Podcast Transcript
Dr. Sandi: Are you concerned about mold perhaps in your own home or you’re a coach and you hear a client talking about mold, they’ve had a mold problem, they think they may have a mold problem? Well, this is a very pervasive problem, and that’s why I was thrilled to connect with the person that I have on “Health Coach Talk” today. And I know you are going to really get a lot out of this conversation.
So, let me tell you about my guest, Jason Earle. He is the founder of GOT MOLD? and he’s a recognized leader in indoor air quality and environmental health. He overcame his own health challenges related to mold exposure, and has spent over two decades empowering people to identify and address indoor environmental hazards. His work bridges cutting edge science and practical applications. And he offers functional medicine practitioners tools to integrate environmental assessment into clinical care. He’s committed to advancing awareness that healthy buildings are foundational to human health. So, here is my conversation with Jason.
Welcome to our podcast, Jason. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Jason: It’s so good to be here. Thank you very much for having me.
Dr. Sandi: So, mold. This is a topic that seems to be on everyone’s mind. They’re concerned, do I have mold? How do I test for mold? What do I do if we discover mold? So, let’s start out by talking about the pervasiveness of the problem. How pervasive is the problem of mold? Is it getting worse, or are we just more aware than in previous times?
Jason: It’s a really good question. It’s a combination of things. So, first of all, Lawrence Berkeley Labs and EPA came up with the number of 47% of American homes have a mold and moisture problem of significance. That’s a big deal. The question is why now? And I would say that there’s a combination of awarenesses that have occurred in the last couple of decades. Hurricane Katrina brought Katrina cough to our awareness, which is basically exposure to very high counts of mold outside, believe it or not, as well as from chronic exposure indoors. And so, that was a mold phenomenon and this sort of giant exhibition of what happens when buildings get wet and stay wet for more than a few days.
But then, following that, COVID brought a lot of awareness, not to mold per se, but to air and to the unseen hazard and the fact that buildings can actually harbor disease and that the risk of being indoors maybe too long, maybe the same air all the time, and these kinds of things. These awarenesses are all tangential, but very strongly support the notion that air is a disease vector, or at least it’s a transport mechanism for disease, which is something that I think is very easy to forget.
Someone once said that whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish. And no, air is such an afterthought for us. Right? You think about the built environment or you think about air, water, food, shelter, these basic human needs. And obviously, everyone wants to have a bed, a home. Food, yeah, you don’t do too well without food for a few days, a few weeks. Water, a few days. Air, a few minutes. And yet it’s an afterthought.
And so, these events have brought more awareness to this sort of nebulous thing that’s so close to us that we take for granted. And then we don’t think about until it’s too smelly, too. It tastes bad, it smells bad. There’s not enough of it. And that’s air. It’s kind of like money. You don’t think about it until you don’t have it.
So, really, when you think about the pervasiveness of it, the other major component to this is that homes were built before 1947 out of materials that were low…they had low chemical load. They had a high drying potential. So, what that meant is that when they got water in the building, they didn’t absorb a lot of water and then they also dried out fairly quickly. So, you’re talking about brick, concrete, old growth timber, plaster. These kinds of materials are very durable. Again, low chemical load. They are hard to heat and cool, for sure, but they were fundamentally healthier buildings.
And then over time, because of World War II and this need to build faster, cheaper buildings to meet the demand of the baby boomers, we began looking at faster, cheaper building materials. And so, introducing sheetrock and fluffy insulation in walls a couple of decades later to save money on energy. And then we closed the buildings up really tight. And then by the way, we also slotted them with toxic chemicals in addition to building them out of mold food so that when they get moldy…they get wet, they get moldy very quickly. But then they’re also…we’re also locked into this sort of chemical stew.
So, it’s a combination of things. It’s beyond mold. You really have to look at indoor air quality in a holistic way, and think about mold as the biological component of this. And then there’s the chemistry coming from building materials, personal care products, personal cleaning products, things like that. And there’s a Venn diagram, and that overlap is really what gets a lot of people. Because mold will trigger chemical sensitivities and vice versa.
So, what we have is this huge aging housing stock of homes that were built post 1947 that are all highly susceptible to mold that have poor ventilation and are also, by the way, aspirational buildings. These are homes that oftentimes people are very excited about. They’ve saved their whole life to build a new home or to move into a new place. And unfortunately, new homes are more prone to this problem than the old homes, which is very counterintuitive.
