Category Archives: News

Indian River County firefighters test positive for toxic mold

Nine firefighters in Indian River County have tested positive for exposure to toxic mold, which could be inside their fire stations, according to The Indian River County Fire Union.

The union received the test results this week.

Union President, John O’Connor, says the union is now pressing the county to more thoroughly inspect the stations for mold and to correct the problem.

O’Connor says firefighters at three stations tested positive.

Read more here:
Indian River County firefighters test positive for toxic mold

Presentation by Dr Jack Thrasher – Part 2

Presentation by Dr. Jack Thrasher
Toxicologist and Injured Worker Advocate

Transcribed for the hearing impaired. Part 2
For Part 1 of the transcription Follow this link

Starting at 7:00

That’s a horrible tragic case.
Alrighty… the next one.

This is a couple right here in Fulsom. They were in a water damaged brand new home. It was a brand new home but of course built by a builder who wasn’t to careful about construction. And this just recently happened. This was within the last couple of years. All these cases get settled out of court and all the records get sealed so nobody knows what’s going on.

But I’m going to write this story up too. He develops what we call renal cell carcinoma in situ. She develops ductile breast cancer in situ. So they both have surgery. They remove a tumor off of his kidney. Fortunately it has not come back. And they also did a bilateral mastectomy on her. Got rid of the breast tissue. We take the breast tissues and what we look for is the presence of fungal DNA in the breast tissues and in the kidney. And guess what? That’s what we found. We also tested their urine. We found the same mycotoxins in their urine. We also tested the environment and found the same organisms and the mycotoxins in the home. Now, that case got settled out of court. Again, a misdiagnosis. They go to the family doctor. The family doctor says, “I don’t know what to do.” I have no idea what’s going on.

This last case, the next case I want to talk about very briefly, it’s right here in Sacramento. This is a young woman, age 41, her fiance and her 12 year old daughter. She is a trainer of horses. Little tiny thing. About 5’2″ and she could shove 1,500-2,000 pound horses around and push ’em around. She goes to work for this outfit with her own business. She has a business of doing massages on horses, race horses to make them feel better after a race. Doing very well. She moves into an apartment that is available to her fiance, her daughter and her on the horse ranch. Unbeknownst to her, the apartment has had a history of water intrusion and sewage leaks. So they stay here for a while and the next thing they know they are not feeling well, they have headaches, their neuro-cognitive dysfunctions, etc. etc. etc. going on and on. And then she calls me in finally as her expert in this case. This case is ongoing, the suit has been filed so it hasn’t been closed off yet. And she has what we call muscle wasting disease, and the fiance is just now starting to show up with it and the 12 year daughter is showing up with the same phenomena. Total muscle wasting disease and I will explain to you what she cannot do.

I had her stand on her tip toes like this. Ok. See I can do it. So if you do that, you find that your ____________muscles get very tight. I pushed on her muscles and they were flacid(sp) Her biceps flacid(sp) Everything about her, all the muscles in her body flacid. Now she has gone over to Stamford medical school. She has a neuro-muscular disease and we don’t know what it is. We’ve done biopsies on her muscles and we looked for mitochondrial function. Now, remember I said the baby had mitochondrial deficit? This woman, for some reason has an increase in mitochondrial mass and mitochondrial enzymes but cannot utilize the energy that she is taking in. We found the mycotoxins in her urine. We found the mycotoxins in her environment. And now we are doing mold DNA on the biopsied specimens and we are looking for mycotoxins in those specimens. Now, that’s a tragic story. Here is a family of 3, adversely effected by the environment and if you listen to ACOEM, ACOEM will tell you it doesn’t hurt normal people. It only, mold and fungi only hurt people who have immune compromised.

Now the last case I am going to talk about very briefly is right up here in Uva City. Family of five. Yeah, there is twin boys and I think the little girl, mother and father. They move into a brand new home within a year all five are sick. The two twin boys are bout the second, grade one or two, develop severe asthma and they can’t control the asthma. So they call in an outfit and lo and behold, they find the fungi and the bacteria. they corrected that. Now this is going to arbitration hearing Monday. They corrected that situation but continued to be sick.

So, we were called back out there a month ago to look — so called they remediated the house — to look at that home. And guess what? They still had water intrusion, we still found the fungi, and we are now looking for the mycotoxins and all the other things and these people are sick.

You know what the arbitrator said to this? Well they remediated this thing 3 years ago, why are they still sick? So, I got to go into this arbitration, sit down and say, sir, on such and such a date, we went in there and this is what we found and they never cleaned the damn mess up to begin with.

Alright. And I can go on to case after case after case after case that I have been involved with over the years. It’s very interesting. I always get called a junk scientist. But why do the cases get settled out of court? If I’m a junk scientist? If I am a junk scientist, put me on the witness stand. They will not do that. They don’t want this information out to the general public.

