At the risk of sounding stupid, I’ve noticed my mom’s house smell has changed a lot in the last year and is stronger in her room and bathroom, coincidentally or not, since she has started showing mild dementia symptoms and has been diagnosed with vascular dementia. She feels extremely tired despite standard blood test markers being OK.
The smell could have simple explanations, like she forgets to ventilate the room, or her hygiene is not as good as before, since she has become more avoidant of any discomfort, but we are helping her with the hygiene part at least, the ventilation is harder because she complains about cold, and refuses to leave the room. Also to me, it is a different smell from what would be poor ventilation and from what would be lack of hygiene, but I can’t point out what it is. I'm usually very good detecting when a room has not been ventilated, I just feel I breath worse and can't focus as well, I'm annoying to other people that doesn't want to open the window.
She spends most of the time in bed, her body is telling her to sleep much more than before, and she has become very stubborn about getting out of the house, going to the dentist, etc. Since she is very intelligent and still has the verbal ability to make you believe she will do it as soon as she feels better and that will be soon, the reality is that months are passing by and that is not happening.
I wonder if anyone could recommend an affordable but effective air quality device, mold testing kits (if such a thing exists), or what targeted blood tests can be done. Also, if there are tests to fine grain the diagnosis of vascular dementia, to know if there is accumulation of proteins in the brain, or what is the origin of the issue.
She is 79 years old, perhaps there is nothing to do, but somehow I feel the environment of the house has something toxic in it, I even thought about electromagnetic fields, but I really don’t know where to start.
Edit: We live in Spain, her doctor feedback is that her blood tests are great for her age, and we didn't have much info about the vascular dementia situation somehow has been implied that is normal in her age.
There is an easy and cheap test that is actually accurate. You place Petri dishes with a specific medium in them in the room, open, for an hour. Then you close them and put them in a dark spot for a week. When you next look at them, count the colonies that have formed. 3 or 4 or below is fine. 3 to 6 or 7 you need to wipe the walls with citrus oil cleaner or diluted bleach, deep clean carpets, remove old books and otherwise deep clean the space. More than that, you likely have mold issues in the walls or ceiling or floors. All mold issues come from water sources- small leaks in plumbing, old seals around the edges of bathtubs, ingress from clogged gutters backing up, etc. here’s where you can get the petri dishes- https://immunolytics.com/store/
Don’t bother with the kit or with paying them to interpret results, just count colonies like I outlined above.
We are going through this now. It’s no fun at all. We have the house ripped down to the studs. A couple times the plates saved us, showing there was more mold then we’d thought. We’d rip out some stuff we’d found, run the test, find too many colonies on the plate then dig some more only to find more issues. Finally, we are getting clear plates, and I feel much better.
If it does turn out to be mold and fatigue caused by the mold feel free to contact me as I have been through it and am now on the mend. It’s a long difficult process with only the vague signals you mentioned to guide you.
Please don't direct people to that website selling overpriced petri dishes, "expert consult" services, and using scare tactics to convince people to order their expensive tests.
> count the colonies that have formed. 3 or 4 or below is fine. 3 to 6 or 7 you need to wipe the walls with citrus oil cleaner or diluted bleach, deep clean carpets, remove old books and otherwise deep clean the space.
Mold spores are everywhere in the air. This is not an accurate test at all. It's a random number generator. The thresholds don't even make sense: 3-4 is fine but 3-6 means throw out your books and deep clean the house?
If you want professional mold testing services, please start by looking up your local health department and seeing who they recommend for testing.
Most importantly, don't buy anything or take any advice from websites that have long lists of non-specific health symptoms that they claim are caused by mold. The lists of symptoms on that website include everything under the sun from headaches to sleep problems to acid reflux - https://immunolytics.com/understand-mold/ - This is how alternative medicine (and testing) sellers make their sales funnel as large as possible, not real science.
In the US where I live, professional mold testing companies have big expensive machines which supposedly count spores in the air. The results always come back negative, unless the space is visibly super contaminated. This is because mold is usually in the walls and these services are called in after a water issues to absolve landlords of financial responsibility for the extensive work and expense it would take to actually solve mold problems. It’s a nasty business.
We had our place professionally tested, got negative results, then tore the place down to the studs anyway (eventually, after the Petri dish tests described above) and found all sorts of mold.
My grandmother is currently dying from vascular dementia at 80. She sleeps all day. There’s really nothing you can do except keep them comfortable. There is no cure, only treatments for side effects unfortunately.
And yes, she smells weird ;) it’s mostly from change in normal hygiene. No matter how much you help clean them, they will smell different than they used to. And not good-different.
Any decent person would take that risk, for their mother's health.
At least in the US, there's a fairly large industry built around mold testing & remediation. Laboratories need to be inspected & certified, and you can do your own home air testing and receive the results directly from the lab.
Compared to a family member's health, testing is very cheap.
Vs. if you're testing to make sure the house isn't rotting - that's trickier. Many sorts of mold can be underachievers at releasing spores (which is what the common air tests look for). Or the spores could be released in a wall cavity or something, where air doesn't circulate and carry them to where you're taking samples.
I've no idea what the situation is in Spain.
Changing topic - my mother's mental health & vision were destroyed by an undiagnosed case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_cell_arteritis . America's health care system burned through incredible amounts of money for fancy high-tech scans and tests. It did not bother with having a competent doctor sit down, and really think about what might be causing mom's slowly-worsening symptoms. That would not have been hard - mom was in the very highest-risk demographic for that disease. And after it was too late - my optician was able to diagnose her in seconds, sight unseen, from just my in-passing mention of her eye-related symptoms.
(Yes, I also got the clear feeling that the health care system did not care at all about an elderly woman's declining health);
> At least in the US, there's a fairly large industry built around mold testing & remediation
Be aware that's there's also a very large industry built around selling people unnecessary or non-standard mold tests (which always come back positive) along with "expert consultation services" and then refer you to local remediation companies for a very large kickback.
Mold scares are big business. If you visit a company's website and they have long lists of non-specific illnesses or make claims that nearly every disease could be caused by mold, don't engage with them. If you contact them at all or buy their services you're likely to end up in their leads database and be marketed to until the end of time. There is a lot of money in scaring people into unnecessary mold testing and remediation services.
Thanks for sharing that experience, it means a lot.
Sometimes it feels like the health system is just about keeping you alive, and they don't dig enough in different posible root causes, they focus on treating the symptoms, specially with elderly.
> That would not have been hard
I understand the feeling, and it inspires me to look for a second opinion and someone more involved in finding a root cause. I'm sure in your case you did what you though it was best with the information you had, the reality is that the system does not invest in prevention and education of us patients and relatives. Knowing certain demographic is high risk should be somehow automated to raise flags when certain symptoms are mention even if they are in-passing mentioned as you said, because we as regular people are not educated to weight the importance of symptoms, and often doctors get defensive if you come with a theory.
The other day I was at the doctor, he was asking me many things, trying to figure out my stomach problems, I though I had a stomach flu, then really at the and by chance I mentioned I was at the dentist the week before and they gave me antibiotics for 7 days, it was only then with that small comment that I almost forget to say that the doctor could have the explanation, he said some antibiotics wipe out the gut microbiota, and it just gave me some probiotics and I was fine the day after, with a big improvement. I don't know how much time would have take me to recover if I would have forgotten about that detail.
When I think about it after the fact, duh! of course antibiotics kill gut bacteria, I heard that a million times in podcasts, but I did not make the connection.
My point is that we have enough in our plates and our profession is already quite complex, we deal with tons of complexities and it shouldn't be our job to know the right questions, or the right doctor to go for, but I wish there was a system that focused more on preventions, and finding the root cause with a more multidisciplinary approach rather that specialized niche knowledge doctors that ignore other causes, or symptoms if they are not present if their knowledge map.
> but that does sound like mold, and the mold could be progressing those symptoms
That's both my fear and my hope, if you have any good resource that I could educate myself about this hypothetical type of mold that can accelerate the symptoms of dementia, please share, would be very useful.
If you think there is a mold problem you could look for any sources of moisture or leaks and remediate those. The CDC has some guidance on where to start https://www.cdc.gov/mold-health/about/index.html
If moisture is a problem in areas like the bathroom you can install an automatic humidity controlled switch for the fan. It will regulate humidity automatically after showers.
If you feel like you must do something more, a HEPA air purifier would remove mold spores from the air. A carbon filter would remove odors and other compounds. A building-level solution is a heat recovery ventilator which brings in fresh air but captures most of the heat from the exhaust air.
I know you want to find a source of the health problem and identify something you can fix, but mold is probably not it. Mold is a popular topic in complementary and alternative medicine as an explanation for everything. If you ask the internet if any health condition could be caused by mold, someone will show up and tell you yes. I need to caution you that there are forums and subreddits where this is taken to extremes and anyone who disagrees has their comments deleted, creating an illusion of consensus. Some of these forums will tell you that the only solution is to move to a dry climate and only sleep outside. There are mold testing companies where your results will always come back positive followed by a recommendation that you buy their expensive consulting services. Please take some caution and a healthy dose of skepticism before getting involved with this subject.
One addition to this excellent advice: removing the moisture is not enough. Now that there is a mold infestation, you will need to replace the drywall and other affected areas.
Last year I found this YouTube channel, which you might find helpful. He mostly covers topics like how to deal with mold issues, improving air quality at home, as well as his experience with mold sickness.
https://youtube.com/@healthyhomeguide
I do not have a good link sorry. This is more of my general background knowledge that have accumulated over the years, as I have faced various similar situations. Persistent fungal infestation in the body can cause accumulating plaque from immune response, which compounds with other sources that are the root cause of the dementia.
Hi - this very much parallels my experience with significant mold exposure. We were able to identify mold using a laboratory test of air sample + swab completed by a certified specialist here in the US. Cost about $500. Highly recommend as the effects on our health
have been drastic and long-lasting. Best of luck.
The odor part may be nothing to worry about. When I was a child I noticed an "old lady smell" that many people have. I used to think they had terrible taste in perfume. As my mom got older and I observed her in life, I realized she was starting to smell that way without any effort, and did not before. I don't think she had particularly poor hygiene. I have no idea, but perhaps there is some biological reason for this, that older people produce distinct body odors from younger people.
Too late to edit but I googled "old lady smell" and here is the ai summary:
> ... aging odor, is a real biological scent caused by the compound 2-nonenal, produced as skin's antioxidants decline with age, creating a greasy, musty, or grassy smell that starts around age 40. While natural and not always a hygiene issue, it can be managed with specialized soaps ...
I would very strongly recommend you get her tested for mycotoxins. Vascular dementia / Alzheimer’s symptoms can come from mold exposure alone (type 3 Alzheimer’s). If you find signs of mold exposure, consider the shoemaker protocol or something like Cellcore to bind the mycotoxins or other similar endotoxins out of the gut using things like Cholestyramine, or other binders.
You can use the Mosaic mycotox test, order it directly to your home and then ship the sample to the lab.
I'm sorry, dementia is horrible and most likely the major reason for the symptoms. Just remember that dementia patients can also forget to turn off the water and cause a spillage they don't remember, or fall down in the shower and spray the whole room with water, or simply forget where the toilet is and urinate somewhere. But nevertheless if it smells weird you should check it, one can have both dementia and mold in the house.
If you can smell that the house is bad for you then it would be easiest to just get her out of the damn house for one or two weeks, maybe to somewhere on the ocean, and see if her symptoms improve significantly.
Check her Vitamin D / iron / B12 levels and supplement with relevant cofactors. Doctors often don't check it here in Germany.
If she drinks tap water do one of the online water tests which checks both for bateria and lead contamination - both for hot and cold water supply. Contamination can be by old pipes or in the water boiler. If lead in water is high also tell the doctor.
If you have access to thermal imaging camera it is a very quick way to figure out water leaks in the wall or places of bad insulation. Maybe a shingle on the roof has moved and rain has been dripping into the ceiling. I bought one for ~350€ and didn't regret it.
As you mention the bathroom check the silicone sealings around the bathtub and see if they are broken and/or moldy. Maybe water leaks behind the shower because the silicone has a defect. Silicone needs to be relaced every couple of years, just rip it out and apply new silicone it is a DIY job with many youtube videos. Wear mask while you are in the house.
You can DIY hack a around-the-clock humidity/temperature monitoring with esphome/homeassistant so you can compare outdoor air vs. indoor air in several rooms and also calculate dew point temperature to see where/if water condensation in the walls occur. It is quite cheap and wifi-based but a lot of fiddling.