Dr. Sandi: Yeah, I just heard that. And so, you think you’re a brand new building, it’s got to be cleared of molds. And yet it can be even worse.
Jason: It can be, for lots of reasons, by the way. First of all, the materials are prone to mold growth. But also, fascinating study came out of a major Danish university. It was Dr. Birgitte Andersen, actually, who was suspicious about the fact that Stachybotrys and Chaetomium show up so commonly in water-damaged buildings. And these are known as the toxic mold of the black molds. These are the most notorious ones. And that’s a bit of a misnomer, but it’s important to understand that they are chronic water damage indicators. They are prone to…they like to live in the ditches where dry grass…and nature, where there’s dry grass, dead grass. So, they like the cellulose. They’re like the top of the food chain on fungi.
So, why are they so prevalent in our buildings when you find them outdoors very infrequently? They’re not very much…they’re not airborne. So, why are they so prevalent in modern buildings when they get water-damaged? And she looked at all the commercial drywall that’s out there and tested it all, and found that those spores are in the drywall paper already because they’re made with post-consumer content.
So, cardboard that’s harvested from recycling programs, of course, is…you leave yours outside in the weather sometimes. Sure. They all…like in alleys that…drive through New York City for five seconds. You’ll see alleys filled with cardboard, or in Chicago. You see this and you see…that’s all being repurposed through the paper mills and stuff like that. Believe it or not, these spores are so durable, they can survive the chemical and the treatment for the actual production process. And then when mold…when moisture is…moisture condition…moisture vented develops in the building, in two or three days, next thing you know, you’ve got these guys propagating. They were already there. It’s kind of like those greeting cards that have seeds in them that people throw and grow wildflowers.
We build our buildings pre-inoculated with mold. I mean, it’s built…we build self-composting buildings and then we wonder why we have this skyrocketing rates of asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease. It really is, objectively, if you just look at it from that perspective, insane what we have done. And then we’re still wondering what’s happening.
Dr. Sandi: Yeah. And I hear so frequently that, well, all houses have mold. So, unless it’s like you see the visible black mold and unless you’re symptomatic, oh, it’s not a problem. And why freak out about it? Can you comment on that?
Jason: Yeah. The distinction is mold versus a mold problem. Okay? So, now, to put a point on that, mold is ubiquitous in the sense that the organism, fungi and microfungi… So, just to be clear, fungi contains macrofungi, mushrooms, microfungi, molds and yeast. Okay? What we’re talking about is microfungi. It is ubiquitous. Every breath you take, you’re breathing in spores. Hopefully, by the way, in a healthy environment, you’re breathing in spores. And when you go for a walk in the forest, part of the benefit is you’re creating in the diverse flora, little hormetic stressors in some cases that actually train your immune system to what we are…as humans, we are from earth or human comes from the word humus, by the way, which is from soil. And so, we are from earth, but we’ve disconnected ourselves so much that when we’re in buildings that are too clean, then we have…that’s a problem and buildings that have too much fungal matter, that’s a problem.
But anyway, most spores is normal in a healthy environment to a limited degree. And so, I think it’s very important that we recognize that mold spores are abundant. They’re on the face of your watch, on the…in every breath you take. It’s when they begin to grow indoors that we have problems. And the reason for that is that mold is the entry. It’s the beginning of decay when it’s eating your building, it’s releasing these digestive byproducts.
Well, if you suck on a tailpipe of any living organism for long enough, you’re not going to do well. We know that effluence is not healthy. You don’t want to be downstream during the digestive process of some other organism. And what we do is we breathe in their digestive byproducts. And this is fundamentally just objectively unhealthy. The musty smell, some people call them mold burps. Some people refer them to another effluent that we’re all familiar with. And so, that’s really what it is.
And so, these microbial VOCs, which have…in some cases, they’re carcinogens. Some of them are known to be neurotoxic. Have a doozy on your nervous system. It affects you primarily through your trigeminal nerve. And there’s all this downstream. There’s a neurogenic inflammatory cascade, but it’s beginning to be much more well understood that creates all this emotional dysregulation.
So, the difference between mold spores and the environment could be a slight hormetic stressor, benevolent actually, and benign in most cases or benevolent in some philosophies, is good. So, you want your indoor air to look a lot like outdoor, which has mold, spores, but mold is not growing actively in your building. Buildings where mold growth is occurring, you have a moisture problem.
