Welcome to our podcast. My name is Kealy Severson and I'm here with Erik Johnson and Alicia Swamy and we're Exposing Mold. Today we're going to talk about SIDS. To introduce our conversation, we're going to talk about the misconception from the Cleveland incident, which was thought to be SIDS, but was actually probably or proven cases of pulmonary hemorrhage, Erik.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, it was proven. There's no question the babies went to the hospital and they had bleeding lung disease.
Kealy Severson:Okay, so the question hanging in the balance that went into debate was then what's the cause? Is that right?
Erik Johnson:Ruth Etzel examined all the factors in the So is that was never clarified publicly that that wasn't houses that could possibly serve as a common denominator and eventually wound up with a toxic black mold. And it turns out officially SIDS? Or was it? that in all subsequent studies, this particular species of mold, It was cleared up because it was not SIDS. Sudden Infant Death Stachybotrys, does cause pulmonary hemorrhage and bleeding disorders. Syndrome is where babies just stop breathing, but without the pulmonary hemorrhage. So Ruth Etzel did go to great lengths to keep them separate.
Kealy Severson:Okay, thank you. I understand now. I know that Ruth Etzel is the originator of finding mold illness because there was this mystery with the baby's, Stachybotrys or toxic mold wasn't really entered into the literature. You've explained to us that she was the one who went back in the veterinarian literature found cases of Stachybotrys killing horses and like when to go examine the houses and found preliminary evidence of Stachybotrys. I don't know what samples were taken, what the exact method was. Then later, the CDC, I think they did they start to get some heat from like insurance companies and political pressure because I know at some point, they did this little pivot that is really called into question by people who know that kind of like the inside track of it, where they brought in a team of six scientists who essentially discredit Ruth Etzel's findings, and they sign this declaration, like the previous information was all kind of null and void. But they didn't even sign their names of six unnamed scientists that just totally discredited this link between Stachybotrys and infant pulmonary hemorrhage in which is killing babies in Cleveland. What year was that?
Erik Johnson:1994 and the so called researchers who threw these findings into dispute did so by saying that Ruth Etzel, Dorr Dearborn's findings, were a poorly contrived study that it was, it was not done scientifically, it was just bad study methods. And Dorr Dearborn and Ruth Etzel, tried to counter that this wasn't a study, it was a preliminary investigation. And it turned up this evidence. It was not any kind of conclusive study, it was just a foot in the door for further investigation. But by portraying it as a poor study, of course, they could say that it was not a study at all, and cast doubt on it. When Dorr Dearborn continued on finding more and more cases of pulmonary infant hemorrhage in the presence of Stachybotrys and there again for all these years, the researchers use this academic insanity of saying it's not in the literature, so therefore, you have no proof.
Kealy Severson:I remember reading that description from Dorr Dearborn and an old man's book where he was like describing with with alarm, the increased frequency of pulmonary hemorrhage and infants and same in a normal in a normal setting. It would just be like a fraction, such a small fraction of these cases and we're just seeing one after another. It was very alarming to him at the time that it was occurring so much in one area.
Erik Johnson:Yeah as Ruth Etzel said it's the duty of the disease detective to look for correlations, try to isolate the cause, to see if you can find the culprit and prevent it from striking again.
Kealy Severson:So do you think it was the political pressure that ultimately led to that unwinding?
Erik Johnson:Absolutely. No question.
Kealy Severson:Is there anything else we should cover on the Cleveland incident before moving on a bit here?
Erik Johnson:One of the things that is used to cast doubt on it is that it wasn't a constant phenomenon. It didn't start up and keep on going permanently, as a artifact peculiar to that region. So researchers say if your findings of Stachybotrys, which is still in houses were the cause it would still be going on. And there would be no doubt because there would always be babies suffering from this disease, when this seems to be something that came and went. Well, what caught my attention is that this was on Lake Erie, directly adjacent, which is notorious for algae blooms, which is the same situation we saw at Lake Tahoe, Where it appeared that the algae bloom amplified for a short period of time, all the sick buildings felt worse, and caused unexplained illness in sick buildings in associated with Stachybotrys, which later died down when algae bloom died down. So is there a relationship between the two? That's what I hope to ask researchers. But there again, they exercise its academic insanity of saying there's nothing to look into because it's not in our literature.
