Haunted by Mold - Part 2

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Haunted by Mold

By LISA BELKIN

Published: August 12, 2001

Part 2 

Since the Cleveland study was first released, other doctors have become convinced that there are mold risks to adults as well. ''We do know for a fact that mold is associated with cognitive impairment in some people,'' says Dr. Wayne Gordon, a neuropsychologist and professor of rehabilitation medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, and one of a small but growing group of scientists who have come to specialize in the health effects of mycotoxins. These doctors cannot yet say definitively how these toxins work and why they affect some people more than others. But they do know that victims of the toxins visit their offices every day, more this year than last year and that their problems range from minor memory loss to devastating cognitive failure. ''This is real,'' he says, ''and it isn't going away.''

In March of last year, however, the C.D.C. backed away from its initial study. In a 97-page examination of the case, two panels of reviewers gathered by the agency criticized everything from the way the babies' illness was diagnosed to the way the mold was measured. ''The available evidence,'' the reviewers concluded, ''does not substantiate the reported epidemiologic associations -- between household water damage and A.I.P.H. or between household fungi and A.I.P.H. -- or any inferences regarding causality.''

In other words, one report by the C.D.C. recants another report by the C.D.C. The agency now describes mold as an ''allergen'' on its Web site, but makes little mention of the serious problems that researchers like Dearborn, Etzel and Gordon say are associated with mold. Nor does it mention that their findings have been replicated by other scientists. And while the agency advises that mold be cleaned up, it does not recommend testing to discover what type of mold is growing. ''We are not saying there are no health consequences to mold,'' says Dr. Stephen Redd, chief of the air-pollution-and-respiratory-health branch at the C.D.C. ''There's a diversity of opinion. Our opinion is that not enough is known about it.'' The agency does not doubt that people are suffering, he says, but the C.D.C. is lacking scientific proof of the extent to which mold is the cause. To declare causation without that proof, he says, would be as irresponsible as waiting too long.

Dearborn and Etzel disagree and stand by their study. The C.D.C. rebuttal ''put the message out there that there was nothing to worry about,'' Dearborn says. ''They didn't take the prudent health position that until there is definitive evidence, we will take precautions. A legal standard of proof is 51 percent. A scientific standard of proof is greater than 95 percent. But where does public health prudence fall between the two?''

While scientists argue over mold, lawyers have been having a field day. Like the fungus itself, mold litigation has completely taken over Robertson's practice in the years since the Malibu claim. ''The case settled very shortly, once we demonstrated what this stuff was,'' Robertson says. The whole of the house was shrink-wrapped in plastic, torn down, then carted away and buried.

Today, callers to his voice mail are instructed that all new toxic-mold cases are being screened by the firm's new director of microbiological investigations, a paralegal with a master's degree in microbiology. At last count, she had a list of 325 potential new clients on deck, and Robertson has stopped representing individual homeowners in favor of cases that ''really prove a point.'' On his plate at the moment are five courthouses where everyone from the judges to the bailiffs complain that they have become sick, and housing projects like the Spectrum, which, he says ''should have been the American dream, but has become a nightmare.''

(Robertson, too, makes some exceptions to his ''no private homes'' rule. His star client right now is Erin Brockovich, whose two-story, 4,000-square-foot house outside Los Angeles -- bought with the money from the movie about her environmental crusades -- is contaminated with mold. There is a huge poster in Robertson's office of Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich, signed by the real Erin. ''To Alex, What a 'bulldog' you are,'' it says, then asks, ''Gee, could a 'mold' movie be next?'')

Robertson says he believes he is in on the start of an entirely new area of law. ''It's a hybrid,'' he says, ''that's why people have a hard time getting their arms around it. It's part construction defect, because that's what allows the water to get into the building. And it's part personal injury, and very few lawyers do both.'' Robertson himself had not handled a personal injury case until 1994, ''when I realized, Hey, we can't just treat the building, we've got to treat some people in the building as well.''

Industry watchers agree. Mealey's Publications, which puts out monthly legal reports, just added Mealey's Litigation Report: Mold to its title list. ''Mold litigation isn't going to go away any time soon,'' says Colleen McLaughlin, the report's editor. ''The attorneys involved are cutting edge, the type who are always looking for the next big thing.''

