Sign Up to Dr. Crista's online Mold Course

 

Nirala Jacobi:

Welcome back to part two of The SIBO Doctor Podcast and let's jump right back into it. Once again, I interrupted you with something. You were on another thought.

Jill Crista:

Oh, no, no. I think maybe we had talked earlier about testing.

Nirala Jacobi:

Oh, yeah. So-

Jill Crista:

So, somebody is... Yeah.

Nirala Jacobi:

Oh, no. Actually, before we get into testing, can we talk about... I did it all the wrong way around. I should have done testing but I just feel like people aren't... They know there's going to be mold. So what about things like ozone machines?

Jill Crista:

Good question. Because we get this a lot in the States too with people that are not in a flood situation, we'll come in and we'll fog with ozone, or we'll run ozone through your HVAC system or something like that. If you are having an ozone treatment done, it's to be done at the tail end of a remediation where this material has been removed. You need to not be in that space and you need to have a way to get it completely cleaned out of the space before you enter it. It makes mycotoxins more toxic. So mycotoxins are hard on the body, ozone is hard on the lungs and when you combine them, it's a not only a doubling effect, but a quadrupling effect of toxicity. So this idea of like, well, we'll just run an ozone air filter constantly and take care of it, you're actually going to make yourself sicker.

An ozone treatment where they come in and they blast the house with ozone, HVAC with ozone, you can do that on cars. In the HVAC of a car, they actually can inject an ozone into the tubing that can maybe help. Cars get quite moldy as well because there's so many nooks and crannies in the bottom where water goes down. So you can get some mold in the carpet underneath, but if it's just a factor of maybe the filter got wet and now the filter maybe has caused problems in the HVAC system, they can use ozone for that. But it is a treatment, not a daily filtration situation. Not a note of filtration. Yeah, go ahead.

Nirala Jacobi:

Okay. Once again, I'm interrupting. Sorry about that.

Jill Crista:

No, it's just that we-

Nirala Jacobi:

Okay, put a little-

Jill Crista:

... we're both passionate.

Nirala Jacobi:

... put a sticky on that, where you were going with that thought. Because with ozone machine, I usually tell patients at the end, like you say, after that house has been remediated, they can remediate their stuff by using the ozone machine. I mean, after that has also been superficially treated with ozone and going away for the weekend, closing everything up, running the ozone machine and then airing out their place, and leaving or turning off the ozone machine. So that has been helpful for some people. What are your thoughts on that?

Jill Crista:

I've done a lot of pre and post testing because that's my nerdy self, I don't want to assume. And some of the porous things like upholstered furniture were very difficult to help with that. So that's where we run into trouble. Because every time you sit on that cushion, it squishes out the air and every time you stand up, it'll pull the air in. And so they're very porous and they're hard to get at. I had one patient whose husband was tough as nails, was a great detoxifier, pooped like he was... No problem, every day, just perfect poop, perfect diet, perfect everything. And they squished while it was being ozone treated, they made this booth. So he wasn't breathing the ozone and the cushion was in it. This is an anti thing they wanted to keep. And so he was squishing the cushion to try to get the ozone up into the cushion. We let it calm down, took a few days to let all that ozone get out of it. And then we tested it and it still had mold and mycotoxins.

Nirala Jacobi:

So difficult to treat.

Jill Crista:

So porous furniture is really hard, mattresses are hard. Yeah. Those would be things that it's better to say goodbye to than to get sick. There's no point-

Nirala Jacobi:

What was the sticky note that you were going to go somewhere?

Jill Crista:

Yes. Air filtration. So that is going to be something. If you've been in a house that did have mold growth, by the time you've got back into it, even though you've contained the area, there is going to be some fragmenting and some small particulate, and it's the ultra fine particulate that carries the mycotoxins around. So you'll have spores, you'll have those fragments and then you'll have some of the particulate and the particulate may be carrying also the endotoxins from the bacteria, because there will be mold and bacteria at the same time. Air filtration is really key and there is one air filter that I like the best for mold because there are others out there like there's AirDoctor is a good one, IQAir is a good one, Austin Air is a good one, but I like one called Intellipure because the filter itself can become a Petri dish for mold.