Thank you! I think I'll start with the water supply and air humidity monitors, vitamin D (supplementing), iron and B12 shows normal in blood tests.
> get her out of the damn house for one or two weeks
Yes, this is my thinking too, I'm trying to solve the logistics of that as well, and hopefully we can do it soon enough.
Good luck! Maybe do a short holiday with her or simply take her outside for a full day and see if she improves.
You could also take some pictures of the suspected rooms especially the walls/ceiling and the bathtub/shower area and post them online to reddit.com/r/toxicmoldexposure and they can give you feedback. If you dont want to post online feel free to send to my email but I'm a layman without special training in this.
Also there are dogs who can smell mold, not sure how many of them are in Spain but maybe you are lucky and one is close to you.
As another top level comment describes, there are very inexpensive hardware store mold testing kits which are essentially just petri dishes you leave open and then mail in for testing.
Also if it is indeed mold, the source is typically some source of moisture. You want to rule out roof leaks and plumbing leaks, and bear in mind that water is incredibly non intuitive and creative in getting from point a to point b.
Another major source of humidity is the human body. Between sweat and respiration, we emit quite a bit of water. This goes into the air and into the bedding and requires ventilation to dissipate. Tightly sealed under-bed areas prevent the mattress from breathing. You might consider stripping the bedding and lifting up the mattress to see how things look.
Consider the rooms' ventilation system. Are the filters new, are the ducts clean? Hiring a professional to check the HVAC system is good routine maintenance.
A final source of moisture leading to mold to consider is condensation. Anywhere warm air meets a much colder surface leads to liquid water and mold. This can mean cracks and poor insulation in exterior walls during winter, or the air conditioning parts during summer. I've seen this combine with the bed-human moisture where under a bed against an exterior wall in a poorly insulated house was staying cold. The bottom of the mattress was moldy.
Mold is insidious. You often need to get into the mindset of a detective, or hire one, to find it. Good luck.
I find it interesting that we seem to have mastered what the human eye can do and even go beyond it with like infrared but somehow we still can't build a chip that can "taste" or "smell".
This is exactly the problem I've been obsessing over. The challenge is that olfaction isn't like vision. you're not detecting photons at discrete wavelengths, you're dealing with ~400 olfactory receptor types responding to millions of possible volatile molecules in combinatorial ways.
MOX sensors (like the SnO2 in this paper) have been around for decades but hit a fundamental ceiling—they require specific coatings to bind to specific VOCs. Want to detect a new substance? You're changing hardware.
The more promising path, IMO, is carbon nanotube (CNT) sensors that actually mimic how our nose works. Instead of measuring bulk resistance changes, you functionalize CNT arrays to respond to specific molecular binding events—much closer to how olfactory receptors operate. detection of new substances becomes a software/ML problem rather than a hardware redesign. That's how biology does it—your nose doesn't grow new receptors, your brain learns new patterns.
Full disclosure: I'm building in this space (https://nosy.network) Nosy is using CNT paired with transformer models to create what we call a "Large Essence Model" (LEM). LEM "GPT for smell" processes scent information similar to how LLMs process text.
Makes total sense to me. Detecting and measuring photons seems much simpler than accurately detecting whole molecules. When we need to detect if a sample contains a certain kind of molecule, it usually requires expensive chemical processes.
Mass spectrometry is a multi-faceted beast, and has many applications. One that comes to mind is ion mobility spectrometry. I am most familiar with FAIMS which is an extremely selective method and can detect trace amounts of specific molecules.
The challenge is piecing together what you have detected to draw conclusions about the sample - in this instance you might detect a specific molecule, but to definitively conclude that it's caused by a particular fungus requires lots of prior testing.
If you just want a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done. But how would you even quantify/qualify the "sensations" of those senses?
Vision is "easy": What I see is what you see is what the machine sees.
A machine shows us what it sees and we can verify that it is working correctly, with a glance.
How would we verify that a machine smells or tastes "correctly"?
> a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done.
I'm no olfactory biochemist, but that sounds like science-fiction to me. The, er, reference implementation we're talking about is advanced nanotechnology we don't fully understand.
While we can do stuff like mass-spectrography, that involves destroying complex chemicals and converting them to smaller fragments we can tally, and then guessing at possible configurations they might have originally had.
If someone had a device that could simply tell you the exact chemical formulas of all molecules of any kind in a sample, it would be used everywhere and they would be very rich.
You are right that such device does not exist, but in theory you could combine many analytical techniques to a single black box that could analyze practically all of molecules and particles in the air or even in more complicated samples. It would contain at least some sort of chromatography, nmr, mass spectrometer, infrared spectrometer and various special analytical techniques for some compounds. Also some kind of sample preparation system would be needed.
This would be a very large machine and you would need to provide a sample to it in a test tube or similar manner. Automated blood analyzers in hospitals are maybe the closest thing to a such device.
The machine smells correctly, when the same numbers (or similar when using some norm, e.g. the L2) appear for the same smell (reproducibility) and therefore a mapping (numbers -> smell) can be created. When this starts to exist (practically usable), there can be a database to store the mappings, allowing classification. E.g., the machine says "this tastes like banana". The machines/algorithms/products could itself be rated for precision.
I dont say such machines don't exist, but for my taste (pun intended) the solutions all lack something, either long term stability or having a second source supplier or being able to classify a reasonable amount of tastes or being able to distinguish between two tastes (or lacking all those things together).
I think at least _part_ of the reason why is that it's just a whole lot less useful? There's tons and tons of applications for image and video and the automated analysis of it (for art, documentation or business purposes), whereas taste/smell capture and the analysis of it doesn't have that many useful use-cases (the article points at one of course, I'm not saying there's no use-case but much fewer). So we put a whole lot of effort and money into developing it, which didn't happen for smell.
The human eye is still pretty difficult to beat on some metrics, especially dynamic range (I think top-of-the-line sensors are now competitive, but for a while there was not really any options)
This would be very interesting for industrial applications that rely on clean rooms. What comes to mind is environmental monitoring for microbes, which is tedious but important and currently has significant lag time (≈2 weeks).
What I couldn’t determine is whether there is any information about concentration. I mean so what if something is present, you have a lot of ubiquitous organisms out there.
Nevertheless, if the technology matures, it could help identify a problem earlier before it becomes visually obvious. You would still need to determine the root cause. Or it could help with a better decision making before buying a house?
Correct, the workflow is something like this usually.
You would take contact, settle and active air sample plates within the cleanroom, followed by approximately one day before culturing is initiated in QC. Incubation then typically takes around seven days to cover both bacteria and fungi. You then get the colony forming units value which is the key parameter. Some companies take this further and perform organism identification, which adds additional days to the timeline but great for reactive investigations.
There is also a lag until the data becomes available in a digital format.
This of course differs between companies. Some companies may opt for shorter or longer incubation times, but in general, the key takeaway is that the process takes time.
KIT had a project on this (Project KAMINA) which looks like it is also cited in the linked paper.
They had a spin off SMELLDECT GmbH which sells a kit but not exactly a order from DigiKey thing. I imagine you will need to send an RFQ and go through the motions with their sales team.
I’ve used hardware store “mold kits” where you tack some tape onto a surface and then send it to a service that will analyze it for you. My understanding is that these services simply look at the tape through a microscope, or apply it to a growth media that’s been prepped to “prefer” the specific types of fungus they’re looking for.
One would think there are PCR-based services that do this? That would be the gold standard for this stuff, and it could easily scale enough to become economical, but to my knowledge there are no commercial mold testers that do this.
I've had success using my nose and a cheap $15 moisture meter against walls and ceilings. In my case I was already pretty sure the moisture came from the roof when it rained so went looking right after rainstorms. This was after also running a dehumidifier in a formerly damp basement.
If a home has an active mold problem, it probably has an active water or moisture problem. What mold remediation people sometimes do as well is use an IR camera to try to find unusually cold (thus damp areas).
> If a home has an active mold problem, it probably has an active water or moisture problem.
Mold can't grow or spread without moisture, so a moisture problem is a necessary prerequisite for a mold problem.
So focusing on fixing any moisture problems is a great place to start. Feeling around walls and baseboards or climbing up into the attic in the hours and days after a big rainstorm is one way to get started without any equipment investment. Air circulation also helps dry things out, so make sure every space has some openings for air exchange.
I wonder if there's anything that can be done from an ecological perspective, encouraging the presence of (acceptable) organisms that consume the problematic fungal spore species.
Spores are kind of designed to not be valuable as food. Can you name some organisms that actually consume spores rather than eat and then poop them out?
It doesn't need to be the species' spore-stage per se, as long as it occurs somewhere in the lifecycle before bad-stuff-humans-care-about happens. Can we encourage any (microscopic) conditions that trigger germination that turns out badly for the fungus?
Kind of like how there are plant seeds we don't eat directly, but we trick them into opening up and eat the sprouts.
Infrared thermometer is also good to survey a room and look for cold spots which are associated with moisture (condensation and/or structural dampness increasing thermal transfer). A thermal camera even moreso (but more expensive).
I've seen situations where experts put different colored water soluble dye on different spots outside the house, so that when it leaks through you can determine the source. Presumably that's within reach for an individual as well.
That's what I had to do to figure out source of my asthma and allergies.
Without any microbiology degree and while suffering from delibitating disease it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease while in other subreddits people post their poop for analyis.
In tune with the saying of "it can't be what mustn't be" ("Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf") a lot of medical professionals outright dispute mold-caused sicknesses. Their imaging can detect late stage fungal infections in the lungs and head of elderly people wholly consumed by the fungus, but they have no methods to detect early stage infections. And instead of realizing they're lacking appropriate analytical methods for mold detection they outright deny that it could be the cause of the problem.
Luckily the microscopy helped me to figure out which samples to send to a professional in order to pin down and remediate the cause of my sickness.
> it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease
Unfortunately, this is the only way to keep a hobby subreddit on topic. Once a subreddit becomes known as an outlet for non-hobbyists looking for one time assistance, the same requests get posted over and over again until the people who want to discuss the topic get fed up and leave.
Mold topics are particularly sensitive on Reddit because mold exposure is a huge red herring theme on TikTok and social media. People with difficult to diagnose medical conditions will often go through a phase thinking that mold exposure must explain everything and there are thousands of TikTok accounts and Facebook groups that will tell them it's the only explanation.
I understand that one cannot expect a reddit hobbyist community to compensate for a medical system that has already "failed" the patients. But if you feel your disease is progressing despite the medications the doctors give you, you will desperately try every single thing that people post on social media.
The cycle of "long covid > mold > lyme > candida > parasites" can only be broken by clever people building better, cheaper analytical methods for detection of these diseases.
Doctors really should show some humility and remember that 200 years ago it was an innovation for them to wash and disinfect their hands, and the guy who told them, Ignaz Semmelweis, was "red herring" chased into psychiatric asylum.
Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.
Viel besser! I'm happy to hear you have recovered, thanks for sharing. You're correct, the mycotoxin contamination of food products is such an important but overlooked fact. Once your body starts reacting to them your life is turned upside down.
The kicker for me was IKEA furniture. I was literally allergic to IKEA furniture, and only against specific parts of that IKEA furniture. It was only happening with the newer models of IKEA furniture bought in the past ~5 years. I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture.
In their recent sustainability reports IKEA has proudly mentioned how they are saving both costs and the planet by increasingly using recycled materials. They are quite light on the details but you can put together the stories across several of their publications and promotional videos.
Basically IKEA uses fungal waste products from industrial processes such as aspergillus from citric acid production. These fungal waste products are used as packaging material but also as a novel fungal adhesive for their "recycled wood" materials. This novel IKEA material sigificantly reduces plastic use and is cheaper - the holy cow of sustainability. It is basically old wooden furniture shredded into wood chips and then the wood chips are throw onto a big pile where they outside in the rain (even in the official IKEA video). Then they glue the wood chips back together with the novel fungal-based adhesive. Then they put a big layer of plastic around it and use it in parts of their furniture which are a bit more hidden, like the side panels of the pull-out drawers. One can recognize it by the rugged surface.
So these things are basically mold time bombs. It is wet wood chips, wrapped in plastic, and laced with fungal adhesive. The problem was so bad for IKEA that they changed the color of all components made from this from WHITE to GREY because people kept posting pictures of the slight grey mold on top of the white paint to social media.
If you go on the IKEA website and look at furniture, they list the exact material name for every single part of the furniture - except for the recycled wood parts.
I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments. If your immune system is wrecked by covid infection and lockdown-triggered vitamin D deficiency the mold really hits hard. I do not believe that IKEA sufficiently removed residual humidity from all shipments of this material, there are too many pictures on social media that show it.