What looks like Genesis to lawyers looks like Armageddon to insurance companies. ''This mold problem seemed to come out of nowhere,'' says Janet Bachman, vice-president of claims administration for the American Insurance Association. The Ballard case became front-page news in Texas and spurred many other mold claims. In the state, Bachman says, there has been a 137 percent increase so far this year in the amount paid out by insurance companies for water damage. (Insurance policies do not cover mold, per se; they cover damage that results from an otherwise covered event, like a leak or burst pipe.)

If that trend continues through the end of 2001, Texas insurers will be spending roughly $670 million on water claims. (That does not count damage from the Houston floods last June; while they will cause mold damage, the floods themselves are not covered events, meaning the resulting damage is not reimbursed by insurance.) Some in the insurance industry say that premiums will have to increase by 40 percent in order to offset mold claims.

Insurers are hoping, Bachman says, that this will turn out to be a short-term scare, a crisis of the moment, and that soon a fickle public will start worrying about something else. ''For a while the hysteria was over radon,'' she says. ''And now it's so obvious that nobody gives a damn. Remember the Alar scare? Now that's a big shrug, too. Maybe this is just 15 minutes of fame for the latest boo-boo.''

Just in case it doesn't disappear, however, some insurers are taking concrete steps. Farmers Insurance, for instance, has said that it will stop selling new homeowner's policies that include water-damage coverage. In addition, it has asked the Texas Department of Insurance to allow the company to exclude mold damage from its policies entirely, even mold that results from a covered event.

State governments, in an effort to protect homeowners, are beginning to act, too. California's Senate recently approved the Toxic Mold Protection Act, which orders the State Department of Health Services to establish licensing standards for professionals who go into the business of measuring and cleaning out toxic mold. ''Right now anyone can advertise in the Yellow Pages and call themselves a mold expert,'' says Robertson, who helped draft the legislation, and who refers to opportunists as ''mold diggers.''

Whenever Robertson gives a lecture before an industry group, he says, ''I ask for a hand count at the beginning to find out who's in the audience, and 90 percent are contractors who were all doing lead and asbestos abatement until the last year, and now they're trying to jump on the mold bandwagon. It frightens me because you've got people that are taking a two-day course, and then they're turning around as quote-unquote experts.''

The California bill also urges the health department to establish permissible exposure limits: how much mold is too much? Exactly what level of spores per cubic meter of air is enough to make us sick? It may be an impossible task, because the same level of mold seems to affect every individual differently. That would explain, among other things, why Ballard's husband is still so sick but Ballard herself is not.

''We don't always see the same health reaction every time,'' Johanning says. ''I've seen marriages go down because people are not equally affected by it and one spouse thinks the other is imagining things.''

Ron Allison sits in the overdecorated living room of the rented house that his family has been living in, staring straight ahead. The furnishings around him are a swirl of burgundy and green, yellow and red, but he is a study in white and beige. His expression is as bland and subdued as his clothing, as he tries, quietly and haltingly, to explain who he used to be and who he is today.

Back when he was an investment adviser, he says: ''I did three to four deals at a time, I kept all these balls in the air. If I dialed your phone number once, I would have remembered it.'' But in the months before the mold was finally discovered in his Dripping Springs home, his memory began to go. ''My problem is with input,'' he says, trying to explain what his doctors have since explained to him. ''I can concentrate on one thing for a while, but if you add a second thing, then the input makes me short-circuit.'' By way of example, his wife says, ''He can talk on the phone, but if you hand him a piece of paper while he's talking, his brain just fries.''

Allison was asked to quit his job nearly two years ago, according to Ballard, and has been going to cognitive therapy sessions four times a week. ''He's not worse, but he's not better,'' she says of her husband's progress. ''I guess we have to give it time.'' When not at therapy, he works at keeping his life simple. ''You can arrange your day to avoid feeling like an idiot,'' he says. ''Sitting here and watching 'Oprah,' you're not going to feel like an idiot, but I aimed a little higher than that in my life. I'm going to remember only a small percentage of this conversation, but I still remember my old life, and I want it back.''

He worries about what his son, Reese, will think of him. ''He knows that I used to go to work in the morning and now I don't,'' he says. ''He understands that the house made my brain sick. You want to be the absolute best role model for your kids. I'm not the best. I'm far less. I'm the best I can be now, but less than I was.''

Ballard worries about other things. ''Do you leave him?'' she asks me later, explaining that Allison is now more like her child than her husband. ''How can I leave him? He can't take care of himself. The worst day of our lives is still to come,'' she continues. ''The worst day will be if we finally get that money, and he'll want to manage it.''