So the more loaded that filter gets, if you've got humid air and you've had a previously affected home, now you have a little bit of biofilm tendency going on in that space. And that's what was unique about testing things in my own home, is I got to test it in the home. I wasn't in a sterile lab. So I got to see what is the impact of having the biofilm air on these things. And what I found is that the filters themselves can become Petri dishes with the Intellipure, they zap the filter continuously. So it creates a biostasis and then you're getting the zero particulate and I have a laser particle counter, I tested everything and that's zero particulate coming now, ultra fine particulate coming out of the machine and the filter itself is getting zapped. So it won't-

Nirala Jacobi:

And what's it zapped with?

Jill Crista:

It's just electrical current running through the filter.

Nirala Jacobi:

Wow. That's the way [crosstalk 00:06:04]. Yeah. And what about UV and stuff like that, is that any good?

Jill Crista:

If you have something like I was talking about that wood, let's say you have real wood and probably the remediators listening are just like rolling their eyes right now because I am not a building expert. This is all stuff I've learned with working with the inspectors and the remediators in my area. And I'm also, we've got to bend a little bit sometimes because of situations like this, where there aren't resources so people are left to figure it out and do the best we can. And now I've completely lost what I was going to say. Oh, the UV, if you have something where you can leave it in the sunshine day after day, after day, and the air it's sitting in, is dry air, which is not where you live. We have seen that real wood can be surface. You either can plain it, or sand it, or leave it in the sun and leave it in the sun ideally.

And then as we do a scraping of that, that will work in some cases, a lot of times what I've done is we've sanded essential oil and then left it in the sun. And we've been able to treat wood, real wood things that way. But remember anything that is organic, so that's leather, wood, paper, that's why drywalls is a problem because it has paper on each side, anything that has particulate and dust in it. And that's where we get into issues with insulation. Because a lot of that insulation is very airy fairy and it can allow a lot of dust to be in it every time you open and close a door, part of that particulate that goes into that insulation, it's the dust growing the mold in the insulation.

So those things that if it has UV light over sustained long periods of time in dry air, that's something that can help. But the UV filters, the mold's pore is not exposed to that UV long enough to make a difference. So it will just go right through it. Really the name of the game is reducing particulate. So you want to get something where, as the air is going into the machine, that machine is pulling every tiny bit of particulate out of it. And we've seen with the Intellipure, forest fire smoke, they've done it with foggers and you run the machine on high and it just, the air just cleans right up. It's really cool.

Nirala Jacobi:

So that's an air filter [crosstalk 00:08:38] that people can buy for a new-

Jill Crista:

Yes. And I highly recommend.

Nirala Jacobi:

Yeah. And that's like one unit for every room or how...

Jill Crista:

Good question. So they have whole house filters and then you can do room filters. So if you have a room that is particularly affected, I have a YouTube video about how to pick an air filter and why I chose this one. And there's a formula on there, in that YouTube video, you can just go to the transcript and find where the formula is. And it will tell you how to pick the air filter for your cubic space. So it will ask you what's the dimensions of the room, height, width, and whatever width and length. And then it will figure your cubic clearance that you're going to have to find for that air filter and that's how you pick an air filter. And if you call the company, they help you. If you're just like, I'm overwhelmed, I'm heartbroken. Help me. What do I have to do?

Nirala Jacobi:

Well, and what was the name of that company?

Jill Crista:

Intellipure.

Nirala Jacobi:

Intellipure.

Jill Crista:

Yeah, it's on my website. If you guys want to go to drcrista.com, it's at the bottom called My Favorite Air Filter. And it is-

Nirala Jacobi:

I don't know if they're available here in Australia. We have different-

Jill Crista:

I think, so they sell in China. So, yeah.

Nirala Jacobi:

Okay. Well, I'll look it up. I'll look it up. And so next best would be what? IQ filter or? Because air filters are going to be a big thing.

Jill Crista:

IQ, AirDoctor. Yeah.