I don’t know what else to say about this, Steve, but, uh. It’s very frightening what’s going on out there.

I’ll tell one other story. In 1988, I was called into Washington D.C. by the EPA Union and the workers in that building were getting sick. We called it, you called it, Larry, back then? Sick Building Syndrome. They had 150 workers, they furlowed to home who did not have to come back into the building to work because the building made them that sick. There were probably more than 150.

We went through and we inspected the building. As you pointed out, the air conditioning system was contaminated, you could see mold growing, filthy dirt, just the whole place was filthy dirty. So we had a town meeting in the big hall there at the EPA headquarters. And I was setting there and the EPA administrator at the time, I’ve forgotten who it was, says, “Wow, he says. Here at the EPA, we recognize that sick building syndrome truly is real. But we don’t have it here at headquarters. And have you ever seen an audience of one thousand workers get up and boo all at once, they all stood up and booed this guy. He ran off the stage.

And so this has been going on… that was 1988, so how long do you think this has been hidden from the public?

Well, that’s 20 plus years.

Ok. But anyway. It has been going on before then. Because we were talking about earlier in the research papers about sick building syndrome and guess who was denying that sick building syndrome existed? The industry that is responsible for maintaining buildings. It didn’t exist, ok.

And that was 1988.

What of Legionaire’s disease that kicked.

But anyways. I don’t know what else to say. I’ve been battling these issues since 1982 or so 1980 or something like this. And it continues today. It goes on and on and on. You heard what Dr. Rose had to say. And I see it from the other point of view, the injured people.

Not only what happened in Poway, ok. But across the country, it’s everywhere. The estimate I last saw was some 30-40% of the schools in this country are contaminated with mold and bacteria from intrusion.

I was called and went down to Santa Maria at a high school with an industrial hygienist and there were two workers who were put into little closet like rooms and the prior testing said, oh there is nothing wrong with this environment. But what we did is we went in there and actually tested the environment under the working conditions. What we found was extremely elevated carbon dioxide which means poor ventilation. And then we took dust samples out of the heating system and we tested them with what we call PCR/DNA analysis and guess what? Those two offices and the rest of the school have a history of mold and bacterial intrusion. That the remediators and the industrial hygienists that they hired didn’t look for.

So right now that is in litigation on behalf of those two injured workers under workman’s comp and we will see how it goes from here. So what they do is they hire a group who doesn’t do what they need to do to identify the problem and then deny that there is a problem. And now I have to go into court and say, well this is what they did differently then we did differently. And this is the difference between the two analysises. This one is real and this one is false.

You know it is very difficult to convince a judge who has got his mind closed to begin with. But that is the type of thing that we have to do. Alright, that’s enough out of me Thank you.

Presentation At Corporate Medicine, Injured Workers, ACOEM And Labor Sponsored By California Coalition For Workers Memorial Day March 26, 2011 San Francisco www.workersmemorialday.org

Dr. Jack Thrasher on Mold, Bacteria and Mycotoxins

Presentation by Dr. Jack Thrasher
Toxicologist and Injured Worker Advocate

Transcribed for the hearing impaired

(speaking) Dr Jack Thrasher:
“What he said is true, but I want to correct one thing for the record. Everybody keeps talking about mold being a problem. When we get into a water damaged building, whether it be a school, a house or a building, there’s more than mold present. We have a variety of species of fungi is what I refer to them as. But also, there are bacteria that are almost as dangerous if not more dangerous than the fungi. And the bacteria consists of two groups. What we call gram negative and gram positive. The gram negative bacteria are pathogenic. The gram positive bacteria include a whole group called Actinomyces and the Actinomyces produce toxins that are more toxic than the mycotoxins that are produced by the mold or the fungi.

So what we are dealing with is a very complex indoor environment that is impinging upon the human being and that environment. Therefore the immune system gets busy and doesn’t know what it is doing to fight off and the people wind up being shifted into what we call a chronic inflammatory disease syndrome. The immune system has shifted over to try to correct this situation but it has shifted over to where it begins attacking it’s own body with it’s cytocines and hormones that the immune system produces and causes general inflammation. Now the general inflammation involves the brain so they get into neurocognitive deficites, it involves the lungs so they get into respiratory distress, it involves the muscles so they lose muscle tone, a whole variety so it just infects the whole organ.

I am going to talk about five cases that I am involved in and we are writing the research papers on and what happened.

