque flooring creeping up the wall behind the headboard of the bed. I had only vaguely smelled the odor of mold about a week before I got sick.

I was told to throw out anything that had mold visibly growing on it or at least wash it very thouroughly with bleach and sulfur soap and let it dry out in the sun outside during the day. I had to treat the walls and flooring several times with bleach and expose the surfaces to UV light (supposedly to kill the spores). I used a IR lamp to speed up the drying process for the walls and the flooring and I bought a secondhand tanning lamp which I pointed at one section at a time for 6 hours each. It did seem to work at the time.

I had to take 2 rounds of Ciprox antibiotic (which only made things worse because IMO it kills bacteria not molds) along with broncodialators and corticosteriods.... yuck! I was taken to the ER three times during the ordeal ( about a month) as I could exhale but couldn't inhale to save my soul! This is NOT something I would wish on anyone, foe or friend!

I moved out of that house a few years later, so I don't know if the wall and floor treatment really worked. I haven't had any more problems with my health caused by mold as far as I know here in my new abode.

It is very, very important to find the mold if you think that is the problem. And remember, when you see "mold", what you are actually seeing is the flowering of the spores.. the actual fungus is microscopic and practically invisible to our eyes... and its "roots" can extend over huge distances if the climate where it's growing is to its linking.

Here are 2 links to Dr. Mercola's site about mold and treatment:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...g-you-ill.aspx
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...-exposure.aspx

[DeDukshyn]

Black mold is ubiquitous on the entire planet -- you can't get really "get rid" of it, unless you live in a aerospace engineering cleanroom or something. I think most people don't realize this fact; but the fact it is so, means that most people are exposed to it very often, albeit in very tiny amounts - one wouldn't want to be in a situation where you might be breathing the dust / spores directly- that would be excessive. You can often find it on old onions, as it is one of the few micro organisms that can survive the onion's potent essential oils (it's hardy, which is one of the reasons it's difficult to get rid of).

I don't have any remedies (other than ensuring no detriment to one's immune system and to avoid breathing dust that might contain it), but I just want to note that if black mold did cause illness to humans on sight or on contact, like we are often led to believe, then we would all be sick. Immune system is a major factor. I have a relative that has ongoing issues with various fungal infections; mainstream doctors couldn't seem to help, and the naturopathic doctor said he has too much mercury in his body (mainly due to excessive tooth fillings) for his immune system to be in good enough shape to fight them off properly (compromised immune system). He's already started to get some amalgams replaced with ceramics, but it's a lot of costly work. This is just an anecdote.

[Jantje]

I personally had black mold on the floor in the shower. I used a commercial chemical cleaning solution that was specifically designed to battle mold.
It did not only destroy the mold but also the cement filling between the tiles. This floor has to be replaced now.
Beware !

besides that the mould came back afterwards. I use vinegar when I encounter mold from now on.

[Nick Matkin]

Here's a short podcast and transcript on the black mold subject from the usually grounded Skeptiod website run by Brian Dunning. Perhaps it might help.

I know some people have a problem with Dunning, but perhaps they should they get over it and at least consider what he has to say on a range of subjects.

(I think his dealing with the Diana death 'accident' was far too superficial, but on HAARP and the 'STENDEC' mystery my experience suggests he's spot on.)

Nick

[Baby Steps]

I work in a small underground office, at one point it got flooded and this stuff started.

Eventually, it was dried out, painted, re-carpeted etc. There is one black section on a desk,its that cheap chip board that retains the damp. At the time I wiped it with a tissue soaked in tea tree oil, and this was very effective, the black just breaks up. It came back, and I have just re-cleaned the same way but more thoroughly.

I am now going to get some Oregano oil to help my lungs resist the spores!

Australians do those steam treatments for the lungs (hot water with essential oils in a bowl, towel over head), they do Tea Tree oil, & Eucalyptus, very effective!

[Watching from Cyprus]

Hi Bill & Friend :-)

Tooth root problem: 10 drops of MMS in a 4cl shot glass of water. Gurgle (do not swallow) this in 3 dozes for 1 minute, and it should be gone. If not repeat every 3-4 hours and it should will be gone within 24 hours. Remember to drink clean water after each gurgling session.