Nirala Jacobi:

Okay, those are-

Jill Crista:

They're huge because that's dehumidifying and cleaning the particulate, because you've had the bomb go off, you can't... Especially if you've already started tearing things out and you didn't do with plastic, if you didn't plastic size first, now you're in the game of cleaning up particulate and managing humidity. And don't be in a rush to rebuild. I know that everyone will want to go back to normal and will want to go ahead and slap that drywall back up and be normal again, wait longer than you think you need to because the flooring, the slab, everything has been saturated and it's going to need to take some time. You're better off living in studs and rebuild much later and have it not grow mold behind the walls and you don't know it and you're getting sick, then to rush to rebuild.

Nirala Jacobi:

[crosstalk 00:11:01] That's a really good point. That's a really good point. Yeah. So don't put that drywall up or the chip rock, that's-

Jill Crista:

Because then you're just closing off a wet environment, which is exactly what mold does, stagnation and humidity.

Nirala Jacobi:

Let's talk about professional remediation because this is something that really runs the gamut of, like you say, just stain removal to somebody that's coming in saying, well, I don't see any mold so you don't have any mold, to people actually really doing it properly with air samples and things like that. So what should people really look out for in terms of proper mold inspection to let them know what are the testers supposed to be testing?

Jill Crista:

Best tool that an inspector has is their eyeballs. So in a flood situation's going to be a little more obvious, but what if you weren't sure if the flood situation really grew mold or not, maybe you have a water line up a couple of inches and your insurance company is going to try to convince you that, that's fine. Just run fans and it'll dry out. I can assure you it won't. You need to cut that stuff out of there. I know because I've worked with so many situations where they just ran fans, surface fans, but nothing is going to dry out behind that drywall. So what we want to know is if you don't see mold on the outside because it dried out and you want to know, but is my house still moldy? You need to drill into cavities.

And they would take an air sample. Air sampling is really meant to determine the moldiness of a small space. So inside of a cabinet or maybe even you're drilling underneath the cabinet and you're taking their sample under there, inside the wall, you go to the low place where water goes. And so that's where the mold is going to be. You don't drill in where you would hang a picture. You go all the way to the bottom. And then the inspector will be testing areas where their eyes are saying, this looks like this might be a problem. There's either going to be rusting of nails, buckling of floorboards, some indication for them, paint bubbling or something like that, that might be a problematic area. And that tends to be in a flood situation corners because that area got it from two angles. And so water will make a half moon right around that corner to try to... So that can be a problematic area.

One thing that you don't want to use for an air sample is take the air sample in the middle of a room. And this is what insurance wants you to do because it's a great way to prove that there's no mold in a space, even if there is mold in a space, because then they don't have to pay for it. So if the insurance people send out an inspector and they do a narrow sample in the middle of your room, that is not adequate assessment for a moldy building, neither is one of the plates. Those plates, every mold has an auger of food that it likes. Some of them like potato starch, some of them like blood meals, some of them like... So every single mold has a different type of food, which is what that plate is made with that auger. There may be out there some... So the commercially available plates that auger only grows about 10% of the water damage building molds, the toxic molds. We're missing 90%.

Nirala Jacobi:

Oh, geez.

Jill Crista:

There's some innovation that they say, "No, no, no, we've mixed it. And so use our plates because we've mixed the augers." When I talked to a scientist that actually makes these augers, he said it is possible that there's been innovation where someone's figured out how to mix it. But the fast growing molds will eat all of the food before the slow growing molds, would tend to be the more toxic ones, will get a chance to grow. So you might get a normal amount in air quotes, people don't see me right now, normal amount of aspergillus and penicillin. They're in a normal house, healthy house, there's a little bit of those things because we have it in the outside too. So when you open a door and you open a window, you're going to get some cross contamination. There's a normal amount of that.

Your plate test might have a "normal amount" of that. And that normal amount ate all the food. So that stachybotrys or toxic black mold, or some of these more toxic species, never get a chance to grow. And you're going to go, "Okay, we're good." So those are dangerous. If they are abnormal, you have a problem and you need to call in someone to do more testing. If it's normal, that does not rule out a moldy building, or car, or RV.

