Mould in apartment causing candida? Questions about mould exposure and mould removal!

Hi! Hopefully this is the right place to ask - I apologize in advance for the long post.

This is the situation: I live in an apartment with my mother. We have lived here since 2002 (14 years). Both her and I are experiencing many candida overgrowth symptoms - we both have gastrointestinal ones such as constipation, gas, pain, bad breath, body odour etc, while I alone also experience coated tongue, acne, vaginal infections, exfoliative cheilitis and dry and itchy skin. She alone experiences rectal itch/pain which has been confirmed to be a candida infection.

Anyway. Some months ago, I came to the realization that there is lots of mould in our bathroom. It's mainly stuck underneath the silicone sealant in the shower, it kinda looks like this (not my photo, found on google): http://moderndaymoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/bath-mold.jpeg There are also some suspicious spots in the ceiling that might or might not be mould - I'm not sure.
When I mentioned this to my mom, she just shrugged it off and said that the mould has been there since before we moved here(!!!), and that it was probably no big deal. I then stopped worrying about it for some time - until yesterday, that is.

After some close inspection yesterday, I noticed the same kind of mould on the tiles in our kitchen. I immediately started googling it, and found lots of horror stories about people who had to move away from their homes and get rid of every single item they owned due to dangerous mycotoxins in the air contaminating everything in the entire house, people who got really sick from mould exposure, and even people who died from it. Needless to say, this obviously made me freak out!


Is it possible that the symptoms my mom and I are experiencing are due to the mold in our kitchen and bathroom? How likely is it that the mould is releasing these dangerous myxotoxin spores that are currently flying around everywhere in our home and contaminating everything? Do we have to leave everything behind and move right away, or is it possible to clean the mould and keep living here??


A few things do actually speak against the mould being toxic, though - first of all, according to my mom, the mould under the silicone in the bathroom has been there for at least 14 years. My mom has had her gastrointestinal problems for most of her life, which in other words is since long before we moved here. Her rectal problem started after repeated courses of Antibiotics three years ago. Most of my problems on the other hand started after moving here, but not immediately - I was 7 years old when we moved here, but I didn't really start experiencing any problems until puberty. Surely if my problems were caused by the mould, wouldn't they have started sooner? The people I've read about got really sick after only a few months - if my mom and I had lived in toxic mould for 14 years, wouldn't we be dead or at least extremely ill by now?


I have a few more questions. I have googled about ways to remove the mould - it seems like mould in bathroom sealants is fairly common, and people are usually recommending to simply remove the silicone, wash off the mould with bleach/chlorine or some other strong struff, and then reseal it with new silicone. Wouldn't doing this be really dangerous? Both since mycotoxins/spores might fly into the air and contaminate everything upon touch and also since the person who does it might breath in these mycotoxins and get them into their body?

This is all really confusing to me since some sites say that if you have mould in your home you should move away and leave everything behind, while other sites simply say that you should remove it yourself and that's it. Yet, both parts are talking about black toxic mould. What should we do? Also, how do you know for sure if the mould is toxic or not? I understand that no mould is good, but that some species are more dangerous than others. Is the black kind always toxic?


One final question. We also own a shower curtain with a few mould stains on it. Apparently, my mom has washed this shower curtain several times in the buildings' shared laundry machine. Is it possible that by doing this, she has contaminated the landry machine, which in turn has contaminated our clothes and everything else that has since been washed in it with mould?


As you can probably figure, I am totally unexperienced when it comes to mould, which is why I have so many (possibly stupid) questions. I would really appreciate it if some knowledgeable person would take the time to read and reply to this.
(PS: To clarify, I'm not looking for advice on how to overcome candida overgrowth - I'm looking for advice on what to do about the mould in our home and opinions on whether the mould is dangerous or not, and whether it might have caused our illnesses. Thank you so much!) Tweet