To clean and regulate the body, take 2 table spoons of Organic Apple Cider Vinegar in a glass of water first thing in the morning and again before bedtime. Strongest natural antibiotic on the planet.

That should be it.

Love and light
Peter

[DeDukshyn]

Posted by Baby Steps (here)
...

Australians do those steam treatments for the lungs (hot water with essential oils in a bowl, towel over head), they do Tea Tree oil, & Eucalyptus, very effective!

hehe reminded me of this scene from "Crocodile Dundee"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUxOdFJEDdg

[bettye198]

The House is one thing, but your health is another. If you can find a practitioner like nutritional response tester advanced, acupuncturist, naturopath or Chiropractor who can deal with these products, and muscle test you for them:
Mycocanchord homeopathic from Energetix in Atlanta, GA. ( usual dose is 20 drops in water twice a day maybe more)
Fung Dx capsules from Systemic Formulas in Utah. I had to take up to 2/day usually 1 now. I recommend testing though because they are strong herbal/homeopathics and dynamic. No side effects from me and I am sensitive. In addition, you must have some product to wash this out of the system like ACX 1/dayfrom Systemic Formulas or Antronex 4-6/day from Standard Process in Wisconsin. These products are so pure and go back to the mid or early last century. They work but again, removal of the mold in the house has to be done.

[LindyLou22]

Loving the wealth of knowledge shared here. I don't believe anyone has mentioned light. We leave lights on in the basement to alleviate mold problems down there. I use a lot of rosemary essential oil, and I didn't realize it had any toxicity. Will look into that.

There is a lady named Ingrid Naiman who is an alternative medicine genius. She loves to watch blood cells under her microscope and has extensively studied the effects of mold on blood cells. She recommends products made from orange peel. She's very thorough and shares her experiences. This website is a treasure trove of information.

http://www.moldmisery.com/herbs.html

***

[avid]

Was editing my correspondence from early 2015, and came across this by Soren Dreier, who said fungus was the hidden cause of most major disease.
Apols if previously referenced
http://sorendreier.com/fungus-the-hi...major-disease/
He advocates coconut oil, cider vinegar, garlic etc etc. Well worth a read. Using organic coconut oil now instead of veggie oil, but not for steaks, that's butter!

[Constance]

Moldy - The documentary

Snippets from the documentary - >

• 45 million people in the US at any given time, live in a moldy building
  
  
• Common symptoms are brain fog, cognitive dysfunction, mood issues, sleep issues, autoimmune, inflammatory problems, joint pain, fatigue
  
  
• Exposure to mold, water damage conditions has been widely documented to cause significant neurocognitive effects. One of the most disturbing was a study in Poland of young children in water damaged buildings that showed significant IQ drops
  
  
• It was really in the 1970's, perhaps, 1969 that fungicides were added to paints for the first time. Unfortunately, those fungicides created mutations in fungi such as the fungi that lived beyond the fungicide created toxins that made us sick and ones that were from non-mutants did not make us sick. We put the fungicides in the paint, we are paying a price.
  
  
• Mold, certainly many of them, make a poisonous by-product called a mycotoxin, so it's a mold poison. For example, penicillium is a mold. The poison it makes is called pencillin. Brewers yeast is the mold, the poison it makes is called alcohol, and of course we all know that alcohol is neurotoxic. Few people know, although this was published in the year 2002, I believe, in the journal of the medical association, Dr. Ruth Etzel published this; that our corn supply in America is commonly contaminated with these fungal metabolites, that peanuts in America are commonly contaminated with these fungal byproducts, even today we are learning more and more about our coffee supply in America being contaminated with these fungal products. These are not okay to eat in large doses. So if you love that cup of coffee, and you drink a moldy coffee everyday, it may have an adverse affect on your health...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VI0_azQv6N8

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Dr. Mercola interviews Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker M.D about exposure to molds.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=No1wA8Akx5Q

You can read the entire Transcript here.


Website: Survivingmold.com

[Constance]

Dr. Andrew Campbell discusses some of the ways exposure to toxigenic molds and mycotoxins affect the human body.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=08GKz3GuobU

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Constance (here)
Moldy - The documentary

Posted by Constance (here)
Dr. Andrew Campbell discusses some of the ways exposure to toxigenic molds and mycotoxins affect the human body.