That money is the $32 million she was awarded by a Texas jury in June, the result of her lawsuit against Farmers Insurance. It is by far the largest judgment against an insurance company in a mold case. Before the trial even began, Farmers had sent Ballard checks for nearly $1.4 million, first to repair and then to remediate the house. But Ballard charged that this did not account for the reality of toxic mold -- mold that was given free rein, she says, while the company tried to find a way not to pay the whole of the hefty claim. All her possessions needed to be replaced, her lawsuit said, and according to experts like Holder and Straus, the house could not just be cleaned, it had to be destroyed and rebuilt.

Although Flynn, the Farmers spokesperson, says the company ''handled this claim promptly and vigorously and would do it the same way again,'' the jury agreed with Ballard, and granted her approximately $6 million for the house and its contents, $12 million in punitive damages against Farmers, $5 million for emotional distress and nearly $9 million in attorneys' fees. Flynn, of Farmers, says the verdict (which the judge has sent to mediation) threatens not only the company but also the entire industry.

''As a practical matter she has almost single-handedly caused, well, not an hysteria, but a heightened interest in mold,'' Flynn says, choosing her words carefully. ''In the year or more since the start of this case, we are seeing claims for mold in and of itself. People are filing claims from a fire that happened a year ago saying that mold arose from the fire-suppression activity. They are about to go to mediation on a claim for a cracked foundation, and we get a letter a week before saying, 'by the way there's mold in the house and we have to tear it down.' ''

Until this case, she says: ''we didn't have any designation or coding for a mold claim. That was an animal that just didn't exist. Mold was a byproduct. It was never viewed as a separate loss.''

As alarmed as the company is by the judgment, Farmers is relieved that the jury was only allowed to hear evidence about material damage to the house. Ballard's suit also claimed health damage to her husband, but the judge disallowed all medical evidence, saying that there was not sufficient epidemiological research directly linking health problems to mold.

''Suppressing the medical testimony was extremely important to us,'' Flynn says. ''This is a property insurance policy,'' she explains. ''This is a policy that takes care of physical damage to the house. This is not a medical policy. It is not a type of policy ever intended to pay for a person's physical injuries while living in their homes. If they develop a health problem, it should be covered by medical insurance.

''On a second level,'' she continues, ''there was the inference that somehow we did something that made the family sick. That we should have said: 'Oh, you had a water leak a year ago and that leak might result in mold. It could be toxic mold, and that could be injurious to your health so you'd better leave your house now.' We didn't have that kind of knowledge.''

Ballard responded to the verdict by spending some of her expected payment to gather the sort of scientific evidence the judge and Farmers say does not yet exist. Over this summer she plans to assemble some of the leading experts in the field, who, between them, have seen hundreds of patients suffering ''mold poisoning.'' She says she will ''lock them all in a conference room somewhere and ask them to compile a complete database, a profile of what we know.'' She has plans to invite representatives from the C.D.C., because, she says: ''You have to keep your enemies close. If those S.O.B.'s are in from the beginning, they can't complain about our accuracy at the end.''

Out in California, where evidence rules are less stringent than in Texas, Alexander Robertson, too, is looking for future epidemiological data. His ''laboratory'' is the Spectrum condominium complex, and he has contracted with an ''occ-doc'' from the Harvard Medical School to do a biostatistical study of every occupant. All 1,500 residents will be asked about their symptoms, and their apartments will be tested to establish the presence and quantity of mold. The residents of a control apartment complex will be similarly studied. ''If we show that the Spectrum building has a higher percentage of people reporting the same or similar symptoms, we go a long way to silencing those who argue mold can't be the cause,'' he says.

On my way back from Melinda Ballard's contaminated house, I stop at a highway gas station and change my clothes in the restroom. I kick myself for not wearing long sleeves, long pants and combat boots when I went into the house, and wrap what I did wear -- shorts, T-shirt and flip flops -- in a double plastic bag and throw it in a nearby Dumpster so that the mold spores that might have settled on my clothing won't contaminate everything else I own. I debate whether to go straight back to my hotel to take a shower but decide that I don't want to add water to the spores that might be in my hair. I'd rather kill them first by spending time outside in the ultraviolet light.