And let me just also say that moisture problem…and what’s grows from it is not just mold. You get bacteria. You get all sorts of other stuff. It’s like a pool party, all sorts of uninvited guests show. And so, the byproducts of dampness are a much larger concern because it’s not just mycotoxins and things like that. There’s lots of other things into this chemical potpourri that occurs from biological growth in the home. The distinction is mold spores, normal, mold growth indoors, not.
Dr. Sandi: Thank you for that really detailed explanation. So, let’s turn to testing. So, let’s say you’re concerned you’ve had mold exposure and you want testing, lab testing for mycotoxin. What are some of the issues that may arise as relying on this type of testing? Is it reliable? Can it be overwhelming when people get back these lab reports? Can you dive into that?
Jason: There’s so many layers of problems with this. And I would say that some of…the biggest problem is that most of the coaches, providers, practitioners who are using these tests don’t really even understand mycotoxin, let alone what the route of exposure, most common routes of exposure are from literature. So, this is what’s important.
We tell stories, we make up stories. And this happens, I think, primarily from communities, Facebook communities in particular where things get repeated and then they get amplified. And if you hear it from enough people that you like and trust that are similar to you, then eventually, it becomes the truth. We’re seeing this in politics. We’re also seeing this in health, and this is hard to debunk. But let me give this a shot because I think this is going to bump up against a lot of what people have been taught. But upon closer examination, I would encourage everybody to use the tools that we have at our disposal, like ChatGPT and things like that because the literature is accessible now. It’s no longer a Google search. Now, you can get much deeper into this stuff.
And so, mycotoxins are the…first of all, mycotoxin tests that are being promoted heavily in this industry are either a blood test, which is for antibodies. So, it just means you’ve been exposed in some way. There’s also the urine panels, which actually yield mycotoxins for direct analysis. Okay.
So, Dr. David Krause, who’s a…was the state toxicologist for Florida and got his PhD, wrote his PhD on mold growth and mycotoxin production on building materials. So, he knows a little bit more about this than most people I know. In fact, probably a hundred of them that I know combined. And I know a lot of these people. He has concluded, and this is supported by the evidence in air testing, that fungi that produce mycotoxins in an environment where there’s a lot of nutrition, like grain silos, agricultural settings, where there’s a lot of food and a lot of moisture and a lot of temperature variability, these organisms are under a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of competition. So, they bring out their chemical weapons, and they’ve got a lot of nutrition to do that. So, mycotoxin production is very metabolically intensive for fungi.
And so, building materials don’t actually have that nutrition. So, this is really interesting stuff. This is a first principles discussion. So, mycotoxin production being so intensive, building materials are…essentially, all the nutrition has been extracted. Bleached paper does not have a lot of nutrition in it. And it’s a very thin layer of it. The gypsum itself does not have nutrition in it. It’s basically mineral. And fiberglass itself does not have nutrition. A little bit of paper on the insulation does. OSP and things like that, those materials are actually much harder to get to the nutrition because there’s lignans and other protective poisons in there to actually inhibit fungal growth.
So, you just keep going. I can go layer after layer, but the bottom line is that the mycotoxin production argument is actually metabolically probably easily disproved. And by the way, there’s not a single reputable study that shows that you can find mycotoxins in residential environments in the air in quantities significant enough to yield in urine panel. There’s never been one study, not one.
Now, I would open this up and this is my call. There are lots of very intelligent, motivated people that will watch and listen to this. Go do the research. Don’t rely on me. Trust, but verify if you want. But my suggestion is to go and look at this more closely because there’s a couple of studies out there and they’ve been…sure, you can find some in the air, but not significant enough to track to this yield. So, where’s it coming from?
Well, Dr. Andrew Campbell from MyMycoLab, who does the blood test, will tell you it’s not food, it’s just buildings. And he claims he’s got all this research. I’ve known Andrew for ages, and he and I openly discuss this and debate about it. And I can show him the pile of studies on food. A study from 2018 was a group of food scientists who were challenging this notion that 25% of mycotoxins…of foodstuffs internationally have mycotoxin contamination. And so, they went to UN and said, hey, where’s the data? And they said, well, we don’t really know. We don’t really have it.