The timing really coincides with IKEA's introduction of their sustainable wood material. Too many people reported the "gray dust" that was appearing on these white pieces so IKEA simply painted them gray.
If you are located in the US and have access to a lawyer and a microbiology lab, buy some IKEA drawers and do some experiments with the material of the pull-out drawers (left and right side panels). If you can document it for a court case, it might be a big class action lawsuit.
> I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments.
I'm glad you're better, but I'm sorry to say this is not a good take. I have a couple friends who suffered from Long COVID, one of whom eventually passed away from complications. Their conditions were clearly triggered by COVID and knowing both of their styles and tastes, I don't think they had a single IKEA furniture in their houses.
Long COVID misinformation is rampant and this is not helpful.
I'm sorry for your loss. It's definitely a fringe theory and I didn't intend to minimize their suffering. But this theory is grounded in my personal experience and my personal analysis with the furniture at hand and my immune system, plus the input of dozens of medical professionals and hundreds of lab tests along the way. My disease fits all of the long covid symptoms listed on wikipedia and it is brazen of you to swing the "long covid misinformation" hammer when I share my personal story of suffering and healing from the thing that people like you call "long covid".
This constant invalidation of multi-year delibitating disease is exhausting. If you come up with a long covid biomarker feel free to reach out so we can test and then you can officially gatekeep me from being part of "long covid". But until then please don't invalidate my healing story.
What helped me was other affected people sharing their story and figuring out what helped them personally to improve and what not. What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.
I have healed from this stuff DESPITE OF medical professionals.
> the thing that people like you call "long covid"
No. See e.g. https://meassociation.org.uk/2023/05/updated-booklet-long-co.... There are many conditions with a similar spectrum of symptoms, distinguished by their suspected causes: Long COVID is specifically the name where this is caused by a COVID-19 infection. We already know that COVID-19 infections aren't the only cause, because these conditions predate SARS-CoV-2 (in humans).
If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID. "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.
> What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.
I half-seriously want to propose "doctors flat-out refuse to think about your condition" as a diagnostic criterion for chronic fatigue syndrome.
It is a horrific disease and there are many who have it much worse than me. But I also nearly died from this.
> If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID.
The symptom onset correlated both with covid infection and with covid vaccination.
> "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.
Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture. But in my informed opinion there is a correlation, just as with the covid vaccine, and it would make sense to do both scientific and judicial discovery of this correlation.
Due to lacking medical methods one might most likely never be able to show that long covid is caused by a certain mycotoxin plus a certain covid strain hitting the body at the same time, or a certain mycotoxin weakening the immune system enough for long covid symptoms to appear.
But IKEA is/was aware of the problem as they change color from white to gray, they actively hide facts about these materials from their product detail pages, and their own videos demonstrate that it is very likely that shipments of their product were soaked in humidity. And if you soak wood in water, wrap it in plastic paint, and then put it into a room with 30% humidity it is like a fungal growth booster no matter what the person who lives in that apartment does. The water wrapped inside plastic will create micropores in the plastic and try to diffuse outside, thereby creating perfect conditions for mold growth. This is what I think IKEA has done, and I think they tried to hide it.
As mold-based materials are growing in popularity both due to lower costs and sustainability factors, the dangers of mold-based materials that are shipped with too much internal humidity need to be researched and remediated.
PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.
> Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture.
Can you please explain how this isn't evidence strong enough to immediately reject your "all long COVID is caused by IKEA furniture" theory?
> But IKEA is/was aware […] they actively hide facts […]
This is classic conspiratorial reasoning. You observe that group A do activity B to cover up activity C, which – if activity C causes situation D – would help cover up situation D. You then treat this as evidence that activity C causes situation D, and/or that group A is complicit in knowingly causing situation D; but this doesn't follow, no matter how much it feels like it does.
This kind of conspiratorial reasoning is extremely seductive – as I know from experience. I was never able to reason myself out of belief systems shaped like this. I'm hoping that laying this out abstractly will help bypass this – that you can look at the shape of the argument, go "yeah, that shape of argument is exceedingly questionable", then let that cognitive dissonance sit in your mind and gradually break apart the conspiratorial thinking over time – but I'm not really expecting it to help you.
I got lucky, because my conspiratorial beliefs (about big tech being evil cyberstalkers who collect and sell everyone's personal information) were never validated by others, and I began to doubt them (despite the mounting evidence), until I started to consider non-conspiratorial alternative explanations. It turns out, those have a lot more evidence to support them (as I'm sure most of HN is aware). This eventually allowed me to construct general models of the world where the "bad guys" are not necessarily omniscient, and these have served me well across a wide variety of topics.
> PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.
Please stay away from these. They are not healthy to someone with your mindset. You already know that the medical establishment is sceptical of the existence of ME/CFS, and only grudgingly acknowledges Long COVID: you don't need to expose yourself to repeated testimony from people with grudges and a vested interest in holding your interest.
I understand the joke but high-quality furniture is expensive, and only recently IKEA went from "good value" to "horribly overpriced".
Generally IKEA's goal of sustainability is noble and their transparency is appreciated, but the way they handled this issue reminded me they are a very profit-driven company with customer service set up to deflect issues and minimize cost.
The best furniture one can have are family heirlooms from old-growth wood, but it is both expensive to place them and to move them.
Fungus in general is not well-understood at all. We didn't even realize until a few decades ago that it's pretty much the backbone of life on Earth. All of our research into it is highly specific (using fungi as chemical factories in pharmacology, for instance), but besides that, it's largely a very mysterious branch of life. In medical school, you learn about fungus as it pertains to a few common infections and some classes of drugs, but otherwise you don't hear much.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just not something they're willing to speak on professionally because it's a huge blind-spot for science.
This is really interesting. I haven't been the same since I stayed in an extremely moldy place and have wondered about fungal infections/candida infection.
What was the remediation, some kind of anti fungal course/Nystatin?
I just wanted to say: Be careful going down this rabbit hole. There is a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience on the internet regarding mold, fungus, and candida as an explanation for every vague illness. The candida forums are particularly bad at misinformation. You can find people on internet forums, Facebook, and TikTok confidently explaining how candida explains everything wrong with you and can cause any symptom, but it's not backed by reality. People can waste a lot of time arguing with doctors or trying different antifungals and supplements before realizing that their condition is not candida at all.
I feel you have good intentions and I appreciate your warnings but it's not like people go down these rabbit holes because they want to. They get pushed away and invalidated all the time by people like you who have the best intentions. Their appearance is uncomfortable, their symptom descriptions are vague and conflicting, and due to limited financial and intellectual resources they cannot express their disease in an optimal way, especially to stressed medical professional.
Doctors WANT to help people, but their diagnostic tools are still very limited and they can't/won't do home visits and see in what kind of unhealthy environment people are living in. For healthy people from a stable environment many homes of sick people smell horrible. But if you're financially tied to such a place, and never lived somewhere else you might feel that you're not well but you cannot pin it down.
The whole candida thing feels like a strawman to me. For my industry it would be a layperson coming to me with a defective computer and saying they have a trojan on their computer but in fact it is a spyware instead. I wouldn't send them home and be angry at social media to talk about trojans so much, I would help them diagnose the issue "computer problem" and then we see it is technically a spyware.
50% of population has below-average intelligence, 50% of population has below-average education, 50% of population has below-average wealth. The medical system makes it too easy to send these people back home and invalidate their symptoms just because they come with the wrong "tagline" into the meeting.
And what doctors are reporting as bad influence of social media is actually that patients know of thousands of others with similar symptoms, so they will be giving more push back against gaslighting attempts by doctors. For doctors it's easier to blame "misinformation" than to actually accept the symptoms listed by the patients and see that the medical profession is far from perfect and that the current lab methods have a lot of room for improvement.
The following advice assumes that you went to your doctor, reported the symptoms, they did a full checkup incl. CT imaging and sent you home without finding anything (e.g. the famous conversation of "congratulations you don't have cancer!" - "yeah but why do I have these symptoms then?" - "We don't know!").
So from my personal experience your biggest priority should be to reduce exposure, e.g. mask up with an FFP3 mask that properly keeps the mold spores out. If your disease is really exaberated by mold then simply wearing the FFP3 for several hours will reduce your allergic respiratory symptoms so much that you feel it. Of course move places if you can, but be aware that the new place also very likely has some sort of mold, and the mycotoxins are spread out all throughout your stuff.
Trust your instincts, especially your nose to find indoor mold sources - unless you simply can't smell for several years like me. If you leave the house for some hours and come back then you have a short time frame of some minutes where you can literally smell the location of a mold source in your house before the nose swells up again. Youtube has many videos that explain how to find mold. Generally learn about diffusion in wall construction materials and figure out where organic material is used in your house. If organic material is next to something that limits diffusion (plastic, foam, metal, concrete, cement, paint) it is a possible point of water condensation and mold growth. Maybe there is a very obvious high-intensity source of mold like backside of a picture frame on the outside wall or moldy dust in an uncleaned ventilation system. But mold can also be invisible inside the wall, floor, ceilings, wallpaper or furniture. In any case buy or DIY a hepa filter for your home.
Then assess your immune system and support it as good as possible. This means go to a doctor and do all possible traditional bloodwork (Vitamin D, the B Vitamins, iron, minerals) and figure out what kind of supplements your immune system needs but does not get at the moment. Take these supplements and do monthly blood panels to track your progress and check if your symptoms improve. Once my vitamin D deficiency was resolved it was a big jump in life quality.
Do genetic testing to see if you have genetic metabolism issues such as MTHFR, and adapt supplementation of methylfolate / methyl-B12 accordingly. If you're curious you can use promethease to do deep dive into your genetic predispositions, but be aware that the symptoms they list are correlations and not causations.
Stop smoking, alcohol, sodas, fast food. Try to eat more healthy and drink enough water and eat an apple a day (Vitamin C!). If you have trouble quitting smoking/alcohol you need to recognize those as self-medication for underlying issues which should be medicated by a psychiatrist instead.
Please be aware that if your immune system is suppressed, the moment it "starts up" again will feel like your symptoms are getting worse. Suddenly there will be a pain in the sinus, or a light fever, or a weird tingling in some part of your body. Get familiar with the Herxheimer effect which is accepted by medical professionals for bacteria die-off symptoms where people get more sick after antibiotics because the bacteria release toxins when they die. Many argue that the same Herxheimer affect also applies to mold die-off or when the mycotoxins stored in your body are re-released into your bloodstream. Medicine lacks methods to validate any of these claims.
Try not to accept any treament that reduces your immune system (e.g. cortisone or monoclonal antibodies). You want to strengthen up your immune system, and not supress it. You really need to learn to listen to your body and notice when your nose starts tingling or allergic symptoms are starting to hit. Do not do any polyp removal surgery or FESS before blood panels show that your immune system has all needed supplements and your genetic metabolism defects are adequately addressed with things like methyl B12 shots etc. For all the traditional vitamin/mineral lab tests you should be at the upper end of the green range and not just barely on the start of the green range.
The one medication that helped me all along the way was desloratadine - an OTC anti-allergic medication. Coincidentially recent medical studies also showed that desloratadine is highly effective against covid by blocking ACE2 receptor. For me it deswelled my whole respiratory system the same way that monoclonal antibodies did, without killing my eosinophils along the way.
Do not take any anti-fungal medicine, they have significant side effects (some of them are classified as chemotherapy medications - you do not have cancer). If antifungals are adviced there will be a team of well-educated doctors that make you aware of the need because they found a fungal growth.
Do not take EDTA or NAC before your immune system is recovered. They re-release things into your bloodstream your body is not able to cope with and it can really harm your body and mental health.
Do not eat any clay or charcoal or buy salt baths before your immune system is recovered. It is a waste of time. Fix immune system first and track the improvements.
Really listen to your body. Eat healthy and drink plenty of water. Maybe check lead levels of your water supply just to be sure. Read labels of food and get an understanding of how much food is rotting with mold in the factories before it is mushed together and sold to us. If you have skin rashes then sulfur soap bars are a magic trick.
Go to communities such as r/moldtoxicity and read their stories and experiences, especially about finding and remediating the mold sources. Stay away from supposed wonder medications before you fix your immune system and the bloodwork shows that your immune system is fixed.
Finally, mold growth is seasonal and highly dependent on humidity. Every time after it has rained it is really bad. If your symptoms spike in wet season don't get fooled to think you are "healed" just because summer arrives. Mold can also grow outdoors. If you are allergic to indoor mold a hike in the woods can very well put you into the emergency room because your respiratory system simply swells shut. You might live next to some wetlands and the wind blows mold spores in your direction. These are all factors to consider.