David Straus says this is not overreacting. Bill Holder says it probably is. Melinda Ballard, who suggested these precautions in the first place, has become fed up with doing this herself and now saves one ratty outfit for visiting her old home. Such is the murky level of knowledge at the moment about the dos and don'ts of toxic mold.

Dressed in fresh, uncontaminated clothes, with hair of questionable cleanliness, I go on to spend the evening at the home of an Austin friend. We sit in her living room and talk with her new neighbors, Bridget and Ted Karam, who are renting a house for several months while their 4,700-square-foot dream home across the highway is inhabited by men in moon suits. The house has leaked in the rain since it was built in 1993, the Karams say, but it wasn't until they read about the Ballard case that they thought to look for mold. ''We realized my daughter was waking up with sore throats every time she slept in her room,'' Bridget Karam says.

The couple paid $2,800 to learn that there was Stachybotrys and penicillium in their home. It will take nearly six months and cost $140,000 to clear it out. Listening to their story, my throat starts to hurt. So does my friend's. ''My kids wake up with sore throats all the time,'' she says, looking around her pristine living room, which suddenly smells a little musty. ''Maybe I should call someone to test us?''

Medical students develop symptoms of one disease after another as they go through their textbooks. Called somatization, it is a testament to ''the power of suggestion,'' says Bachman of the American Insurance Association, which clearly has a stake in believing this is all in our heads. ''When I was in college, I took a psych course, and within nanoseconds after reading a list of symptoms I diagnosed myself as being crazy as a bedbug. I'm thinking that people are going through the same thing with mold. Mold has always been around, it will always be around. Why is everyone going so crazy about it right now?''

Nowhere are people going crazier than in Austin, where the Austin Independent School District closed the Hill Elementary School for the past 18 months and closed off sections of another school because of mold. Now there is a wait of months for most contractors who screen for mold, and homeowners are hiring testers from Dallas and Houston, paying their travel expenses.

All this raises some obvious questions: Is there more toxic mold than ever before? Is all the new construction, using cheaper, mold-friendly material causing a true invasion or are we just paying more attention? Is this a new asbestos -- a new and measurable danger? Or a new Legionnaire's disease -- a threat that has existed and been unrecognized for generations? Or, perhaps a new chronic fatigue syndrome -- a disease that definitely affects some people while playing mind games with many more? Do we really need to clean it up, or is it just that ''mold is gold,'' as contractors say, and there is money to be made from homeowners' fears.

These are questions that Ted Karam does not feel he has the luxury of pondering. ''I don't know how much is hysteria,'' he says. ''But I can't take any chances. If you find it, you have to do something.''

The something varies, however, because no one seems to agree on the right thing to do. The Karams, for instance, lived in their home for more than six months after the mold was found. ''But we kept running into other people with mold, and they had been told to move out,'' Bridget Karam says, so eventually they did, too. And although they have read that Ballard left all her belongings in her house, they could not bring themselves to do the same. They let their daughters sneak back in to rescue a few favorite outfits along with their yearbooks and some angel figurines. Bridget, who is a professional photographer, took all her negatives. ''I can't bear to lose any of my memories,'' she says.

Tracy and Steve Wehmeyer, in contrast, who live across town from the Karams, began making plans to leave their home and most of their belongings within days of getting their results. No one in the family had been terribly sick before Stachybotrys was discovered in their walls, but they aren't feeling too well right now. ''Every time I can't remember something, I wonder, Is it mold or is it wine or is it age?'' Tracy Wehmeyer says, half-joking. Then she turns pensive. ''You think of your house as the safest place you can be. Then to learn it is hurting you and your family. . . . '' She doesn't finish the sentence.

So far only one family in the Austin area has burned down their home. Ballard says she has considered it, but was warned that the wind and smoke would simply spread the mold. Her neighbor is already suing her for $1 million, saying that the very existence of the Ballard house has lowered area property values. The Karams fear a financial toll, too. Before the mold was found, their house was appraised at $2.3 million. Because of the history of mold, however, their bank's appraiser warns that it will be worth 30 percent less.

Ballard says she will wait until the case is completely closed before she touches her Dripping Springs home. Then, when the house is no longer evidence, she will have it cut apart -- walls, beams, furniture, appliances, hardwood floors and all -- and shrouded piece by piece in double-wrapped plastic before being buried in a landfill.

She has other plans too. She has announced her candidacy as a representative from the 46th District, and her hope is to sit on the insurance committee. ''Nearly everyone hates their insurance company,'' she says. ''What a platform.''

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