So, they went and did a big meta study, and they came back and said, well, it turns out about 10% of foodstuffs at the point of origination when they’re exporting have mycotoxin contamination. So, not huge. But by the time it got to the port of destination, which is primarily United States and Europe, it was 60% to 80%, and many of them with five to seven different mycotoxins, which in aggregate amplify each other.
So, we have a major problem with imported stuff, coffee, seeds, nuts, grains, grains in general, spices, also conventional meat and dairy, because these animals are fed non-human-grade food that’s oftentimes stored in substandard conditions. And then it gets moldy and then that carries over to us. So, we’re getting food, we’re getting mycotoxins from our food, primarily. It’s showing up in urine panels.
And people are then being alarmed. They go take an ERMI test. ERMI is wildly prone to false positives, and it’s been…even the EPA, who developed it, said don’t use it. And it’s a 36 species panel out of 230,000 known taxa. And it uses DNA-based approach that’s 25 years old. This is literally the stone ages of genomics PCR.
So, we’re using ancient technologies to create this constellation of data points that then like myth and mythology, making stories up about these things that are not based on truth. So, people, they’re chasing Stachybotrys spores and ripping their houses apart and getting these extraordinarily expensive procedures done both in terms of detox and investigations based upon these junk science tests. And they are junk science. None of them have been validated. There’s not a single human diagnostic test that has been validated in this industry. This is dangerous stuff.
So, this is a clinical diagnosis, understanding that the building…and so, I always say, the building is a patient. Think about the building as the patient. You have to look at them through the same fundamental approach that you do with a scientific method. You first get history, and you look at symptoms, and then you look at the building itself just the way you’ve seen…the way you have a physical to a human. And then, later, you do the testing. People want to lead with the test. They want the test to be a silver bullet, but you can’t test a body like that. Show me the test for cancer. Which is the test for cancer? There isn’t one, right? Because imaging will miss something, blood will miss something, and a physical will miss something. You have to do all three.
So, when we’re looking at buildings, we have to think about the much more holistic way. And the building is this extension of our immune system. It is not just a box that we live and store stuff in. And so, the building has to be taken into consideration as really a part of almost our anatomy. The word shelter comes from shell. Think about that. Animals, that’s part of their anatomy. With us, we’re not that much different. We’re a little bit like hermit crabs in the sense that we don’t do very well without our shell. So, this idea that this is a blunt, this is not in part of fundamental…actually, the first step in every single intake, to me, I think, is probably a major gap.
And so, we’ve developed a framework for that called the fast forward questions, which help guide that process. But my call to arms here is really to start thinking about the building as a fundamental foundational aspect of health that if you don’t get the building right, none of the other efforts that you make will actually take hold. But if you get the building right, A, those interventions will do well. And B, you don’t have to be nearly as vigilant as you would otherwise.
Dr. Sandi: That makes so much sense. Okay. So, building as a patient, how do you assess, how do you test to make a good diagnosis?
Jason: Sure. So, first of all, I’ve got four questions, and I can give them to you so you can put them into the notes. But I always say that, on intake, they should ask, first of all…and again, I’ll give this to you in writing. So, is there a history of dampness, floods, leaks, sign of moisture conditions in the building? So, that’s number one, history. Number two, is there any visible indication of dampness? Is there any visible mold, blistering paint, warped materials, these kinds of things? Condensation on windows. So, this is just, do you see it?
And then is there an odor? Is there any signs of that damp smell, that musty smell, which is not just an aesthetic nuisance. Actually, this has a neurosensory impact. The musty smell is a source of disease, dis-ease. So, it’s very important. Odor is not just an indicator. It is the first indicator of mold, but it’s also a source of illness.
And then you also want to ask if there’s symptoms that seem to get better when people leave the building. And so, this is really important because this…by the way, if anyone wants to focus on the mycotoxin, that’s dependent upon a toxicity diagnosis. Let’s look at toxicity for one second. Does toxicity, when you walk into a building, immediately kick in? Do you get toxic immediately, and then when you leave the building, immediately get non-toxic? That doesn’t make sense. But that’s the way symptoms with mold-related or building-related illness typically onsets quickly. Relative to exposure, the offset is fairly… Acute exposure, acute symptoms, chronic exposure, chronic symptoms. That’s not a toxicity model by definition. Toxicity is a much slower build, and then it doesn’t off-ramp the moment you leave the building.
