Why you are consuming mold, not just breathing it

Ray pulled the drywall off the wall of his basement laundry room and found black staining running up the studs.

He did everything you are supposed to do.

Air sampling. Spore counts. A remediation crew in white plastic suits and respirators.

New drywall. New subfloor. A commercial dehumidifier running around the clock.

$38,000.

He moved his wife and his youngest into a rental for four months while the work got done.

And he was still sick.

Same brain fog at 10 in the morning. Same crash at 3 in the afternoon. Same stiff hands. Same stuffy nose that never fully cleared.

He emailed me and asked what he had missed in the house.

He had not missed anything in the house.

Now, before you decide I am one of those people who thinks mold is nonsense — I am not. I’m super paranoid about mold.

Consider this: The Environmental Protection Agency’s own indoor air people ran the numbers back in 2007.

Mudarri and Fisk.

They took the risk of current asthma from damp and moldy homes and applied it to the whole country.

Of the 21.8 million Americans who had asthma at the time, they estimated about 4.6 million of those cases came from dampness and mold in the home.

That is roughly one asthmatic American in five.

So the house looks like the source of the problem. And the best study on this makes it look even worse.

Dan Norbäck at Uppsala took 7,104 young adults across 13 countries who had no asthma and no respiratory symptoms at the start.

He followed them for nine years.

He did not just ask them about their homes — he sent people to go look.

Water damage in the home predicted new adult asthma. Visible damp spots predicted it. There was a dose-response. The more damp, the more asthma.

I have read that paper several times, and there is one number sitting in the results that almost nobody quotes.

It is the number that told me Ray’s $38,000 was never going to work.

Two men live in the same house. Same walls, same air, same spore count, same basement, same everything.

One of them is wrecked.

One of them is completely fine.

The house is identical for both of them. So the house cannot be what is deciding.

Something inside the man is deciding. And it has been measured — in humans, in a hospital, with a needle and a stopwatch, in an experiment that would probably be considered too “unethical” today to even perform.

Once you know what it is, mold stops being a real estate problem and becomes something you can start doing something about tomorrow morning. For about a dollar.

And there is a second half to this that almost nobody ever gets to.

Because whatever is doing the deciding also turns out to control how fast your entire body runs.