After Ike, Waiting for a Breath of Relief
Returning residents are likely to face multiple mold problems.
Sept. 17, 2008— -- As the floodwaters left behind by Hurricane Ike recede, residents of Galveston, Texas, and other areas affected by the storm will likely return home. But for many, an unwelcome visitor will await: mold.
And if the aftermath of Katrina is any indication, this mold will likely leave some gasping for air and others with a new allergy to contend with.
"There's going to be lots and lots of mold," said Harriet Burge, a former professor at Harvard University and the University of Michigan who now serves as director of aerobiology for EMLab P&K, an indoor air quality testing facility.
"Based on the New Orleans experience, houses were filled with water and the water sat there for so long that parts that weren't wet became moldy," owing to the condensation and humidity of the air, she said.
And that mold created a problem for people with asthma and mold allergies.
"The airborne mold levels in those places were very high because of the places that were moldy," Burge said.
While some suffer from mold allergies, many more people suffer from asthma, the symptoms of which can be set off by mold spores.
"[Mold] is a trigger to asthma. Airways narrow, and then you have a shortage of breath," Dr. Maureen Lichtveld said.
Lichtveld, who chairs the department of environmental health sciences at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has served as the primary investigator of HEAL (Head-off Environmental Asthma in Louisiana), which looks at childhood asthma in post-Katrina New Orleans.
She said that, following a storm like this, many asthmatic children face the dual problem of a lack of medical care due to the storm and a lack of care because they come from poor families.
"In Katrina, the clinical evaluation that we are conducting ... was, for many of the children, the first access to clinical care they had post the storm," Lichtveld said.
As part of her study, Lichtveld is looking at the four or five most prevalent of 72 species of mold and their effects, but she noted that people should not waste time considering whether the mold in their homes is harmful.