Thank you!

I'd looked up this thread because although I started it 3 years ago on behalf of a friend, now I have black mold in my house. OMG.

This is what I found in the roof corner behind a cupboard...



... and on looking up in the roof space, it's full of the stuff.

Now, I've not had it analyzed. But it's mold, and it's black. It doesn't look very benign!

Despite this, I don't have any obvious health issues. But it may be simply because I'm in pretty good shape anyway. Interestingly, though, what I have noticed is that while i have a ton of energy up in the high mountains (see this thread for my expeditions to search for the elusive Wawa Grande ), and I always feel pretty good when I go into the nearest town 25 miles away on errands, at home I often feel quite fatigued.

And my dog Mara — who, naturally, has a hugely sensitive nose! — rarely comes in the house. She always prefers to sleep outside in the grass, even when it's cold and raining. I only made that [possible] connection just now.

So really, I'm just sharing this out of interest. Clearly, I need to get it out of there fast. That means replacing a whole bunch of moldy roof timbers.

But 'fast' doesn't happen easily here, and the main factor is the weather: that's because to work on the roof there needs to be little or no rain for a couple weeks at least, and there's no chance of that until July at the earliest. (Here on the equator, there are two seasons: wet, Jan—June; and dry, July—Dec.) And even so, August—September are more likely to be dry for a stable period.

So, an interesting circle. My next job is to go back and study all the links and videos posted earlier on the thread.

[Tomkoyote]

In the mean time, go to a hardware store get 'Pool shock' at least 65% calcium hypochlorite. Do not buy if it says Sodium hypo (must say on the bag 65% or 70% or 78% Calcium Hypo). Put a tablespoon of the granule in a bottle of water or spray bottle, shake well to dissolve. Spray any affected area. Repeat every 3to4 hrs. Cal hypo is also dubbed MMS2, so it is safe.
You can safely sanitize your hands, body with it but use a less concentrated solution (like 1 teasp/lit.)

[Trisher]

If you have MMS then mix up around 70 to 80 drops of mms with activator...you do not need to dilute but if you do then using just a small amount of water will slow it down. Place under/near mold. Close up the space..stay out until it has off gassed. Probably 8 or so hours. This should kill the mold according to Dr Andreas Kalcker. If you wish to target one corner you could halve the number of drops and tape up plastic around the area and place the drops in their glass container inside this sealed off space.

Good luck Bill.

Trisher

[Bill Ryan]

Thank you! That's most interesting about MMS combating mold. I can believe it.

And yes: I know Dr Andreas Kalcker, and have spent some quality time with him. He's a very smart guy. He used to manufacture MMS for retail, but was shut down by the EU when MMS was outlawed in Europe.

Whether using MMS or MMS2, the problem I have is that there's a lot of mold. Not just a little patch. Large roof timbers are covered, and need to be replaced. I was just now going to take and post a photo of all the ferns growing out of the antique roof tiles, but the sun was in the wrong direction.

It's basically an 80-year old farmhouse with a porous, leaking roof in a climate which is often quite wet and foggy 6 months of the year. That's like 40 straight years of damp roof timbers, enough to create quite an ecosystem up there.

Bats seem to like it, though, and I regularly have bats in my bedroom flying round in fast circles like something on the end of a string, never hitting a thing. Unlike birds, though, they're easy to set free... just open a door or window, and they head straight out like a guided missile. They're actually really beautiful things, like large flying mice.

Anyway! Wildlife report notwithstanding, it'd need a vast amount of undiluted MMS to deal with what seems to be up there — or a pretty large amount of calcium hypochlorite. But thanks again, and I'll definitely investigate that... I know who I can ask.

[happyuk]

Would a suitably industrial dehumidifier help given that the house will be subject to so much damp for a large portion of the year?

A different situation, but I remember moving into a newly built apartment block, which was so new in fact that the landlord had provided for us a large dehumidifier to combat the amount of moisture still remaining in the building work. We would switch this on before leaving for work in the morning, and I never failed to be astounded by the amount of water to be removed from it on getting home in the evening.