Good luck!
PS: If after all this your eosinophils are still high your doctors should triple check you for parasitic infection.
Can you add an email to your profile, so I can reach out to learn more? I'm really into air quality and been trying to improve conditions in my apartment. You mentioned that
> Generally learn about diffusion in wall construction materials and figure out where organic material is used in your house. If organic material is next to something that limits diffusion (plastic, foam, metal, concrete, cement, paint) it is a possible point of water condensation and mold growth.
which is super interesting — I've found a couple of electrical sockets in my apartment which have a very strange smell, similar to soil/mold (I've confirmed that with other people, just to reduce the chance that I'm crazy). I'm still trying to investigate/fix the issue, and it seems that you know more about that, would love to learn from you.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, very interesting!
Thanks for your kind words. I've added mail to profile, feel free to reach out.
If you are into air quality monitoring you might like homeassistant either with DIY sensors based on esphome (quite easy if you like very basic tinkering with low voltage) or with some off-the-shelf IOT products. If you just want to have a reliable CO2 sensor I can recommend the aranet4, but unfortunately those are quite expensive.
I had some electrical sockets which were super corroded from the humdity, so that the copper wire turned black even though the plastic wrap of the cable was still on it. The humidity must have moved up the cable for ~10cm. The mold damage that I found a year later was at the same wall, but I didn't mentally connect these two things at the time.
Re AIQ, I've actually built a couple of devices myself (using different sensors, plantower being the most popular one, but I've played with sensiron and others as well) but I've mostly focused on the PM monitoring.
The sockets that have strange "smell" are actually on the (inside) wall that is the building boundary (i.e. not a wall with a neighbour — these sockets don't "smell"). Still, it's a bit shocking to me that this could happen. Do you know how the humidity "got" onto your wall? How were you able to find out? I'm pretty early in my mini "investigation".
Yes, it might've been lost in translation but my socket also was located on the inside of an exterior wall of the building. So one side was room other side was outside. If all your problematic outlets are located like this, then it might be a condensation/insulation problem.
Obviously you should rule out a leaking pipe, especially if someone created a slow leak by putting a nail into a wastewater pipe, and also rule out a damage to the outside of the wall where rain could come in.
Maybe you can find out if there was a change to the exterior walls after the house was originally built, for example someone insulating the building by putting foam mats on the exterior walls during the most recent "renovation", or putting insulation wallpaper on the inside of the exterior walls. When houses are originally built, normally experts ensure with calculations that no condensation problems will happen within exterior walls.
But after many decades people think they are clever by putting additional insulation on the exterior walls in order to save some money, or to simply change the style of the building. In worst case, additional insulation will move the dew point towards the inside of the wall, and then condensation of warm+humid indoor air will happen within your exterior wall. If it is a wooden building like it's common in the US this can create a mold problem. But it can also be a problem for stone buildings like we have here in Germany, if a wallpaper of wallpaint is used that prevents humidity that is trapped within the stone wall from evaporating.
Once you know what materials were used for your exterior wall, you can use a very nice calculator [1] that will show you if the wall has a condensation problem or not. For this you need thickness and material for every single layer of the outside wall.
The airborne mycotoxin I was exposed to is a scientifically proven carcinogen and class A indoor toxin, confirmed by an official lab. It was direct cause of my eosinophilia/asthma/sinusitis. It is the biggest gaslighting ever because two people share a place and both have emergency hospital visits and nearly die but from totally different diseases in different areas of the body.
All the communities suggest you throw away everything once you leave a mold-infested place, but most can't afford that. Many keep their furniture and regret it.
I truly wish this experience upon the denialists so they can use it to gather the evidence they need. A proper cancer would've been easier because there is at least a support network and hospitals have a damn handbook for it.
I’ve done that - moved out of a mold infested house into a brand new house and kept some but not all belongings. Can you elaborate on risks? What do I need to watch out for?
Mold can stick to some of the furniture even if it's not a large, visible spot. When mold developed on the wall behind your large wardrobe there's a good chance that the wooden back of the dressed caught a bit of it. You move to a new place and carry the spores with you. At worst the new place also has a humidity problem and the spores you brought accelerate the mold development process.
Anything that sat around a mold infested area is something you should look at closely, at least to proactively give it a thorough scrub and dry in a well ventilated area before bringing in the house.
An air filer with a real HEPA filter will help catch airborne spores but if you already have mold growth anywhere in the room you need to take care of that before blowing air all around.
I wouldn't worry if you have no symptoms. I'd advise to regularly monitor biomarkers of your immune system (monthly/quarterly bloodwork with vitamin D etc), take approriate supplements which take into account any genetic metabolism defects (MTHFR), and listen to your body, especially the magic tingling of your nose and any symptoms of seasonal allergy.
Generally a DIY HEPA filter and a CO2 monitor should be enough to keep good air in a home which does not have water damage. If you have ventilation then remember to swap your filters.
So this might not be the answer you were looking for, but from my digging into this ozone treatments can supposedly kill the mold spores but they are still able to somehow harm you when you breath them in. Mold is one of those things that is supposedly so bad to have around, even when dead in the furniture, can continue to harm you.
We have mold in my family's basement downstairs too and I run the ozone generator a lot to freshen the air. But unfortunately parents would never throw out the things.
If you have too much water in the basement a very easy fix that might work for you is to remove anything that blocks drainage on the outside of your house. E.g. there should be a strip of 1m all around your house where there is only earth or light crushed stones, but no tiles or plastic. I have seen two houses where there were tiles in the garden right up to the house wall, and the cellar was wet. Once the garden tiles outside directly next to the house wall were removed, the humidity from the cellar wall was able to evaporate to the outside air and the cellar got dry again.
It might be a very easy fix before you start buying expensive solutions. Maybe you have old pictures of the house before there were problems and you notice there was actually a strip of garden all around the house instead of concrete or tiles.
Be very cautious with ozone generators. Mold might or might not damage you but ozone will definitely damage you even at very low levels that you don't notice.
UAS move a lot of air - I can't imagine this would be practical. At the very least, you'd need to put the sensor on a boom long enough to make it unwieldy.
The sensor recovery time limits the sampling time. A 28 second sensor recovery time with SnO2-Gr (graphene oxide) would be more useful for sampling larger volumes than minutes with just SnO2 FWIU; https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46521695
Everything about this website screams alternative medicine scam. "Integrative medicine" and "book a consultation" is not what you want to see on your mold testing lab's website. It means they're out to sell you things. I can almost guarantee that everybody who gets one of their test kits will get, surprise, a positive result that requires more expensive consultations and treatments from them.
One of the founders is a friend of mine that has been an IVD researcher for decades. I don't smell any scam. They are just looking for traction in the consumer and real estate sectors. They already have customers in agriculture, especially with cannabis farms looking for molds. They don't sell treatments. It's more like a radon sampler you leave in a house for a day to get a reading.
The AirAnswers website blocks visitors from the EU.
Most likely because they are in violation of GDPR and have no plan to care about data privacy. This is a really big red flag for all AirAnswers customers.
What if not GDPR would make an american B2C startup intentionally block visitors from Europe? Their investors most likely fly in and out of Europe all the time and want to show their portfolio company to their buddies. The startup's growth case is international expansion.
AirAnswers is not a startup as I originally thought, it seems to be a ten year old company with mature product and a set of patents they mention in marketing materials. If they block EU customers it's definitely a conscious choice.
The inevitable AI angle: researchers are increasingly exploring perception, self-modeling, and grounded interaction as the foundation for the next wave of AI systems, ones that behave in ways more aligned with human-like awareness than LLMs alone can provide (see work like MUSE or situational awareness in vision-language reasoning).
Systems like the electronic nose described here highlight what many think is missing in current AI approaches: continuous physical sensing combined with explicit novelty detection and decision boundaries that let a system say “this is real”, “this is happening now”, or “this is outside what I know”. Human-like behavior is unlikely to emerge from language models in isolation; it appears to come from closed perception-reasoning loops that are causally coupled to the environment. Without sensory grounding, AI tends to optimize for plausibility rather than correctness, and scaling or prompting alone doesn’t seem to address that gap.
LLMs are trained on text about the world, not the world itself. Olfaction is an interesting test case because it's one of the most ancient and direct sensory modalities. no symbolic abstraction layer, just molecular binding triggering pattern recognition.
What's compelling about pairing e-nose hardware with transformer architectures is you get that grounded perception loop you're describing. The sensor array produces high-dimensional response patterns from real physical interactions, and the model learns to classify and reason over patterns it's never been explicitly trained on—genuine novelty detection rather than interpolation over training data.
The "this is outside what I know" capability is critical for real-world deployment. A model that hallucinates a scent classification is potentially dangerous (think: fentanyl detection in law enforcement). You need calibrated uncertainty, not just a softmax score.
Looks like adding Graphene to SnO2 (Tin Oxide) sensors increases sensitivity and battery life and reduces operating temperature to room temperature, for an increase in manufacturing complexity and cost.
"Extraordinary Improvement of Gas-Sensing Performances in SnO2 Nanofibers Due to Creation of Local p–n Heterojunctions by Loading Reduced Graphene Oxide Nanosheets" (2015)
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/am5071656
"Highly Sensitive and Selective SnO2-Gr Sensor Photoactivated for Detection of Low NO2 Concentrations at Room Temperature" (2024)
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/14/24/1994 ; UV photo activation of SnO2-Gr sensors
I was surprised to see surface acoustic wave sensing for bio mentioned, since my lecturer researched it in the 80s. I guess mechanical sensing is hard to innovate.
This is significant, especially if it can be productized. Thanks for working on such an important topic. One day in the future technologies like this will keep vulnerable, sick people from being gaslit by other humans about the cause of their disease.
Or just project negative ions into your working and sleeping places and breathe easy, wipe the mold spores off the walls every couple months or so. Test their effectiveness by shining a bright flashlight in the dark. You can't see the beam!
Ozone (the source of those negative ions) comes with its own issues. If you are going to use ionize with ozone, it's best to do it when you're not going to be home for a while.
Are you saying that all particulates in the air inside a house are mold spores? Surely the vast majority is just normal dust (dander, microplastics, silicates, etc.)?
At the risk of sounding stupid, I’ve noticed my mom’s house smell has changed a lot in the last year and is stronger in her room and bathroom, coincidentally or not, since she has started showing mild dementia symptoms and has been diagnosed with vascular dementia. She feels extremely tired despite standard blood test markers being OK.
The smell could have simple explanations, like she forgets to ventilate the room, or her hygiene is not as good as before, since she has become more avoidant of any discomfort, but we are helping her with the hygiene part at least, the ventilation is harder because she complains about cold, and refuses to leave the room. Also to me, it is a different smell from what would be poor ventilation and from what would be lack of hygiene, but I can’t point out what it is. I'm usually very good detecting when a room has not been ventilated, I just feel I breath worse and can't focus as well, I'm annoying to other people that doesn't want to open the window.
She spends most of the time in bed, her body is telling her to sleep much more than before, and she has become very stubborn about getting out of the house, going to the dentist, etc. Since she is very intelligent and still has the verbal ability to make you believe she will do it as soon as she feels better and that will be soon, the reality is that months are passing by and that is not happening.
I wonder if anyone could recommend an affordable but effective air quality device, mold testing kits (if such a thing exists), or what targeted blood tests can be done. Also, if there are tests to fine grain the diagnosis of vascular dementia, to know if there is accumulation of proteins in the brain, or what is the origin of the issue.
She is 79 years old, perhaps there is nothing to do, but somehow I feel the environment of the house has something toxic in it, I even thought about electromagnetic fields, but I really don’t know where to start.
Edit: We live in Spain, her doctor feedback is that her blood tests are great for her age, and we didn't have much info about the vascular dementia situation somehow has been implied that is normal in her age.
There is an easy and cheap test that is actually accurate. You place Petri dishes with a specific medium in them in the room, open, for an hour. Then you close them and put them in a dark spot for a week. When you next look at them, count the colonies that have formed. 3 or 4 or below is fine. 3 to 6 or 7 you need to wipe the walls with citrus oil cleaner or diluted bleach, deep clean carpets, remove old books and otherwise deep clean the space. More than that, you likely have mold issues in the walls or ceiling or floors. All mold issues come from water sources- small leaks in plumbing, old seals around the edges of bathtubs, ingress from clogged gutters backing up, etc. here’s where you can get the petri dishes- https://immunolytics.com/store/ Don’t bother with the kit or with paying them to interpret results, just count colonies like I outlined above.
