12/4/05

Biloxi, MS - Three months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, a major health crisis is emerging as residents struggle with the fouled air, moldy houses and the numbing stress the killer storm left behind.  The awareness of this national health crisis is coming to the forefront of the public as hurricane victims come forward in numbers to profess their pathological problems from the damage of mold.

Health professionals have reported patients are afflicted with coughs, infections, rashes, anxiety, chronic fatigue, depression and post traumatic stress disorder all across Mississippi and Louisiana. Scientific studies have shown that long term exposure to indoor molds such as stachybotrys and chaetomium can cause permanent neurological damage. (see scientific literature). It is just a matter of time before these symptoms will set in and with a lack of physicians who have knowledge in this matter, it is becoming alarming.

Exhausted residents trying to clean up and repair homes are falling off roofs and cutting themselves with chainsaws. Stress is fracturing the psyches of countless storm victims.

"It's a cumulative effect here," said Claire Gilbert, a New Orleans surgical technician who works in a Louisiana occupational medical practice and volunteered at the New Waveland Clinic, a tent shelter complex that just closed in Mississippi.

"You get a little cough. You get a nose that runs. You get eye irritation. Then you get falls. And you've got the stress. It's not just little things. It's how they all add up."

When Katrina bore down on Mississippi and Louisiana, some health officials were rather ignorant about the mold problems and instead, circumvented the crisis by creating hysteria about a toxic mixture of industrial chemicals that might flood the area and about the spread of infectious diseases. Instead, a more subtle health problem developed, said Dr. Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.  The truth prevailed and mold is now the center of attention.

"In many ways, this is the major environmental health disaster of our lifetime," Frumkin told Knight Ridder. "It's a very complicated set of risk factors people face. ... This is a huge set of environmental health challenges."

"Stress isn't a strong enough word. I'd call it anguish," Frumkin said. "The level of grief and anguish there is palpable." People can't sleep. They don't remember meetings or what day it is.

William Gasparrini, a Biloxi clinical psychologist, calls it "Post-Katrina Stress Disorder," in which residents suffer bouts of grief, shock, rapid mood shifts, confusion, anger, marital discord, guilt, escape fantasies and substance abuse.

"The effects are lasting longer than I suspected," Gasparrini said. "I thought everything would be back to normal in three to four weeks. Now, three months later, it looks like it'll be one to two years - if we are lucky. There are a lot of people in pain, a lot of people who cry every day."  What many people don?t understand is that this happens every day to mold victims who lose their lives to mold, and virtually walk away from their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs with no assistance or acknowledgement.

Making matters worse is that the devastation is so widespread that people can't escape it. Unlike a tornado or the 2001 terrorist attacks, the area of destruction in Mississippi and Louisiana is so wide that residents need to drive for miles to find a sense of normalcy.

"When you drive around Biloxi and see all those houses that have been very badly damaged and see people living in the rubble for weeks and weeks, it's easy to understand how traumatizing this has been for these families," said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Redlener has spent time since the storm in New Orleans and Mississippi.

"Because of the prolonged nature of this disaster, it's impossible to guess what rate of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] we will see. It may be much higher than we would normally expect."

The Gulf Coast Mental Health Center lost nearly half of its patients during and just after the storm. More patients streamed in to replace them, said psychologist Steve Barrilleaux, director of the adult outpatient program. Nearly half of those the center sees have Katrina-related problems.

Diane Lufreniere, a therapist at the center, developed strange rashes on both arms, a common symptom of mold exposure.

Doctors tried prescribing drugs with no luck and finally tried to link it to stress. Symptoms from mold are often misunderstood as doctors in America, trained by drug companies, are accustomed to prescribing drugs to ?treat? symptoms.  When they have no luck with this, they often blame psychological problems on misunderstood medical problems that prescription drugs cannot treat symptoms.

The stress is overwhelming, but the part of the body that shows the most symptoms is the respiratory system, said directors of local medical centers and makeshift clinics.  This cannot be blamed on psychological problems and that is the main reason the mainstream media is covering the mold problem in the hurricane ridden areas.

In nine days, from Nov. 9 to Nov. 17, the New Waveland Clinic saw 473 patients, and 121 of them were for respiratory problems. 

The second-most-common symptom was skin problems, with 68 patients. These are common signs of aspergillus exposure.

Dave Farragut of DeLisle, Miss., got one of the first new trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The first couple of days, the smell from the trailer made his eyes burn. When his girlfriend moved in a few days later, she also got sick at first.

Volunteer Claire Gilbert at the Waveland clinic had mold problems of her own in her New Orleans apartment. Nearly every structure touched by the floodwater has mold growing.

Mold is serious. In addition to irritating people and triggering asthma and allergy attacks, it can cause infections and can be toxic and cause cancer, said Sam Arbes, a scientist who specializes in mold issues at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina.  Arbes didn?t even acknowledge the neurological problems that are often misdiagnosed and overlooked as Asperser?s Syndrome, autism, ADHD, and undiagnosed seizures and memory loss problems

Arbes said it doesn't get any worse than the mold levels he saw in New Orleans.

Testing there by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, found mold levels in New Orleans nearly 13 times higher than what is considered very high levels by allergists.  Allergists are also not experts in this field as few know anything about the neurological and pathological effects of mold exposure since they lack the training and skills to acknowledge or treat patients with the signs of long term exposure; something that will eventually set in soon with the hurricane victims.

During Katrina, Alicia Heatherton stayed in her retirement home apartment right on the beach in Biloxi. Even though nearby buildings were obliterated, she survived.  It's the end result that's come close to killing her. Heatherton, a 68-year-old woman with emphysema, got a severe lung infection from the mold spreading in her apartment.

Physicians need to be aware of the aware of the full ramifications of mold exposure and stop misdiagnosing many associated illnesses that will soon come into full spectrum due to this national catastrophe.  ?It is about time that the American medical practitioners, as a whole, begin a more proactive role in listening to their patients and treating them in a more respectable manner.  This includes a full recovery plan that doesn?t necessarily include medicating symptoms before listening to the full range of symptoms associated with fungal disease.  Steroids, anti-depressants, and antibiotics can be counterproductive in many cases with mold exposure? said Dr. Daniel Johnson, a Florida physician who has been treating hurricane patients with mold exposure. ?In many cases, some physicians do more harm than good when they don?t fully acknowledge or lack the skill in dealing with an illness.?

Mold Help has an entire library of online articles and medical papers.  If there is a particular subject matter that is not available, please contact us as we have more available that are not published but readily available.  Mold Help is also currently conducting some very interesting medical research and that information will be available soon.