First, that is me, the ruggedly handsome mold professional, maybe that is what the site should have been called. My name is Jeffrey, I have nearly 20 years of experience in industrial hygiene, environmental health, and indoor air quality. My educational background is in biological sciences, and I have a master's degree in public health. I started becoming interested in mold and indoor air quality back in graduate school where my thesis work revolved around indoor air quality in one of the largest medical research and academic institutions in the country. This is my website and all of the information posted here was written by me (unless I'm obviously referencing another entity/person). So, rest assured you are getting information from someone who makes a living working with mold and not some company making spammy websites full of paid ads trying to make a buck off a click.
Mold is Everywhere! I aptly name this website/blog, MoldEverywhere.com because the first step to understanding mold and the role it plays in indoor air quality is acknowledging that mold is literally everywhere and a normal part of our environment. Not only is mold a normal part of our environment, but molds also play a pretty vital role in having a healthy outdoor environment. Molds play a key ecological role as the primary decomposers of dead organic matter, whether that be leaves from trees, dead plants, or even dead animals. By decomposing organic matter in the environment, molds release nutrients back into the environment which are needed by those organisms that are still alive, so they are basically part of the circle of life. Do you like cheese? Certain molds are also used in the production of cheese, like Blue Cheese, one of my personal favorites. Soy sauce, the real stuff, is also produced through a fermentation process that cannot happen without mold. Ever taken the antibiotic Penicillin? You guessed it, comes from a genus of mold called Penicillium. Where do these molds come from? They weren’t made in a laboratory; they are naturally found in our environment. That being said, it is perfectly normal to find mold spores (the reproductive structures of mold) in the air outside. If it is found in the air outside, it is going to be found in the air inside because last time I checked, our homes and office buildings have doors and windows, oh and people.
So, if it is normal to find mold in the outside air, how and why does it become a problem? Why is the internet filled with stories of people with mold related illnesses. Didn’t I read or hear about a story where people died from exposure to “black mold”? The answer to that is not necessarily simple, but as the saying goes, all things in moderation. In my opinion, that is really the goal when it comes to mold and indoor air quality, moderation or keeping the levels of mold to a normal background level. At the end of the day, we are never going to be able to eliminate all the mold spores from the air, at least not in a normal home or commercial building environment. So how are people getting sick? Amplification. What you want to avoid in an indoor environment is the amplification of mold, or in other words you do not want the mold to get happy inside your home. Most of the time when people are getting sick from mold inside their home or office space it is because mold has been allowed to amplify somewhere in the building which is elevating the number of mold spores in the air beyond what the normal background level is. Why this sounds like a pretty simple explanation, in practice, determining what is normal and what is elevated is not always straightforward. There are definitely some cases where it is very clear that something is abnormal, but there are also a lot of cases where it can be difficult to determine based upon the numbers alone. If it was easy, there would not be so many resources dedicated to the topic.
My goal with this website is to continue to unwrap the rest of the mold story with additional articles and resources. Future posts will get into helping you determine if you have a mold problem, discuss mold prevention, mold remediation (cleaning, removal), and even things you can do from a design standpoint to reduce the likelihood of developing a mold issue in your home or office.
Stick around, more to come! (Of if you are reading this post years after it was posted, the information is already here!)
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Jeffrey
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