We are going through this now. It’s no fun at all. We have the house ripped down to the studs. A couple times the plates saved us, showing there was more mold then we’d thought. We’d rip out some stuff we’d found, run the test, find too many colonies on the plate then dig some more only to find more issues. Finally, we are getting clear plates, and I feel much better.
If it does turn out to be mold and fatigue caused by the mold feel free to contact me as I have been through it and am now on the mend. It’s a long difficult process with only the vague signals you mentioned to guide you.
Please don't direct people to that website selling overpriced petri dishes, "expert consult" services, and using scare tactics to convince people to order their expensive tests.
> count the colonies that have formed. 3 or 4 or below is fine. 3 to 6 or 7 you need to wipe the walls with citrus oil cleaner or diluted bleach, deep clean carpets, remove old books and otherwise deep clean the space.
Mold spores are everywhere in the air. This is not an accurate test at all. It's a random number generator. The thresholds don't even make sense: 3-4 is fine but 3-6 means throw out your books and deep clean the house?
If you want professional mold testing services, please start by looking up your local health department and seeing who they recommend for testing.
Most importantly, don't buy anything or take any advice from websites that have long lists of non-specific health symptoms that they claim are caused by mold. The lists of symptoms on that website include everything under the sun from headaches to sleep problems to acid reflux - https://immunolytics.com/understand-mold/ - This is how alternative medicine (and testing) sellers make their sales funnel as large as possible, not real science.
In the US where I live, professional mold testing companies have big expensive machines which supposedly count spores in the air. The results always come back negative, unless the space is visibly super contaminated. This is because mold is usually in the walls and these services are called in after a water issues to absolve landlords of financial responsibility for the extensive work and expense it would take to actually solve mold problems. It’s a nasty business.
We had our place professionally tested, got negative results, then tore the place down to the studs anyway (eventually, after the Petri dish tests described above) and found all sorts of mold.
Thanks a lot for sharing that.
Now that you say water sources, I just remembered she has a reverse osmosis water filter, and God knows the last time that filter was changed.
How would you go about testing the water or the filter with that method ?
My grandmother is currently dying from vascular dementia at 80. She sleeps all day. There’s really nothing you can do except keep them comfortable. There is no cure, only treatments for side effects unfortunately.
And yes, she smells weird ;) it’s mostly from change in normal hygiene. No matter how much you help clean them, they will smell different than they used to. And not good-different.
> At the risk of ...
Any decent person would take that risk, for their mother's health.
At least in the US, there's a fairly large industry built around mold testing & remediation. Laboratories need to be inspected & certified, and you can do your own home air testing and receive the results directly from the lab.
Compared to a family member's health, testing is very cheap.
Vs. if you're testing to make sure the house isn't rotting - that's trickier. Many sorts of mold can be underachievers at releasing spores (which is what the common air tests look for). Or the spores could be released in a wall cavity or something, where air doesn't circulate and carry them to where you're taking samples.
I've no idea what the situation is in Spain.
Changing topic - my mother's mental health & vision were destroyed by an undiagnosed case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_cell_arteritis . America's health care system burned through incredible amounts of money for fancy high-tech scans and tests. It did not bother with having a competent doctor sit down, and really think about what might be causing mom's slowly-worsening symptoms. That would not have been hard - mom was in the very highest-risk demographic for that disease. And after it was too late - my optician was able to diagnose her in seconds, sight unseen, from just my in-passing mention of her eye-related symptoms.
(Yes, I also got the clear feeling that the health care system did not care at all about an elderly woman's declining health);
> At least in the US, there's a fairly large industry built around mold testing & remediation
Be aware that's there's also a very large industry built around selling people unnecessary or non-standard mold tests (which always come back positive) along with "expert consultation services" and then refer you to local remediation companies for a very large kickback.
Mold scares are big business. If you visit a company's website and they have long lists of non-specific illnesses or make claims that nearly every disease could be caused by mold, don't engage with them. If you contact them at all or buy their services you're likely to end up in their leads database and be marketed to until the end of time. There is a lot of money in scaring people into unnecessary mold testing and remediation services.
Thanks for sharing that experience, it means a lot.
Sometimes it feels like the health system is just about keeping you alive, and they don't dig enough in different posible root causes, they focus on treating the symptoms, specially with elderly.
> That would not have been hard
I understand the feeling, and it inspires me to look for a second opinion and someone more involved in finding a root cause. I'm sure in your case you did what you though it was best with the information you had, the reality is that the system does not invest in prevention and education of us patients and relatives. Knowing certain demographic is high risk should be somehow automated to raise flags when certain symptoms are mention even if they are in-passing mentioned as you said, because we as regular people are not educated to weight the importance of symptoms, and often doctors get defensive if you come with a theory.
The other day I was at the doctor, he was asking me many things, trying to figure out my stomach problems, I though I had a stomach flu, then really at the and by chance I mentioned I was at the dentist the week before and they gave me antibiotics for 7 days, it was only then with that small comment that I almost forget to say that the doctor could have the explanation, he said some antibiotics wipe out the gut microbiota, and it just gave me some probiotics and I was fine the day after, with a big improvement. I don't know how much time would have take me to recover if I would have forgotten about that detail.
When I think about it after the fact, duh! of course antibiotics kill gut bacteria, I heard that a million times in podcasts, but I did not make the connection.
My point is that we have enough in our plates and our profession is already quite complex, we deal with tons of complexities and it shouldn't be our job to know the right questions, or the right doctor to go for, but I wish there was a system that focused more on preventions, and finding the root cause with a more multidisciplinary approach rather that specialized niche knowledge doctors that ignore other causes, or symptoms if they are not present if their knowledge map.
I don’t have specific suggestions for your questions, but that does sound like mold, and the mold could be progressing those symptoms.
> but that does sound like mold, and the mold could be progressing those symptoms
That's both my fear and my hope, if you have any good resource that I could educate myself about this hypothetical type of mold that can accelerate the symptoms of dementia, please share, would be very useful.
Thank you
If you think there is a mold problem you could look for any sources of moisture or leaks and remediate those. The CDC has some guidance on where to start https://www.cdc.gov/mold-health/about/index.html
If moisture is a problem in areas like the bathroom you can install an automatic humidity controlled switch for the fan. It will regulate humidity automatically after showers.
If you feel like you must do something more, a HEPA air purifier would remove mold spores from the air. A carbon filter would remove odors and other compounds. A building-level solution is a heat recovery ventilator which brings in fresh air but captures most of the heat from the exhaust air.
I know you want to find a source of the health problem and identify something you can fix, but mold is probably not it. Mold is a popular topic in complementary and alternative medicine as an explanation for everything. If you ask the internet if any health condition could be caused by mold, someone will show up and tell you yes. I need to caution you that there are forums and subreddits where this is taken to extremes and anyone who disagrees has their comments deleted, creating an illusion of consensus. Some of these forums will tell you that the only solution is to move to a dry climate and only sleep outside. There are mold testing companies where your results will always come back positive followed by a recommendation that you buy their expensive consulting services. Please take some caution and a healthy dose of skepticism before getting involved with this subject.
One addition to this excellent advice: removing the moisture is not enough. Now that there is a mold infestation, you will need to replace the drywall and other affected areas.
Last year I found this YouTube channel, which you might find helpful. He mostly covers topics like how to deal with mold issues, improving air quality at home, as well as his experience with mold sickness. https://youtube.com/@healthyhomeguide
I do not have a good link sorry. This is more of my general background knowledge that have accumulated over the years, as I have faced various similar situations. Persistent fungal infestation in the body can cause accumulating plaque from immune response, which compounds with other sources that are the root cause of the dementia.
Hi - this very much parallels my experience with significant mold exposure. We were able to identify mold using a laboratory test of air sample + swab completed by a certified specialist here in the US. Cost about $500. Highly recommend as the effects on our health have been drastic and long-lasting. Best of luck.
I'm sorry about your mom.
The odor part may be nothing to worry about. When I was a child I noticed an "old lady smell" that many people have. I used to think they had terrible taste in perfume. As my mom got older and I observed her in life, I realized she was starting to smell that way without any effort, and did not before. I don't think she had particularly poor hygiene. I have no idea, but perhaps there is some biological reason for this, that older people produce distinct body odors from younger people.
Too late to edit but I googled "old lady smell" and here is the ai summary:
> ... aging odor, is a real biological scent caused by the compound 2-nonenal, produced as skin's antioxidants decline with age, creating a greasy, musty, or grassy smell that starts around age 40. While natural and not always a hygiene issue, it can be managed with specialized soaps ...
I would very strongly recommend you get her tested for mycotoxins. Vascular dementia / Alzheimer’s symptoms can come from mold exposure alone (type 3 Alzheimer’s). If you find signs of mold exposure, consider the shoemaker protocol or something like Cellcore to bind the mycotoxins or other similar endotoxins out of the gut using things like Cholestyramine, or other binders.
You can use the Mosaic mycotox test, order it directly to your home and then ship the sample to the lab.
Thanks a lot! I'm going to look it up.
It's just old people smell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_person_smell
Can be targeted by soaps containing persimmon extract. https://miraiclinical.com/pages/nonenal
I'm sorry, dementia is horrible and most likely the major reason for the symptoms. Just remember that dementia patients can also forget to turn off the water and cause a spillage they don't remember, or fall down in the shower and spray the whole room with water, or simply forget where the toilet is and urinate somewhere. But nevertheless if it smells weird you should check it, one can have both dementia and mold in the house.
If you can smell that the house is bad for you then it would be easiest to just get her out of the damn house for one or two weeks, maybe to somewhere on the ocean, and see if her symptoms improve significantly.
Check her Vitamin D / iron / B12 levels and supplement with relevant cofactors. Doctors often don't check it here in Germany.
If she drinks tap water do one of the online water tests which checks both for bateria and lead contamination - both for hot and cold water supply. Contamination can be by old pipes or in the water boiler. If lead in water is high also tell the doctor.
If you have access to thermal imaging camera it is a very quick way to figure out water leaks in the wall or places of bad insulation. Maybe a shingle on the roof has moved and rain has been dripping into the ceiling. I bought one for ~350€ and didn't regret it.
As you mention the bathroom check the silicone sealings around the bathtub and see if they are broken and/or moldy. Maybe water leaks behind the shower because the silicone has a defect. Silicone needs to be relaced every couple of years, just rip it out and apply new silicone it is a DIY job with many youtube videos. Wear mask while you are in the house.
You can DIY hack a around-the-clock humidity/temperature monitoring with esphome/homeassistant so you can compare outdoor air vs. indoor air in several rooms and also calculate dew point temperature to see where/if water condensation in the walls occur. It is quite cheap and wifi-based but a lot of fiddling.
Good luck in these stressful times.
Thank you! I think I'll start with the water supply and air humidity monitors, vitamin D (supplementing), iron and B12 shows normal in blood tests.
> get her out of the damn house for one or two weeks Yes, this is my thinking too, I'm trying to solve the logistics of that as well, and hopefully we can do it soon enough.
Good luck! Maybe do a short holiday with her or simply take her outside for a full day and see if she improves.
You could also take some pictures of the suspected rooms especially the walls/ceiling and the bathtub/shower area and post them online to reddit.com/r/toxicmoldexposure and they can give you feedback. If you dont want to post online feel free to send to my email but I'm a layman without special training in this.
Also there are dogs who can smell mold, not sure how many of them are in Spain but maybe you are lucky and one is close to you.
It could be "old person smell"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_person_smell
As another top level comment describes, there are very inexpensive hardware store mold testing kits which are essentially just petri dishes you leave open and then mail in for testing.
Also if it is indeed mold, the source is typically some source of moisture. You want to rule out roof leaks and plumbing leaks, and bear in mind that water is incredibly non intuitive and creative in getting from point a to point b.
Another major source of humidity is the human body. Between sweat and respiration, we emit quite a bit of water. This goes into the air and into the bedding and requires ventilation to dissipate. Tightly sealed under-bed areas prevent the mattress from breathing. You might consider stripping the bedding and lifting up the mattress to see how things look.
Consider the rooms' ventilation system. Are the filters new, are the ducts clean? Hiring a professional to check the HVAC system is good routine maintenance.
A final source of moisture leading to mold to consider is condensation. Anywhere warm air meets a much colder surface leads to liquid water and mold. This can mean cracks and poor insulation in exterior walls during winter, or the air conditioning parts during summer. I've seen this combine with the bed-human moisture where under a bed against an exterior wall in a poorly insulated house was staying cold. The bottom of the mattress was moldy.