The first one is a 65 day old infant that died. The infant died of what they call a Rye’s Syndrome. Rye’s Syndrome is a general deterioration of the body, particularly the brain and the liver. And the child was born into a home that had water damage. Conceived and then born into the home. The child was born in the hospital in respiratory distress and was stabilized and sent home. And within 65 days back to the hospital a couple of times. Within 65 days died. Suddenly died. We got involved in the case because we were called in as experts in the case. And what we did was we took autopsy materials and we actually took live tissue materials, muscle and connective tissue before the infant died. We studied them. One thing we found is the infant had what we call mitochondrial damage. Mitochondria are the little organelles in the body that produce the energy we need to do the work with. The Mitochondria were so damaged that they were not functioning so the child really had an energy deficit. The other thing we did is we took the tissues and we looked for and we identified both aspergillus species in the child’s tissues and we also identified aflotoxins and tricothecene mycotoxins in the tissues. Then we took the mother and we took her breast milk. And guess what? We found the mycotoxins in the breast milk. So now this child was exposed in utero and post utero and died as result of Rye’s Syndrome. Now what happened to that case? It got settled out of court. Alrighty? And what they did was they locked up all the information but they are not going to prevent me like they are trying to prevent Sharon from writing the truth. We are writing this paper up and it will be published. And we have identified all that.

The next case is a lady by name… who worked in a building on the east coast. She started to work, she was healthy. ok. By the way, these people are not immune suppressed, ok? These people are normal healthy individuals. She worked in a building with water damage. She went to work and slowly began not feeling well and developed some rashes on her skin, etc. Goes to her doctor, the doctor says you need to see an allergist. She goes to an allergist and guess what, she has suddenly developed allergies to aspergillus, penicillium and a few other molds. She slowly got worse. She started developing headaches, lost her vision, they decided after losing her vision they better do an MRI on her to see what was going on and they found a mass in her Sphenoid sinus and Ethnoid sinus. Then they go in and they do a biopsy. It comes back, she has a neuroblastoma. Now the husband happens to be a microbiologist. He looks at the same slides the pathologist is looking at and says I see fungal hyphae in here. There is something going on. I think this is a fungal infection of the sinuses. Not a neuroblastoma. The pathologist, there were 6 different pathologists involved, 6 different pathologic examinations, all 6 pathologists came up with a different diagnosis. None of them came up with fungus being the source. She got treated with chemotherapy, followed by radiation treatment, and then surgery to remove the mass out of the sinus and we have a series of MRIs showing that the mass in that sinus never changed with all the treatment. After she had the surgery, they opened up the sinus, she started blowing her nose, she got fungi out of her nasal cavity. Needless to say she got involved with Dr. Shoemaker on the east coast, who then sent her to Dr. Grey in Benson, AZ. Dr. Shoemaker does not use anti-fungals in his treatment program, Dr. Grey does. Dr. Gray puts her on antifungal and we have the current MRIs and guess what, her sinuses are clear. And she is fairly healthy but unfortunately she is brain damaged to a slight extent, she has respiratory damage, she has muscle weakness, etc, etc. Now here is a case, an absolute misdiagnosis by pathologists who refused to listen to the husband who said, I think I see mold, here is the reason why. That’s a horrible tragic case.

This is the 7:00 minute mark.

To continue reading the transcription of this video, here is part 2.

It is a horrible tragedy that as of 12/8/13, this video only had 408 views. In just 24 hours, we are at 485 views. That is incredible. Keep sharing.

Share this page with your friends, your family, facebook, twitter, etc. It is important that people know this is happening and has been going on for over 30 years. People are suffering and dying and doctors are misdiagnosing and allowing people to die.

Let me know that you have heard this with a comment. The world should be outraged at this silent epidemic of toxic homes. I hear from people every day who are affected at home, at work or at their schools. At one point in this video, Dr. Thrasher goes on to say that it is estimated that 30-40% of the public schools in this country are contaminated with mold and bacteria from water intrusion.

It’s time we do something…

Toxic Mold Symptoms

It’s not all in your head!

You may feel like you are losing your mind.
Not everyone gets sick the same way
Some people seem completely unharmed by mold

Mold makes me sick!

24 % of people are unable to detox mold
Overwhelmed… when it used to be easy?
Feeling down… disjointed?
Feel like you are having a heart attack?
Headaches that stop your life?

Extreme Fatigue

Not ABLE to do normal activities
Sleep all day… still tired
Blaming it all on stress?
Stabbing Pain on the right side (Liver)

Feel like you are getting old?

Arthritic Hands (Toxins in Joints)
Pain in Ears
Hearing Loss
Hearing Sensitivities
Ringing in Ears

Unable to regulate Body Temperature

Cold (or Hot)
Stomach, Digestive Problems
Where did my memory go?

Toxic Mold Could Be Making You Sick!

Some become hypersensitive to toxins (MCS)
A static shock can be a sign of mold!
Low ADH – causes frequent electrical shocks
Thirsty all the time
Easily Angered
Easily Bruised

Unexplainable Pain

We love our children…
When they are sick, we want to protect them
Moldy homes, schools and food
Allergies and Asthma?
Kids sick all the time?