Nirala Jacobi:

Okay. So besides a really good remediator, we have really no chance of knowing whether or...

Jill Crista:

Yeah. See, and this is where doctors get into trouble, they're trying to navigate a building. And that's one of my big soap boxes is doctors need to know our lane. I've got, which I'm not doing right now, but this has been my passion and my study, and I follow remediators around and I follow inspectors around. So this is coming from not your average doctor telling you this, a lot of doctors will try to navigate this without ever having seen your building without having any experience with buildings and say, do an ERMI. And will look at the score and then will find out if your home has a problem or not. There are some problems with that. Maybe-

Nirala Jacobi:

Can you explain the IME for our listener?

Jill Crista:

An ERMI is an Environmental Relative Moldiness Index. It was designed by the U.S. EPA, the Environmental Protections Agency, Academy, I don't know. Whatever, it's EPA.

Nirala Jacobi:

Agency.

Jill Crista:

Agency, it wouldn't be academy. That's funny. So they designed this as a way to just do a national detection. So it's a genetic test, testing PCR and what they were trying to do is find out how moldy are the homes in the United States. And then they took an average. The problem is that doesn't mean it's a healthy home. So that was never meant to be a diagnostic test. It was an identification test, the logarithm that people have created, or their number, the ERMI score of what is a safe building to be in and what is not, has some major problems with it. The algorithm that is used... I have patients who have beautiful ERMI scores. And when we look at the actual species, they have really sick homes.

So there's a problem with the scoring. And that's why I wanted share with everybody. There's a resource called the ERMI code. And I think you're going to put that in the show notes. This is a way to plug in your ERMI. And an ERMI is basically, you're going to go through the house and test your dust, certain dust in certain places. And the companies that sell an ERMI give you a guide of how to do that. You can collect too much dust or not enough dust and your amount of DNA will be different. So using a standardized way of testing is going to be really important. That's the thing, is there's no per particle divider on an ERMI. So it's going to depend on if you just took a lot of dust or not enough dust. So there's one problem with it.

So the ERMI code, what they're doing is they're looking at the species and they're looking at their 4,000 different tests that they've done. And they were able to... And these are inspectors who were in the place. They did air sampling, they did cavity sampling, they did ERMI sampling, they did mycotoxin sampling, all of it and then were able to say, "Okay, if your ERMI code looks like this, there's a high chance that your house has this," based on their thousands and thousands of testing. So I find that a much more useful tool, and it's something you can just plug in your ERMI, but definitely do the ERMI according to plan, don't mess around because that will affect your results.

Nirala Jacobi:

And that's something that people can do themselves. And then they go to the ERMI code and actually decipher what they found in a better way.

Jill Crista:

Yeah. Yep. But again, is that good enough testing? Maybe.

Nirala Jacobi:

Well, it's good enough probably for now.

Jill Crista:

Yeah. If you can't find an inspector who can put their eyeballs on it, so I understand the situation, this is thousands, and thousands, and thousands of people, this is happening to at one time. So that might be a way to do it, but you could save your money. If you see mold, you don't have to test it. Spend the money on the Tyvek suits, the N100 respirator, the plasticizing the affected space and the cutting out of the material. And the gold standard again, is past two feet from what you can see. Open everything up, spend your money on dehumidifiers, spend your money on air filtration. You don't need to do testing. You already see it.

Nirala Jacobi:

Yeah. I mean, this is more for when people have already cleaned their home and are in that... But I think one of the big take homes or important points that you brought up is, just leave it exposed as long as possible to completely dry it out, even if it takes six months or whatever. And just ideally, not live in that. But a lot of people, that's the only home they have, they have no other place to go. And so, that is already something where we can just leave it like that and wait, because there's a shortage of builders anyways right now. So don't close it all up and just completely dry it out, and do as much remediation as you can before you do that. I think that's a really important point. Oh, dear.