Mold is insidious. You often need to get into the mindset of a detective, or hire one, to find it. Good luck.
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I find it interesting that we seem to have mastered what the human eye can do and even go beyond it with like infrared but somehow we still can't build a chip that can "taste" or "smell".
This is exactly the problem I've been obsessing over. The challenge is that olfaction isn't like vision. you're not detecting photons at discrete wavelengths, you're dealing with ~400 olfactory receptor types responding to millions of possible volatile molecules in combinatorial ways.
MOX sensors (like the SnO2 in this paper) have been around for decades but hit a fundamental ceiling—they require specific coatings to bind to specific VOCs. Want to detect a new substance? You're changing hardware.
The more promising path, IMO, is carbon nanotube (CNT) sensors that actually mimic how our nose works. Instead of measuring bulk resistance changes, you functionalize CNT arrays to respond to specific molecular binding events—much closer to how olfactory receptors operate. detection of new substances becomes a software/ML problem rather than a hardware redesign. That's how biology does it—your nose doesn't grow new receptors, your brain learns new patterns.
Full disclosure: I'm building in this space (https://nosy.network) Nosy is using CNT paired with transformer models to create what we call a "Large Essence Model" (LEM). LEM "GPT for smell" processes scent information similar to how LLMs process text.
Makes total sense to me. Detecting and measuring photons seems much simpler than accurately detecting whole molecules. When we need to detect if a sample contains a certain kind of molecule, it usually requires expensive chemical processes.
Or Mass spectrometry
Pretty sure that relies on a lot of assumptions about how the pieces being detected originally fit together, or extremely pure samples.
Mass spectrometry is a multi-faceted beast, and has many applications. One that comes to mind is ion mobility spectrometry. I am most familiar with FAIMS which is an extremely selective method and can detect trace amounts of specific molecules.
The challenge is piecing together what you have detected to draw conclusions about the sample - in this instance you might detect a specific molecule, but to definitively conclude that it's caused by a particular fungus requires lots of prior testing.
If you just want a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done. But how would you even quantify/qualify the "sensations" of those senses?
Vision is "easy": What I see is what you see is what the machine sees.
A machine shows us what it sees and we can verify that it is working correctly, with a glance.
How would we verify that a machine smells or tastes "correctly"?
> a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done.
I'm no olfactory biochemist, but that sounds like science-fiction to me. The, er, reference implementation we're talking about is advanced nanotechnology we don't fully understand.
While we can do stuff like mass-spectrography, that involves destroying complex chemicals and converting them to smaller fragments we can tally, and then guessing at possible configurations they might have originally had.
If someone had a device that could simply tell you the exact chemical formulas of all molecules of any kind in a sample, it would be used everywhere and they would be very rich.
You are right that such device does not exist, but in theory you could combine many analytical techniques to a single black box that could analyze practically all of molecules and particles in the air or even in more complicated samples. It would contain at least some sort of chromatography, nmr, mass spectrometer, infrared spectrometer and various special analytical techniques for some compounds. Also some kind of sample preparation system would be needed.
This would be a very large machine and you would need to provide a sample to it in a test tube or similar manner. Automated blood analyzers in hospitals are maybe the closest thing to a such device.
The machine smells correctly, when the same numbers (or similar when using some norm, e.g. the L2) appear for the same smell (reproducibility) and therefore a mapping (numbers -> smell) can be created. When this starts to exist (practically usable), there can be a database to store the mappings, allowing classification. E.g., the machine says "this tastes like banana". The machines/algorithms/products could itself be rated for precision.
I dont say such machines don't exist, but for my taste (pun intended) the solutions all lack something, either long term stability or having a second source supplier or being able to classify a reasonable amount of tastes or being able to distinguish between two tastes (or lacking all those things together).
The machine would need to reproduce the smell just like it reproduces what it sees on a screen. What the sensor "sees" isn't what our eye sees either.
I think at least _part_ of the reason why is that it's just a whole lot less useful? There's tons and tons of applications for image and video and the automated analysis of it (for art, documentation or business purposes), whereas taste/smell capture and the analysis of it doesn't have that many useful use-cases (the article points at one of course, I'm not saying there's no use-case but much fewer). So we put a whole lot of effort and money into developing it, which didn't happen for smell.
Dog level smell is pretty useful, as evidenced, well, by actual dog usage.
OTOH maybe dogs are cheap enough not to create strong incentive for automation.
can't cuddle my laptop the same way I can a goofy-but-well-trained golden retriever
Maybe programmers should become cuddly to avoid being replaced by AI.
The human eye is still pretty difficult to beat on some metrics, especially dynamic range (I think top-of-the-line sensors are now competitive, but for a while there was not really any options)
Any reference you can share on this? I'm genuinely curious speaking as a PhD student in image processing for computer vision
- "quantum mechanics are so hard to reason about since I have no senses where that plays a part"
- "oh, so you have no sense of smell?"
This would be very interesting for industrial applications that rely on clean rooms. What comes to mind is environmental monitoring for microbes, which is tedious but important and currently has significant lag time (≈2 weeks).
What I couldn’t determine is whether there is any information about concentration. I mean so what if something is present, you have a lot of ubiquitous organisms out there.
Nevertheless, if the technology matures, it could help identify a problem earlier before it becomes visually obvious. You would still need to determine the root cause. Or it could help with a better decision making before buying a house?
All in all a lot to think about.
Why is there a significant time lag? Is it because monitoring is done via cultures?
Correct, the workflow is something like this usually.
You would take contact, settle and active air sample plates within the cleanroom, followed by approximately one day before culturing is initiated in QC. Incubation then typically takes around seven days to cover both bacteria and fungi. You then get the colony forming units value which is the key parameter. Some companies take this further and perform organism identification, which adds additional days to the timeline but great for reactive investigations.
There is also a lag until the data becomes available in a digital format.
This of course differs between companies. Some companies may opt for shorter or longer incubation times, but in general, the key takeaway is that the process takes time.
This e-nose in general interesting, do anyone know any sensors that are currently commercially available to prototype these things?
KIT had a project on this (Project KAMINA) which looks like it is also cited in the linked paper.
They had a spin off SMELLDECT GmbH which sells a kit but not exactly a order from DigiKey thing. I imagine you will need to send an RFQ and go through the motions with their sales team.
interesting, thanks for sharing these!
I’ve used hardware store “mold kits” where you tack some tape onto a surface and then send it to a service that will analyze it for you. My understanding is that these services simply look at the tape through a microscope, or apply it to a growth media that’s been prepped to “prefer” the specific types of fungus they’re looking for.
One would think there are PCR-based services that do this? That would be the gold standard for this stuff, and it could easily scale enough to become economical, but to my knowledge there are no commercial mold testers that do this.
Usually you have to spend thousands of dollars for an expert with the right equipment to focus on select areas of your home (areas that are suspect).
Are there ways to do a full-house scan yourself?
I've had success using my nose and a cheap $15 moisture meter against walls and ceilings. In my case I was already pretty sure the moisture came from the roof when it rained so went looking right after rainstorms. This was after also running a dehumidifier in a formerly damp basement.
If a home has an active mold problem, it probably has an active water or moisture problem. What mold remediation people sometimes do as well is use an IR camera to try to find unusually cold (thus damp areas).
> If a home has an active mold problem, it probably has an active water or moisture problem.
Mold can't grow or spread without moisture, so a moisture problem is a necessary prerequisite for a mold problem.
So focusing on fixing any moisture problems is a great place to start. Feeling around walls and baseboards or climbing up into the attic in the hours and days after a big rainstorm is one way to get started without any equipment investment. Air circulation also helps dry things out, so make sure every space has some openings for air exchange.
> or spread
Not explicitly true - dry spores get anywhere dust does.
Whether they become active growth or not is a different question.
I wonder if there's anything that can be done from an ecological perspective, encouraging the presence of (acceptable) organisms that consume the problematic fungal spore species.
Mold spores are everywhere. If they were a useful and plentiful food source, an organism would have evolved to consume them in bulk by now.
The presence of spores isn’t a problem by itself and eliminating them isn’t feasible.
Spores are kind of designed to not be valuable as food. Can you name some organisms that actually consume spores rather than eat and then poop them out?
It doesn't need to be the species' spore-stage per se, as long as it occurs somewhere in the lifecycle before bad-stuff-humans-care-about happens. Can we encourage any (microscopic) conditions that trigger germination that turns out badly for the fungus?
Kind of like how there are plant seeds we don't eat directly, but we trick them into opening up and eat the sprouts.
Better to make living spaces antimicrobial,
use surfactants,
instead of particleboard, open edged gypsum board, and open grain woods in basements and attic rafters
where humidity and condensation are inevitable.
Infrared thermometer is also good to survey a room and look for cold spots which are associated with moisture (condensation and/or structural dampness increasing thermal transfer). A thermal camera even moreso (but more expensive).
I've seen situations where experts put different colored water soluble dye on different spots outside the house, so that when it leaks through you can determine the source. Presumably that's within reach for an individual as well.
The IR camera idea is clever, usually we use them to find hot spots. Gonna try this next time I suspect we have a leak.
Yup, look at anything with temps below the dew point and badly vented areas below (condensation follows gravity)
or unusually warm!
(When your shower is improperly installed, for instance)
Swabs and a microscope. Oh and a degree in biology might help!
That's what I had to do to figure out source of my asthma and allergies.
Without any microbiology degree and while suffering from delibitating disease it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease while in other subreddits people post their poop for analyis.
In tune with the saying of "it can't be what mustn't be" ("Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf") a lot of medical professionals outright dispute mold-caused sicknesses. Their imaging can detect late stage fungal infections in the lungs and head of elderly people wholly consumed by the fungus, but they have no methods to detect early stage infections. And instead of realizing they're lacking appropriate analytical methods for mold detection they outright deny that it could be the cause of the problem.
Luckily the microscopy helped me to figure out which samples to send to a professional in order to pin down and remediate the cause of my sickness.
> it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease
Unfortunately, this is the only way to keep a hobby subreddit on topic. Once a subreddit becomes known as an outlet for non-hobbyists looking for one time assistance, the same requests get posted over and over again until the people who want to discuss the topic get fed up and leave.
Mold topics are particularly sensitive on Reddit because mold exposure is a huge red herring theme on TikTok and social media. People with difficult to diagnose medical conditions will often go through a phase thinking that mold exposure must explain everything and there are thousands of TikTok accounts and Facebook groups that will tell them it's the only explanation.
I understand that one cannot expect a reddit hobbyist community to compensate for a medical system that has already "failed" the patients. But if you feel your disease is progressing despite the medications the doctors give you, you will desperately try every single thing that people post on social media.
The cycle of "long covid > mold > lyme > candida > parasites" can only be broken by clever people building better, cheaper analytical methods for detection of these diseases.
Doctors really should show some humility and remember that 200 years ago it was an innovation for them to wash and disinfect their hands, and the guy who told them, Ignaz Semmelweis, was "red herring" chased into psychiatric asylum.
Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.
Viel besser! I'm happy to hear you have recovered, thanks for sharing. You're correct, the mycotoxin contamination of food products is such an important but overlooked fact. Once your body starts reacting to them your life is turned upside down.
The kicker for me was IKEA furniture. I was literally allergic to IKEA furniture, and only against specific parts of that IKEA furniture. It was only happening with the newer models of IKEA furniture bought in the past ~5 years. I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture.
In their recent sustainability reports IKEA has proudly mentioned how they are saving both costs and the planet by increasingly using recycled materials. They are quite light on the details but you can put together the stories across several of their publications and promotional videos.
Basically IKEA uses fungal waste products from industrial processes such as aspergillus from citric acid production. These fungal waste products are used as packaging material but also as a novel fungal adhesive for their "recycled wood" materials. This novel IKEA material sigificantly reduces plastic use and is cheaper - the holy cow of sustainability. It is basically old wooden furniture shredded into wood chips and then the wood chips are throw onto a big pile where they outside in the rain (even in the official IKEA video). Then they glue the wood chips back together with the novel fungal-based adhesive. Then they put a big layer of plastic around it and use it in parts of their furniture which are a bit more hidden, like the side panels of the pull-out drawers. One can recognize it by the rugged surface.
So these things are basically mold time bombs. It is wet wood chips, wrapped in plastic, and laced with fungal adhesive. The problem was so bad for IKEA that they changed the color of all components made from this from WHITE to GREY because people kept posting pictures of the slight grey mold on top of the white paint to social media.
If you go on the IKEA website and look at furniture, they list the exact material name for every single part of the furniture - except for the recycled wood parts.