Kids should not be sick!

Health Departments are Denying People Get Sick From Mold!
Kids Develop Learning Disabilities
RashesMore tired than usual
Sinus Infections
Bloody Noses
Some People LOSE Weight
Can’t gain weight… in toxic mold
Some People Gain Weight
Can’t lose weight… in toxic mold
Most Doctors Don’t Know Anything
About Mold Illness and Environmental Illness
Doctors say… Take a Pill

Pure and Natural Food
and Natural Supplements Can Help

Thanks to MoldSupport.org
and freedigitalphotos.net for this video

Also…
www.agoodhealthadvocate.com
Empowering Individuals to Handle Life’s Challenges

Re-Shelter -housing for mold injured and MCS

On Reshelter’s website, their tagline is: “transforming the homes, health & lives of people with environmental intolerances” There is a ton of good information on the Re|Shelter facebook group as well as their website.

The Safe Oasis Grant program awarded $13,500 to 7 applicants in 2012. I knew a few of those people and this money really helped them to get back on their feet!

Wouldn’t it be great if even more people could be awarded grants to help with safe housing.

Environmentally injured homelessness is a silent epidemic.
Not by choice… by necessity.

My family and myself were made ill by toxic mold in our home and we had to live between motel rooms and tents for over 10 months while we searched for safe housing.

Being homeless is one step above living in mold. I felt like our choice was between homelessness and death. We chose to be homeless with two adults, two kids and a dog. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do. At times, it was Really difficult.

A fundraiser was the reason we took the leap and left. If it were not for the fundraiser that was done for my family, we may have never seen a way to get out of that house.

It literally saved our lives.

Before we moved out, my son was eleven years old and sick every day… and only getting worse for the past 9 months. Four days after we got out, he started to improve.

My whole family was sick to some extent… and it was more obvious when we got out of the house how sick we really were. Some of the symptoms were: hair falling out, thyroid problems, liver problems, pain all over, dyslexia, asthma, allergies, nosebleeds, seizures, weakness, disabling fatigue, rashes, fungal nails, alzheimer-like behavior and symptoms of a heart attack.

This may seem dramatic to someone who has not watched their family become ill from toxic mold. If you have lived through this, you may understand. If you have made it to the other side and you are not safe and living with some level of comfort, perhaps you could spare $5 a month or more to give toward those less fortunate.

donate-run

How to Maintain SSI and Benefit from a Fundraiser

According to How to Maintain SSI Benefits to Ensure Medicaid Coverage:
In order to be eligible for SSI, a person must be aged, blind or disabled, and must meet income and resource tests. If a person exceeds the income and/or resource test, s/he will be ineligible for SSI and lose SSI-related Medicaid benefits.

Lets face it. SSI Benefits are barely enough to live on.

I often hear that an individual does not want to do a fundraiser because they might lose their SSI benefits that they fought so hard to get.
Read More →

Need Money? Too sick to work?

When you are sick, getting a job is the last thing you can do. Some days it is too much to take a shower and feed yourself. But if you are too sick to work, buying toiletries and food can become next to impossible.

Share Your Mold Story

Who hears the voice of the sick?

Sick people are trapped in their homes, barely able to make it to the bathroom, writhing in pain, starving for food, attention, money and companionship. These mold injured people are too sick to work.
Read More →

Mold keeps woman confined to her tent

I have said it before and I’ll say it again… being homeless is one step above living in mold. So here is a story of a woman who is confined to her tent because of mold. I say this is far more common than most people would think.

My family was homeless for 10 months because of mold. We lived between motel rooms and tents. Whatever we kept from the moldy house was put in storage.

Somebody who is not aware of the damage mold can do to a family may be thinking.  Everyone has mold.  It’s silly to run from a little mold.  Who would abandon their home because of mold.  Just clean it up. Clean it up with a bleach and paint it with Kilz.

Bleach and Kilz Do Not Get Rid of Mold

They mask the problem… and make it worse.
Read More →

Health District Building Killing People

Death by Mold and Indifference — The Dan Pauluk Case

An excerpt from the story:

“It’s much too late,” said Dr. Wendy Pauluk, the wife of a former employee. She says a ceiling tile above her husband’s desk raised his suspicions. She alleges tests showed it had toxic black mold.

“It settles in the jaw and in the teeth and the lungs and then it goes to stomach and any area of weakness — over time — will develop into cancer,” she said.

Her husband died in 2007. Pauluk says 14 other people within a 50-foot radius of Dan’s desk have died too.  She alleges mold spores from his clothes and shoes were brought into the Pauluk family home and have also infected her. Wendy’s lungs are full of tumors and she is currently undergoing life-saving treatment in Mexico.

“I am one person among many,” she said.
Read More →