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