I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments. If your immune system is wrecked by covid infection and lockdown-triggered vitamin D deficiency the mold really hits hard. I do not believe that IKEA sufficiently removed residual humidity from all shipments of this material, there are too many pictures on social media that show it.
The timing really coincides with IKEA's introduction of their sustainable wood material. Too many people reported the "gray dust" that was appearing on these white pieces so IKEA simply painted them gray.
If you are located in the US and have access to a lawyer and a microbiology lab, buy some IKEA drawers and do some experiments with the material of the pull-out drawers (left and right side panels). If you can document it for a court case, it might be a big class action lawsuit.
> I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments.
I'm glad you're better, but I'm sorry to say this is not a good take. I have a couple friends who suffered from Long COVID, one of whom eventually passed away from complications. Their conditions were clearly triggered by COVID and knowing both of their styles and tastes, I don't think they had a single IKEA furniture in their houses.
Long COVID misinformation is rampant and this is not helpful.
I'm sorry for your loss. It's definitely a fringe theory and I didn't intend to minimize their suffering. But this theory is grounded in my personal experience and my personal analysis with the furniture at hand and my immune system, plus the input of dozens of medical professionals and hundreds of lab tests along the way. My disease fits all of the long covid symptoms listed on wikipedia and it is brazen of you to swing the "long covid misinformation" hammer when I share my personal story of suffering and healing from the thing that people like you call "long covid".
This constant invalidation of multi-year delibitating disease is exhausting. If you come up with a long covid biomarker feel free to reach out so we can test and then you can officially gatekeep me from being part of "long covid". But until then please don't invalidate my healing story.
What helped me was other affected people sharing their story and figuring out what helped them personally to improve and what not. What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.
I have healed from this stuff DESPITE OF medical professionals.
> the thing that people like you call "long covid"
No. See e.g. https://meassociation.org.uk/2023/05/updated-booklet-long-co.... There are many conditions with a similar spectrum of symptoms, distinguished by their suspected causes: Long COVID is specifically the name where this is caused by a COVID-19 infection. We already know that COVID-19 infections aren't the only cause, because these conditions predate SARS-CoV-2 (in humans).
If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID. "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.
> What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.
I half-seriously want to propose "doctors flat-out refuse to think about your condition" as a diagnostic criterion for chronic fatigue syndrome.
It is a horrific disease and there are many who have it much worse than me. But I also nearly died from this.
> If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID.
The symptom onset correlated both with covid infection and with covid vaccination.
> "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.
Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture. But in my informed opinion there is a correlation, just as with the covid vaccine, and it would make sense to do both scientific and judicial discovery of this correlation.
Due to lacking medical methods one might most likely never be able to show that long covid is caused by a certain mycotoxin plus a certain covid strain hitting the body at the same time, or a certain mycotoxin weakening the immune system enough for long covid symptoms to appear.
But IKEA is/was aware of the problem as they change color from white to gray, they actively hide facts about these materials from their product detail pages, and their own videos demonstrate that it is very likely that shipments of their product were soaked in humidity. And if you soak wood in water, wrap it in plastic paint, and then put it into a room with 30% humidity it is like a fungal growth booster no matter what the person who lives in that apartment does. The water wrapped inside plastic will create micropores in the plastic and try to diffuse outside, thereby creating perfect conditions for mold growth. This is what I think IKEA has done, and I think they tried to hide it.
As mold-based materials are growing in popularity both due to lower costs and sustainability factors, the dangers of mold-based materials that are shipped with too much internal humidity need to be researched and remediated.
PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.
> Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture.
Can you please explain how this isn't evidence strong enough to immediately reject your "all long COVID is caused by IKEA furniture" theory?
> But IKEA is/was aware […] they actively hide facts […]
This is classic conspiratorial reasoning. You observe that group A do activity B to cover up activity C, which – if activity C causes situation D – would help cover up situation D. You then treat this as evidence that activity C causes situation D, and/or that group A is complicit in knowingly causing situation D; but this doesn't follow, no matter how much it feels like it does.
This kind of conspiratorial reasoning is extremely seductive – as I know from experience. I was never able to reason myself out of belief systems shaped like this. I'm hoping that laying this out abstractly will help bypass this – that you can look at the shape of the argument, go "yeah, that shape of argument is exceedingly questionable", then let that cognitive dissonance sit in your mind and gradually break apart the conspiratorial thinking over time – but I'm not really expecting it to help you.
I got lucky, because my conspiratorial beliefs (about big tech being evil cyberstalkers who collect and sell everyone's personal information) were never validated by others, and I began to doubt them (despite the mounting evidence), until I started to consider non-conspiratorial alternative explanations. It turns out, those have a lot more evidence to support them (as I'm sure most of HN is aware). This eventually allowed me to construct general models of the world where the "bad guys" are not necessarily omniscient, and these have served me well across a wide variety of topics.
> PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.
Please stay away from these. They are not healthy to someone with your mindset. You already know that the medical establishment is sceptical of the existence of ME/CFS, and only grudgingly acknowledges Long COVID: you don't need to expose yourself to repeated testimony from people with grudges and a vested interest in holding your interest.
This is an interesting theory. And if valid, will probably bite IKEA down the road.
But I do have to say this in jest. Silver lining?:
I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture.
I understand the joke but high-quality furniture is expensive, and only recently IKEA went from "good value" to "horribly overpriced".
Generally IKEA's goal of sustainability is noble and their transparency is appreciated, but the way they handled this issue reminded me they are a very profit-driven company with customer service set up to deflect issues and minimize cost.
The best furniture one can have are family heirlooms from old-growth wood, but it is both expensive to place them and to move them.
Fungus in general is not well-understood at all. We didn't even realize until a few decades ago that it's pretty much the backbone of life on Earth. All of our research into it is highly specific (using fungi as chemical factories in pharmacology, for instance), but besides that, it's largely a very mysterious branch of life. In medical school, you learn about fungus as it pertains to a few common infections and some classes of drugs, but otherwise you don't hear much.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just not something they're willing to speak on professionally because it's a huge blind-spot for science.
This is really interesting. I haven't been the same since I stayed in an extremely moldy place and have wondered about fungal infections/candida infection.
What was the remediation, some kind of anti fungal course/Nystatin?
I just wanted to say: Be careful going down this rabbit hole. There is a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience on the internet regarding mold, fungus, and candida as an explanation for every vague illness. The candida forums are particularly bad at misinformation. You can find people on internet forums, Facebook, and TikTok confidently explaining how candida explains everything wrong with you and can cause any symptom, but it's not backed by reality. People can waste a lot of time arguing with doctors or trying different antifungals and supplements before realizing that their condition is not candida at all.
I feel you have good intentions and I appreciate your warnings but it's not like people go down these rabbit holes because they want to. They get pushed away and invalidated all the time by people like you who have the best intentions. Their appearance is uncomfortable, their symptom descriptions are vague and conflicting, and due to limited financial and intellectual resources they cannot express their disease in an optimal way, especially to stressed medical professional.
Doctors WANT to help people, but their diagnostic tools are still very limited and they can't/won't do home visits and see in what kind of unhealthy environment people are living in. For healthy people from a stable environment many homes of sick people smell horrible. But if you're financially tied to such a place, and never lived somewhere else you might feel that you're not well but you cannot pin it down.
The whole candida thing feels like a strawman to me. For my industry it would be a layperson coming to me with a defective computer and saying they have a trojan on their computer but in fact it is a spyware instead. I wouldn't send them home and be angry at social media to talk about trojans so much, I would help them diagnose the issue "computer problem" and then we see it is technically a spyware.
50% of population has below-average intelligence, 50% of population has below-average education, 50% of population has below-average wealth. The medical system makes it too easy to send these people back home and invalidate their symptoms just because they come with the wrong "tagline" into the meeting.
And what doctors are reporting as bad influence of social media is actually that patients know of thousands of others with similar symptoms, so they will be giving more push back against gaslighting attempts by doctors. For doctors it's easier to blame "misinformation" than to actually accept the symptoms listed by the patients and see that the medical profession is far from perfect and that the current lab methods have a lot of room for improvement.
The following advice assumes that you went to your doctor, reported the symptoms, they did a full checkup incl. CT imaging and sent you home without finding anything (e.g. the famous conversation of "congratulations you don't have cancer!" - "yeah but why do I have these symptoms then?" - "We don't know!").
So from my personal experience your biggest priority should be to reduce exposure, e.g. mask up with an FFP3 mask that properly keeps the mold spores out. If your disease is really exaberated by mold then simply wearing the FFP3 for several hours will reduce your allergic respiratory symptoms so much that you feel it. Of course move places if you can, but be aware that the new place also very likely has some sort of mold, and the mycotoxins are spread out all throughout your stuff.
Trust your instincts, especially your nose to find indoor mold sources - unless you simply can't smell for several years like me. If you leave the house for some hours and come back then you have a short time frame of some minutes where you can literally smell the location of a mold source in your house before the nose swells up again. Youtube has many videos that explain how to find mold. Generally learn about diffusion in wall construction materials and figure out where organic material is used in your house. If organic material is next to something that limits diffusion (plastic, foam, metal, concrete, cement, paint) it is a possible point of water condensation and mold growth. Maybe there is a very obvious high-intensity source of mold like backside of a picture frame on the outside wall or moldy dust in an uncleaned ventilation system. But mold can also be invisible inside the wall, floor, ceilings, wallpaper or furniture. In any case buy or DIY a hepa filter for your home.
Then assess your immune system and support it as good as possible. This means go to a doctor and do all possible traditional bloodwork (Vitamin D, the B Vitamins, iron, minerals) and figure out what kind of supplements your immune system needs but does not get at the moment. Take these supplements and do monthly blood panels to track your progress and check if your symptoms improve. Once my vitamin D deficiency was resolved it was a big jump in life quality.
Do genetic testing to see if you have genetic metabolism issues such as MTHFR, and adapt supplementation of methylfolate / methyl-B12 accordingly. If you're curious you can use promethease to do deep dive into your genetic predispositions, but be aware that the symptoms they list are correlations and not causations.
Stop smoking, alcohol, sodas, fast food. Try to eat more healthy and drink enough water and eat an apple a day (Vitamin C!). If you have trouble quitting smoking/alcohol you need to recognize those as self-medication for underlying issues which should be medicated by a psychiatrist instead.
Please be aware that if your immune system is suppressed, the moment it "starts up" again will feel like your symptoms are getting worse. Suddenly there will be a pain in the sinus, or a light fever, or a weird tingling in some part of your body. Get familiar with the Herxheimer effect which is accepted by medical professionals for bacteria die-off symptoms where people get more sick after antibiotics because the bacteria release toxins when they die. Many argue that the same Herxheimer affect also applies to mold die-off or when the mycotoxins stored in your body are re-released into your bloodstream. Medicine lacks methods to validate any of these claims.
Try not to accept any treament that reduces your immune system (e.g. cortisone or monoclonal antibodies). You want to strengthen up your immune system, and not supress it. You really need to learn to listen to your body and notice when your nose starts tingling or allergic symptoms are starting to hit. Do not do any polyp removal surgery or FESS before blood panels show that your immune system has all needed supplements and your genetic metabolism defects are adequately addressed with things like methyl B12 shots etc. For all the traditional vitamin/mineral lab tests you should be at the upper end of the green range and not just barely on the start of the green range.
The one medication that helped me all along the way was desloratadine - an OTC anti-allergic medication. Coincidentially recent medical studies also showed that desloratadine is highly effective against covid by blocking ACE2 receptor. For me it deswelled my whole respiratory system the same way that monoclonal antibodies did, without killing my eosinophils along the way.
Do not take any anti-fungal medicine, they have significant side effects (some of them are classified as chemotherapy medications - you do not have cancer). If antifungals are adviced there will be a team of well-educated doctors that make you aware of the need because they found a fungal growth.
Do not take EDTA or NAC before your immune system is recovered. They re-release things into your bloodstream your body is not able to cope with and it can really harm your body and mental health.
Do not eat any clay or charcoal or buy salt baths before your immune system is recovered. It is a waste of time. Fix immune system first and track the improvements.
Really listen to your body. Eat healthy and drink plenty of water. Maybe check lead levels of your water supply just to be sure. Read labels of food and get an understanding of how much food is rotting with mold in the factories before it is mushed together and sold to us. If you have skin rashes then sulfur soap bars are a magic trick.
Go to communities such as r/moldtoxicity and read their stories and experiences, especially about finding and remediating the mold sources. Stay away from supposed wonder medications before you fix your immune system and the bloodwork shows that your immune system is fixed.