And so, when we’re talking about symptoms, building-related symptoms, we have to look at that and recognize that’s a hallmark of building and mold-related illness is really that curve. So, we’re looking for see it, smell it, feel it. That’s the beginning framework. And so, the fast forward questions in the intake process really revolve around that because if there’s an answer yes to any of those, then you’re going to recommend an assessment. That assessment can either be a DIY assessment or a professional assessment, depending upon where the person lives, if they’ve got access to resources, if they’ve got financial resources, if they’re more of a hands-on person or not, that would indicate whether they should do it. But the answer yes to any of those, you have to get an assessment done.
You don’t skip the remediation or a free mold inspection by a remediator or you have to get an assessment done by…and we offer a framework with gotmold.com. So, you can test your air. And we have an ebook, which guides people through that process of inspecting their home and doing all that stuff, the safe, easy, affordable way to do that. And then on the other side, we’re working on a GOT MOLD? professional network of inspectors and professionals, environmental consultants that can help people who are ready for that, that have the budget and things like that.
But that, I think, is important because when we start looking at the building in its proper place, then all of the other efforts, all of the other optimizations are that. They’re not trying to put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
Dr. Sandi: This is a great step by step process, and love those questions. So, let’s say you’re answering yes, you’ve got the odor, you’ve got the paint peeling, maybe you remember some water damage. Okay. And then a big issue is always, okay, you’ve got…let’s say you have it assessed, but I’ve seen assessment reports where it’s like you have to tear down the office practically. And then how do you know who’s reputable in terms of remediation? So, somebody who just took a certificate is, oh, they’re a mold inspector. And how do you know who is going to be reputable in terms of…particularly with the remediation?
Jason: That’s a really good question. And this also applies to the assessment side of things because there are a couple of groups right now and they’re very prominent and I’m going to…they will remain nameless, but anyone who’s dealt with them will know who I’m talking about, which is they’re very prominent. They’ve got a lot of social proof. They’ve got a lot of very big names and some actors and people that have really supported them. And they’re very articulate and they really understand and they speak to this hyper cleanliness. They really are more of a Schumacher type, which is a fear-based approach that does not work, by the way, in the long run, because fear is part of this problem here.
The neurosensory component of this creates a dysregulated nervous system. And until you get out of fear, you’re not going to get better. Then nobody gets better. It’s air, food, and attitude. You got to get the air straight. You got to get your food. You got to get the mycotoxins out of your diet and then the inflammatory stuff out of your diet, and then you got to get your nervous system straight.
Unfortunately, the Schumacher, that process is fear-based. In fact, the whole toxic conversation is very fear-based. So, I think it’s important to lay that groundwork first because the people who are pushing fear and the people who are pushing mycotoxins either…whether it be on the assessment side or on the remediation side are not…they’re disqualified because they are going to be very heavy-handed. They’re going to fail and then charge you more because they failed because they have to be so vigilant around this. Fear on this is overwhelming.
They also generally charge about 10,000 for an assessment. So, if that triggers, if that…anybody…that sounds familiar or 100,000 for remediation, if that sounds familiar, you know who I’m talking about. They rip out HVAC systems. That’s never been necessary in my 25 years. They’ve swabbed toilets during assessments. That is insane, stupid, wasteful, and completely…you know what you’re going to find. You’re going to find bacteria. You’re going to find stuff. It’s a toilet, for heaven’s sake. So, you’re getting…if someone’s swabbing your toilet, you’re getting scammed. Okay. If someone’s telling you got to rip out your HVAC system and they haven’t found a mold problem in that HVAC system, then you’re getting scammed. Okay. And by the way, if you’re relying on social proof, because someone’s got a famous endorsement, you’re probably getting scammed.
So, what you need to know is that there’s an industry standard. It’s called the S520. S as in Sam for standard 520. That is the operative framework for mold remediation. This does not call for chemicals. There’s no chemicals to be used. If they’re using fogs, chemicals, sprays, I’m going to kill the mold, all this stuff, not part of the program. Mold remediation is a few simple steps. Find the moisture source. Stop it. Oftentimes, there’s more than one. So, you oftentimes have a sort of subtle source and maybe humidity-based, and you may have a leak. Sometimes that manifests in two different places at similar…and you think you’ve got one, but really oftentimes it’s more than one source. So, find the moisture source or sources. Stop that. Remediation means remedy. That’s the root word, remedy. So, what’s the problem here? Moisture. Mold is not the problem. Mold is the symptom. So, we got to remedy…the whole thing is really remedying the moisture problem. Stop that.