Jill Crista:

And it's a little tricky because you're entering into a chillier season. So, if you have your bottom five feet of your wall cut away, and open and exposed without any insulation, that could get chilly. But it's again, a space heater or something like that is going to help dry it out. So you can get to the rebuild a little faster. But humor makes things easier to handle. You guys can go over to your friend's house and say, "How many feet up is your exposed wall? Ours is four feet."

Nirala Jacobi:

I think people have been incredibly resilient in this area, but they're very traumatized. So it's practical help that they need and practical advice of how to really avert the worst in a way, that's how I look at it. And just very briefly. So you're saying in terms of mold, all mold like even mildew, because there was some question about mildew, which is pretty common around here. Anybody who's got leather items that they frequently sprout things when it's warm and humid, but are you putting that on par as toxic mold?

Jill Crista:

You never know the difference. There is no difference between mildew and mold from a taxonomy standpoint until you test it. So you could be sprouting toxic mold and because it's light or white, light green, you could be thinking, well that's mildewy. Or if it's a little bit pink, that's Chaetomium, that is toxic to brains, that causes dementia. So you never know the difference between mildew and mold until you test it. So in my book, all growing things need to not be growing inside your space. And if they are, it's an indicator that you are not managing your humidity inside your home well enough for your health. So you can be basically hosting these. They can colonize your sinuses. They can colonize your gut. You can have chronic SIBO because you're not managing the humidity in your home and you're sprouting what you think is mildew, and is actually a mycotoxin-forming mold.

That not all molds make mycotoxins. So some of them, like there's a little really dark green one that almost looks black mold that can grow along window sills at the base where there's condensation. That one sometimes can be black mold, sometimes can be this other one that is just a VOC former. But for someone who's chemically sensitive, that VOC can make them really much more chemically sensitive. It can tax their liver, their hormones get off because that same pathway is being used for managing the VOCs from this little critter. So you want to make sure that you are doing, if things are sprouting, that means you don't have enough air movement and you're not doing enough humidity management.

Nirala Jacobi:

Hard to do that in the-

Jill Crista:

I'm the bearer of all kinds of bad-

Nirala Jacobi:

I know. I was just going to say, let's end on a good note and there just aren't any good notes other than-

Jill Crista:

But all those things you can do.

Nirala Jacobi:

Yeah. There are things, of course. There are things you can do and protect us. I mean, we're alive. We're doing things and sometimes it just adds to the overwhelm when you think, well, this is just too much in a hard basket right now. But I hope people can take away some important points of what you mentioned and just don't be in a rush to rebuild, to get back to normal. I think that was a very important statement you made. Well, Dr. Crista-

Jill Crista:

Don't be a mold magnet, be a mold repellent. As you, as your body, the most important thing you can do is to stay out of the fear part of all this. I mean, I've just given you lots of stuff, if you don't really want to hear I'm sure, but there are the most powerful thing you have is your inner light. Charging that inner light every day in the way that you do, whether it's getting into the sunshine, whether it's playing hard rock music, or whether it's hugging your pet or your kids, I mean exercise, whatever it is that charges your inner light, people can become. Fear is a very involuting emotion. It invites, because now you're on the lookout for things to be harming you. And that's an energy that brings things to you and not the good things.

You want to be a mold repeller. And when you have an inner light that is charged, if it's prayer, whatever it is that charges that light, that makes you a mold repeller. Because as it come to you, you are burning strong like the sun, nothing can get close to you. None of those mold spores, none of those fragments. And you can keep your discernment of the next step, the next best step. So don't give that fear any time in your mind, work on charging.

Nirala Jacobi:

Beautiful. I think we're going to end there. That was a beautiful way of closing this conversation. Thank you so much for your time. Your time and your energy and all you do in the world is very neat and helpful.

Jill Crista:

Yeah. Well, I hope this is helpful. I know that people just got told a bunch of stuff they don't probably want to hear, but there are things that you can do. So do things you have control over.

Nirala Jacobi:

Wonderful. Thank you.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for listening to the SIBO Doctor Podcast. We hope you find the information in this episode useful in the treatment of your SIBO patients. Thanks to our sponsors, SIBOTest.com, a breath testing service with easy online ordering. Thanks again for listening.