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Stephen Redd, chief of the Air Pollution & Respiratory Health Branch of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). Possible health effects are what drive his and CDC's interest in indoor mold. At least to some degree, mold can be a health hazard. First, airborne mold spores or fragments can induce allergic symptoms in some people. Those symptoms range from an irritated nose and a cough to an exacerbated asthma attack, Redd says. Second, in rare instances, immunocompromised individuals, including cancer patients and those with HIV, can contract a mold infection, usually in a hospital. The mold invades the patient's lung tissue and proliferates in either the lung or the bloodstream. And third, Redd says, there is an open question as to whether the toxins that some mold spores produce have a negative health effect when inhaled indoors. The most common fungal genera growing indoors include Penicillium, Aspergillus, and when very wet conditions prevail, Stachybotrys, Chaetomium, and some other genera. All of these fungi produce toxic metabolites of varying potencies. Fungi common in outdoor air are also found indoors, and these include Cladosporium, Alternaria, Aureobasidium, and Fusarium. These are associated with hay fever and asthma. Establishing whether indoor mold growth causes significant adverse health effects is not an easy task. "The challenge," Redd says, "is separating what is really known from what is possible." CDC has recruited the help of the Institute of Medicine--specifically, an IOM panel on damp indoor spaces and health--to prepare a comprehensive, objective review of what is known about the health effects of exposure to indoor mold. The panel's report is due this spring. Aino Nevalainen, who sits on the IOM Panel. In 1994, in Cleveland, an outbreak of pulmonary bleeding in infants occurred. The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention investigated, and, according to CDC's Stephen Redd, "an association was identified between increasing concentrations of spores of [S. chartarum] in case households compared to control households. That was the initial finding." CDC and an outside panel of experts later reviewed the initial findings and stated in a report published in March 2000 that the study had a number of flaws so that the originally reported association shouldn't be considered proven. "It was sort of like we were back where we started before that investigation was done," Redd says. |
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