Then we’re going to identify what materials have been affected, water-damaged and moldy. Those will then be removed in a very careful manner so as not to contaminate other spaces that are not contaminated. Ideally, you’ve tested the whole space, indoors and outdoors, in the work area and outside the work area so that you know what the spore counts are before that. So, then after they finished their work and when they say that they’re done, that someone comes back in as a third party, independent third party that does not have a financial relationship with them. If an inspector tells you there’s only one remediator that they only…guess what. They probably are getting paid. I know what it’s like to only trust one, but oftentimes it’s a little cozy. And by the way, if that remediator happens to be your uncle, which is the case in this other group that I’m talking about, that might be a conflict of interest by itself.
So, we’re looking at these things. Ask about your relationships with the remediator. Are they family? That might be a problem. You don’t want to have too cozy of a relationship between the inspectors and the remediators because they can quickly and easily pass a project that may not actually be passed, or find other ways to span the scope of work. And then everybody benefits from this. And so, you become the product instead of the project being the product.
This is a fundamental problem in our industry. There’s a lot of opportunists. So, making sure that they’re certified in IICRC and that they’re certified in the S520…and not just that the company is, but the foreman on the project is. The worker bees can do what they need to do, but the foreman needs to be certified in the IICRC.
And so, really, what it comes down to is, do they follow best practices and industry standards? Do they advocate a green clean, which is really more about elbow grease than it is about products, sprays, and chemicals and things like…that is a big red flag. Will they agree to a third party test, a third party inspection from an inspector that you choose or vice versa? Will the remediator agree to work with someone who’s independent? And then will they also wait until…
Oh. By the way, anyone who advocates the use of ERMI during, before, or after remediation is a disqualifier because it’s always index is high and it generates additional work. And so, ERMI is a lead generator. Make no mistake. ERMI is a tool of abuse. And mycotoxin panels within some practices are, too. I think it’s widely used because people don’t understand it, but I think there are some practices that build their business on that because it’s so prone. I don’t know anyone who’s ever peed in the cup and hasn’t come back with a high number.
And by the way, that number, if you’re excreting, your body’s doing its job. These are very difficult to excrete. So, they’re both hydrophobic and lipophilic. So, mycotoxins, they don’t like water, , hydrophobic. So, they don’t excrete well in the kidneys. And they’re lipophilic. So, it gets stuck in your fat cells.
So, here’s the good news. If you’re excreting them, you’re detoxing. I’m much more concerned when I see a clean panel with someone in modern America because that person has got detox pathway issues. Think about that. It’s quite opposite of what you think. And by the way, all of that study, all of that work, all the mycotoxin panels, whether it be Great Plains, or Mosaic now, or the other guys, RealTime Labs who just sold, all that science is veterinary medicine. There’s not a single study that validates this on the human side of things.
And so, it’s very important that people realize that they’re cutting and pasting, really, from veterinary medicine. And that route of exposure is through food, not through air. So, we have to look at these tools, I think, with an abundance of honesty and clarity.
Dr. Sandi: This has just been so fascinating. Finally, I hear so much that people are told you need to move or you need to get all new furniture and all new clothing and you can’t touch it. Clear out your house. Thoughts on that.
Jason: So, here’s the truth in this. If your stuff has been directly wet…and let’s make the distinction between porous things and non-porous things. So, fabric, furniture, porous, upholstered stuff, things that can absorb water or humidity, books, things like that. If these things get directly wet and stay wet for more than a few days, they should generally be discarded.
Now, anything that’s of high monetary or sentimental value, you can address those on a case by case basis. So, like art or photos or keepsakes or things like that that are of high value, either monetary or sentimental value often can be restored. Maybe not to their pre-loss condition, but they can often be restored.
And so, that may mean sending them through a dry cleaner or there are specialty remediation companies that will come in and clean art and documents and stuff like that. This can be done. In fact, sometimes water-damaged stuff, if you catch it fast enough, like documents, you can freeze them really quickly and that saves them from getting… So, there are techniques if you get through it quick enough.
So, unless stuff has gotten directly wet or it’s been in a very high humidity environment, so like 60% or 70% or higher for more than a few days, they can generally be cleaned and then removed from the environment for the rest of the demo and stuff like that. So, I’m talking about you’ve got mold in a wall and fairly normal spore counts or even high spore counts, but there hasn’t been actual water on these materials or on these items and the humidity hasn’t been really high in that space. That does not call for removing and throwing everything out, period. End of story. That is absolutely…it causes more harm, I think, probably than the mold.