Finally, mold growth is seasonal and highly dependent on humidity. Every time after it has rained it is really bad. If your symptoms spike in wet season don't get fooled to think you are "healed" just because summer arrives. Mold can also grow outdoors. If you are allergic to indoor mold a hike in the woods can very well put you into the emergency room because your respiratory system simply swells shut. You might live next to some wetlands and the wind blows mold spores in your direction. These are all factors to consider.
Good luck!
PS: If after all this your eosinophils are still high your doctors should triple check you for parasitic infection.
Can you add an email to your profile, so I can reach out to learn more? I'm really into air quality and been trying to improve conditions in my apartment. You mentioned that
> Generally learn about diffusion in wall construction materials and figure out where organic material is used in your house. If organic material is next to something that limits diffusion (plastic, foam, metal, concrete, cement, paint) it is a possible point of water condensation and mold growth.
which is super interesting — I've found a couple of electrical sockets in my apartment which have a very strange smell, similar to soil/mold (I've confirmed that with other people, just to reduce the chance that I'm crazy). I'm still trying to investigate/fix the issue, and it seems that you know more about that, would love to learn from you.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, very interesting!
Thanks for your kind words. I've added mail to profile, feel free to reach out.
If you are into air quality monitoring you might like homeassistant either with DIY sensors based on esphome (quite easy if you like very basic tinkering with low voltage) or with some off-the-shelf IOT products. If you just want to have a reliable CO2 sensor I can recommend the aranet4, but unfortunately those are quite expensive.
I had some electrical sockets which were super corroded from the humdity, so that the copper wire turned black even though the plastic wrap of the cable was still on it. The humidity must have moved up the cable for ~10cm. The mold damage that I found a year later was at the same wall, but I didn't mentally connect these two things at the time.
Thanks, I'll reach out!
Re AIQ, I've actually built a couple of devices myself (using different sensors, plantower being the most popular one, but I've played with sensiron and others as well) but I've mostly focused on the PM monitoring.
The sockets that have strange "smell" are actually on the (inside) wall that is the building boundary (i.e. not a wall with a neighbour — these sockets don't "smell"). Still, it's a bit shocking to me that this could happen. Do you know how the humidity "got" onto your wall? How were you able to find out? I'm pretty early in my mini "investigation".
Yes, it might've been lost in translation but my socket also was located on the inside of an exterior wall of the building. So one side was room other side was outside. If all your problematic outlets are located like this, then it might be a condensation/insulation problem.
Obviously you should rule out a leaking pipe, especially if someone created a slow leak by putting a nail into a wastewater pipe, and also rule out a damage to the outside of the wall where rain could come in.
Maybe you can find out if there was a change to the exterior walls after the house was originally built, for example someone insulating the building by putting foam mats on the exterior walls during the most recent "renovation", or putting insulation wallpaper on the inside of the exterior walls. When houses are originally built, normally experts ensure with calculations that no condensation problems will happen within exterior walls.
But after many decades people think they are clever by putting additional insulation on the exterior walls in order to save some money, or to simply change the style of the building. In worst case, additional insulation will move the dew point towards the inside of the wall, and then condensation of warm+humid indoor air will happen within your exterior wall. If it is a wooden building like it's common in the US this can create a mold problem. But it can also be a problem for stone buildings like we have here in Germany, if a wallpaper of wallpaint is used that prevents humidity that is trapped within the stone wall from evaporating.
Once you know what materials were used for your exterior wall, you can use a very nice calculator [1] that will show you if the wall has a condensation problem or not. For this you need thickness and material for every single layer of the outside wall.
[1] https://www.ubakus.de/en/r-value-calculator/
I gather that airborne mycotoxins also play a role in inflammation, in addition to actual fungal infections.
The airborne mycotoxin I was exposed to is a scientifically proven carcinogen and class A indoor toxin, confirmed by an official lab. It was direct cause of my eosinophilia/asthma/sinusitis. It is the biggest gaslighting ever because two people share a place and both have emergency hospital visits and nearly die but from totally different diseases in different areas of the body.
All the communities suggest you throw away everything once you leave a mold-infested place, but most can't afford that. Many keep their furniture and regret it.
I truly wish this experience upon the denialists so they can use it to gather the evidence they need. A proper cancer would've been easier because there is at least a support network and hospitals have a damn handbook for it.
I’ve done that - moved out of a mold infested house into a brand new house and kept some but not all belongings. Can you elaborate on risks? What do I need to watch out for?
Mold can stick to some of the furniture even if it's not a large, visible spot. When mold developed on the wall behind your large wardrobe there's a good chance that the wooden back of the dressed caught a bit of it. You move to a new place and carry the spores with you. At worst the new place also has a humidity problem and the spores you brought accelerate the mold development process.
Anything that sat around a mold infested area is something you should look at closely, at least to proactively give it a thorough scrub and dry in a well ventilated area before bringing in the house.
An air filer with a real HEPA filter will help catch airborne spores but if you already have mold growth anywhere in the room you need to take care of that before blowing air all around.
I wouldn't worry if you have no symptoms. I'd advise to regularly monitor biomarkers of your immune system (monthly/quarterly bloodwork with vitamin D etc), take approriate supplements which take into account any genetic metabolism defects (MTHFR), and listen to your body, especially the magic tingling of your nose and any symptoms of seasonal allergy.
Generally a DIY HEPA filter and a CO2 monitor should be enough to keep good air in a home which does not have water damage. If you have ventilation then remember to swap your filters.
So this might not be the answer you were looking for, but from my digging into this ozone treatments can supposedly kill the mold spores but they are still able to somehow harm you when you breath them in. Mold is one of those things that is supposedly so bad to have around, even when dead in the furniture, can continue to harm you.
We have mold in my family's basement downstairs too and I run the ozone generator a lot to freshen the air. But unfortunately parents would never throw out the things.
If you have too much water in the basement a very easy fix that might work for you is to remove anything that blocks drainage on the outside of your house. E.g. there should be a strip of 1m all around your house where there is only earth or light crushed stones, but no tiles or plastic. I have seen two houses where there were tiles in the garden right up to the house wall, and the cellar was wet. Once the garden tiles outside directly next to the house wall were removed, the humidity from the cellar wall was able to evaporate to the outside air and the cellar got dry again.
It might be a very easy fix before you start buying expensive solutions. Maybe you have old pictures of the house before there were problems and you notice there was actually a strip of garden all around the house instead of concrete or tiles.
Be very cautious with ozone generators. Mold might or might not damage you but ozone will definitely damage you even at very low levels that you don't notice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Health_effects
Yes it's easy though to give plenty of time to let the ozone air out. The mold won't leave though, the ozone leaves after a few hours to 2 4 hours.
What sort of an indoor drone could this sensor be most usefully added to?
Attaching an air sensor to a giant high-speed fan is not going to help you pinpoint anything, it's just going to blow the air around.
Getting accurate room-based location requires even turning the HVAC off and avoiding a lot of walking through a building.
UAS move a lot of air - I can't imagine this would be practical. At the very least, you'd need to put the sensor on a boom long enough to make it unwieldy.
Many of the described robots in the mujoco_menagerie gallery could probably do the job: https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco_menagerie
The sensor recovery time limits the sampling time. A 28 second sensor recovery time with SnO2-Gr (graphene oxide) would be more useful for sampling larger volumes than minutes with just SnO2 FWIU; https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46521695
Maybe check out AirAnswers.
https://www.airanswers.com/
Everything about this website screams alternative medicine scam. "Integrative medicine" and "book a consultation" is not what you want to see on your mold testing lab's website. It means they're out to sell you things. I can almost guarantee that everybody who gets one of their test kits will get, surprise, a positive result that requires more expensive consultations and treatments from them.
One of the founders is a friend of mine that has been an IVD researcher for decades. I don't smell any scam. They are just looking for traction in the consumer and real estate sectors. They already have customers in agriculture, especially with cannabis farms looking for molds. They don't sell treatments. It's more like a radon sampler you leave in a house for a day to get a reading.
The AirAnswers website blocks visitors from the EU.
Most likely because they are in violation of GDPR and have no plan to care about data privacy. This is a really big red flag for all AirAnswers customers.
> Most likely because they are in violation of GDPR
Why do you say that’s the most likely reason? You can’t imagine other plausible reasons?
What if not GDPR would make an american B2C startup intentionally block visitors from Europe? Their investors most likely fly in and out of Europe all the time and want to show their portfolio company to their buddies. The startup's growth case is international expansion.
Because they don't understand GDPR and don't have time to figure out if and how it applies to them?
AirAnswers is not a startup as I originally thought, it seems to be a ten year old company with mature product and a set of patents they mention in marketing materials. If they block EU customers it's definitely a conscious choice.
The inevitable AI angle: researchers are increasingly exploring perception, self-modeling, and grounded interaction as the foundation for the next wave of AI systems, ones that behave in ways more aligned with human-like awareness than LLMs alone can provide (see work like MUSE or situational awareness in vision-language reasoning).
Systems like the electronic nose described here highlight what many think is missing in current AI approaches: continuous physical sensing combined with explicit novelty detection and decision boundaries that let a system say “this is real”, “this is happening now”, or “this is outside what I know”. Human-like behavior is unlikely to emerge from language models in isolation; it appears to come from closed perception-reasoning loops that are causally coupled to the environment. Without sensory grounding, AI tends to optimize for plausibility rather than correctness, and scaling or prompting alone doesn’t seem to address that gap.
LLMs are trained on text about the world, not the world itself. Olfaction is an interesting test case because it's one of the most ancient and direct sensory modalities. no symbolic abstraction layer, just molecular binding triggering pattern recognition.
What's compelling about pairing e-nose hardware with transformer architectures is you get that grounded perception loop you're describing. The sensor array produces high-dimensional response patterns from real physical interactions, and the model learns to classify and reason over patterns it's never been explicitly trained on—genuine novelty detection rather than interpolation over training data.
The "this is outside what I know" capability is critical for real-world deployment. A model that hallucinates a scent classification is potentially dangerous (think: fentanyl detection in law enforcement). You need calibrated uncertainty, not just a softmax score.
Looks like adding Graphene to SnO2 (Tin Oxide) sensors increases sensitivity and battery life and reduces operating temperature to room temperature, for an increase in manufacturing complexity and cost.
"Extraordinary Improvement of Gas-Sensing Performances in SnO2 Nanofibers Due to Creation of Local p–n Heterojunctions by Loading Reduced Graphene Oxide Nanosheets" (2015) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/am5071656
"Highly Sensitive and Selective SnO2-Gr Sensor Photoactivated for Detection of Low NO2 Concentrations at Room Temperature" (2024) https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/14/24/1994 ; UV photo activation of SnO2-Gr sensors
"Engineering of SnO2–Graphene Oxide Nanoheterojunctions for Selective Room-Temperature Chemical Sensing and Optoelectronic Devices" (2020) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.0c09178
"Humidity-sensing Performance of Graphene/SnO 2 Nanocomposites" (2025) https://sensors.myu-group.co.jp/sm_pdf/SM4049.pdf ; 28s recovery time instead of minutes
I was surprised to see surface acoustic wave sensing for bio mentioned, since my lecturer researched it in the 80s. I guess mechanical sensing is hard to innovate.
And electronic mouth to taste water.
Residents in Bethpage, NY are dealing with Grumman water contamination or “plume”.
https://youtu.be/vgezHCoqiUo?si=1wn7Grt8vpAnzJ_Z
I live on Long Island and drink well water. I’d sure like a home monitor.
This is significant, especially if it can be productized. Thanks for working on such an important topic. One day in the future technologies like this will keep vulnerable, sick people from being gaslit by other humans about the cause of their disease.
Or just project negative ions into your working and sleeping places and breathe easy, wipe the mold spores off the walls every couple months or so. Test their effectiveness by shining a bright flashlight in the dark. You can't see the beam!
Ozone (the source of those negative ions) comes with its own issues. If you are going to use ionize with ozone, it's best to do it when you're not going to be home for a while.
Ozone doesn't generate ions, ionizers produce ozone, and how much will depend on the device.
Are you saying that all particulates in the air inside a house are mold spores? Surely the vast majority is just normal dust (dander, microplastics, silicates, etc.)?
Dust becomes mold rapidly.
Way more rapidly than anyone’s comfortable.
Ambient air has mold spores.
Add a single humid breeze through the space, game over.
If you don’t have a humidity range being recorded day to day in your home, you may be surprised the excursions.
If you can see the mold, that’s too much mold for anywhere sharing air with the inside of your living and sleeping space.
How do you "project negative ions" ?
With an ionic air purifier.