The builder explained that new buildings tend to have very good insulation to comply with building regulations, the downside being there is little ventilation in terms of drafts; only fans, extractors, air con etc. plus of course open windows, which may not be practical for security reasons. These days they are pretty much air tight with a concrete base and plastered interiors that take a long time to dry out properly.

Other than that, I would keep all items of furniture about 2 inches away from the walls especially the outside walls and including any beds. Wipe the walls and skirting boards down with anti-mould stuff (Dettol make a great one) and do this for about 3 months. Other advice I've been given is to try and fit a stronger motor in any extraction fans for the bathrooms but I think there is a limit of the motor you can put in fans, I'm sure others on Avalon will know more about this than I do.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by happyuk (here)
Would a suitably industrial dehumidifier help given that the house will be subject to so much damp for a large portion of the year?

Thanks for the suggestion! But no humidifier could do the necessary job.

This below is a little extreme, but it's a real photo. Something like this happens several times a year. (What you see there is just heavy rain.)



During the day, I always have the doors open, and I keep the windows open 24/7 unless I'm out for the day.

The very old roof really does leak like a sieve. I have heavy plastic sheets laid out above all the room ceiling spaces, but they steadily accumulate water like shallow paddling pools and sometimes that spills through into the house. (There, all the floors are tiled: no carpet could survive. ) Whenever that happens, I just use it as an opportunity to mop the floors clean.

This really isn't a normal house. It's a beautiful place! Here's a photo... when it's sunny, it's gorgeous.



...but OMG, the work it needs never ends. And while I can happily handle the rain and the occasional flood, the mold, the presence of which is I now realize is hardly surprising, is the real problem I now have to eliminate totally.

— because this thread is about health and wellness, not my house.

It's astonishing to me now that it never occurred to me that a great deal of mold simply had to be there. I was just blind to the entire notion. I've never lived in a moldy house before, as best I know.

Constance wrote above (as a summary from the documentary Moldy):

• 45 million people in the US at any given time, live in a moldy building.

That's about 15% of the population. I'm guessing that can be mapped on to Europe in equal or greater proportions: possibly greater, as there are many more older houses.

And that really is food for thought. Yet another modern-day, heath-compromising epidemic that few are aware of.... as if there weren't enough already.

[Constance]

Flash, one of our beloved members who is currently on sabbatical, and who has been following this thread with great interest, has requested that I share this interesting article.

Mold may mean bad news for the brain

WASHINGTON – Moldy houses are hard on the lungs, and new results in mice suggest that they could also be bad for the brain. Inhaling mold spores made mice anxious and forgetful, researchers reported November 15 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Cheryl Harding, a psychologist at the City University of New York, and colleagues dripped low doses of spores from the toxic mold Stachybotrys into mouse noses three times per week. After three weeks, the mice didn’t look sick. But they had trouble remembering a fearful place. The mice were also more anxious than normal counterparts. The anxiety and memory deficits went along with decreases in new brain cells in the hippocampus — a part of the brain that plays a role in memory — compared with control mice.

Harding and colleagues also found that the behaviors linked to increased inflammatory proteins in the hippocampus. Exposure to mold’s toxins and structural proteins may trigger an immune response in the brain. The findings, Harding says, may help explain some of the conditions that people living in moldy buildings complain about, such as anxiety and cognitive problems.

Source: Sciencenews.org

She also wanted to make mention that hazmat protection is really required when treating any kind of moldy surface.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Constance (here)
Inhaling mold spores made mice anxious and forgetful

That's hilarious. I've probably got anxious, forgetful mice in the roof as well.

But of course, I get the serious point. It's a systemic situation, where one might not feel sick or ill, but just be running on reduced capacity: a little less energetic, a little less quick, a little less aware, a little less together, slightly more vulnerable to other factors. Just like a kind of gradual erosion, a dulling down of everything.

And another serious point... it might even account for my not even thinking of the possibility that the mold was there.

The mold might be acting like a very clever enemy that influences its opponent — the humans in the house that might kill it off — to consider there's no problem, and that there's no mold there.

That sounds like a joke... but I'm not sure if it is.