Dr. Sandi: Oh, absolutely. Financially and emotionally, to be told this. And I’ve seen this countless times where, yeah, maybe the mold was by the window and or you had issues in the room, but now you have to get new mattresses and you have to get all of your clothing replaced. It’s in a closet that had no water damage. I could see where if you had water damage, you had a basement and there was water and you had boxes of belongings, yeah, that makes total sense that those were water-damaged. So, thank you for shedding light on this. That’s a big issue.
So, coaches can…I believe, are so well-positioned to help people to clarify, to look at the myths that are out there, to help them get the right assessment of their homes, the right remediation and also educate them about the issues with biomarker testing. So, can you comment on that role of health coaches?
Jason: Yeah. I think that what we need is greater access to well-informed people at the front lines. And I think that’s both the problem and the opportunity because what I talk about a lot is, hey, let’s go back to the scientific method with this stuff. Oftentimes, health coaches are much more open to that kind of conversation because when I say that to a doctor, they’re going to be like, listen, man, I got the MD, you don’t. But unfortunately, so often, people treating people with mold-related or building-related illness forget the scientific method because they’re so used to doing what they’ve been doing. And they actually become…they can’t see the forest for the trees.
Whereas, I think my experience has been with health coaches that they’re hungry for knowledge and information. They actually want to do the right thing. They may not necessarily have the science background or the medical background to be able to go too deep in it. But I think, in terms of learning how to triage this stuff and to be able to help people with the fundamental stuff…
Listen. We live on planet Earth, which is a water planet. We live on planet fungi. So, in other words, mold happens. And we live in buildings and breathe air. So, this is all fundamental stuff, but we need more people on the front lines that understand the value and the importance of the built environment. Because I think that that level of care can actually help people get over the hump on a lot of stuff that doesn’t require medical intervention. I always say that the last mile in this doesn’t occur in the clinic. It doesn’t occur in the hospital. It occurs in the home. But unfortunately, doctors…or, fortunately, doctors don’t do house calls.
So, we need to be doing house calls. And that’s health coaches, that’s environmental consultants. That’s people that are willing to go into homes where there’s a baby crying and or whatever. So, they’re willing to go into that uncomfortable, very personal space, something that…where they can actually interface with people in the environment themselves, whether it be remote or not. But the point is that I think that is what’s missing in our system. And so, I’m here to help support that.
Dr. Sandi: So beautifully said. This has been just a fascinating conversation. Jason, where can people find you, find GOT MOLD?
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So, we are…first of all, we made a little landing page for your listeners and that lives at gotmold.com/health. You could probably put that link in the show notes. And so, if you go there, you’ll find that there’s a link to our ebook, which is a 46-page PDF with inspection checklists and FAQs, and covers a lot of stuff we talked about, what to look for, walks you through the beginning of what we call our GOT MOLD? assessment process.
And then also there you’ll find that there’s a coupon code, which you can also put in the show notes separately, I guess, COACH10, which gives any of your listeners a discount for 10% on any of our products, primarily. Right now, our product is the GOT MOLD? test kit, which is an air test. We have a new test coming out called the Myco Bio, which is really exciting. So, this is a dust test that was developed by Yale. We have a global exclusive on it, and it looks at the entire fungal ecology all at once. It’s a dust test. So, it will make ERMI go away finally, which is really good. It’s about two months from us being able to offer this.
So, if anybody wants to go learn more about that, go check out MCT, which stands for mold classification tool, gotmold.com. And there you’ll find a place where you can sign up, you can put your email in and we’ll send you updates as it becomes available. We’re going to be doing some early adopter offers and some beta testing and stuff like that.
And so, it’s fun because this…you collect a few samples from above doorways on your own and you get the entire fungal ecosystem and then all the interactions. And so, you can see the diversity and heat map and what organisms are found. And it’s next level stuff. And it uses AI machine learning to make sense of all the data. So, we’re starting to get a better grip on what a normal fungal ecology is, and giving people the tools and knowledge that they need to navigate this stuff.
Dr. Sandi: Wonderful. Well, we will post all that in the show notes. And Jason, this has been just a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being with us.
Jason: Thank you for having me.