Kealy Severson:We just need to send a Nigerian Prince after them.
Erik Johnson:With millions and millions of very fine American dollars.
Kealy Severson:Alicia you found a really interesting article about Cot Death. Can you talk to us about this article?
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, something that was brought to our attention was Erik talking about basically Dr. James Sprott in New Zealand finding a cause for SIDS, which at that time was called Cot Death. I believe he was starting in the 90s, looking into that. And again, it brings to mind like CFS and everything that's going on with that with the whole name change thing, how something is named something and then they like to change it to something else, to confuse everyone, and change up the paradigm. So we're seeing this example in this situation as well. And basically, in Dr. James Sprott's article in BMJ, are some pointers that I like to just share with the crowd is that they found that the risk of reusing mattresses increased cot death, within a family. And basically the risk for a second cot death if if the mattress is reused just 1 in 65. So that's 50 to 100, times the risk of the first cot death, which is pretty interesting. And basically, what they're saying is, there's something going on chemically within the mattress. So there's fungi within the mattress, that even if the mattress is heated, it will generate more gases faster. So think of your child having a fever in a mattress that maybe has been used. And that's basically activating the fungi and other gases within the mattress, fire retardants, etc., to make it toxic for the baby. So that's why a lot of doctors say don't put your baby on their stomach because they're breathing in those components. But that mean, the doctors don't understand what's going on. They just think, Hey, you don't put your child on their stomach to reduce suffocation, whatever. But there's more to that. And what's really interesting is something that they did, they did a 10 year mattress wrapping program in New Zealand and this significantly reduced cot deaths. This is something so simple that anyone can do immediately as soon as they bring their child home to reduce the incidence of SIDS. But this is not something that is being taught or told by current pediatricians to families. And so this is pretty significant. This is not some idea in someone's mind, studying a mattress and its chemical components and saying this is the cause this is a 10 year study where they're seeing, okay, based on these families, and based on these families, this is what we're seeing. And there is a reduction in deaths simply by wrapping the mattress to reduce exposure to these toxins, whatever it is in these mattresses are saying it's a fungi and other toxic gases. So that's really interesting. And then it goes all the way back to 1989. Ba Richardson, a Britain, who also came to the same conclusion as Dr. James sprout later, I'm sure Sprott got his information from Richards and then just expanded upon that. But it's like, all of this stuff is here and out there. But it's not being acknowledged for for whatever reason, and then we see these articles that come out. There's a genetic enzyme that we found a biomarker that may give us a clue to SIDS. And then we get another article that says, No, that's not correct, which we do agree to an extent, but it's just so confusing, and it reminds me of the whole nutrition science where one one article will say eggs are bad and another one will say eggs are good. It's just one big ball of confusion. And at this point in time, and just basically from what we're seeing from CFS and other, than COVID, and other things, it's just seems like researchers are becoming a threat to society more than anything these days. And so Erik, I'd love to pass the ball to you, because you've been really interested in SIDS, and Cot death. And you really know the specifics in terms of the fungi. And also can can connect it to Gosio's gas, which is a really interesting story. So we'd love to hear that from you.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, I was very interested because of my belief that toxic mold, or some kind of emission from mold, was the cause of most of my pain. And during the Incline Village, 1985 outbreak, after passing through certain zones, and certain buildings in town, I would wake up in agony in the middle of the night, feeling like I was fighting for my life, I couldn't breathe, I was literally forcing myself to breathe, I'd have to remind myself to breathe. I was scared to death that I was going to fall asleep, and simply stop breathing. And since I was retracing my steps, going to same locations, I saw a pattern that has happened when I'd been in a certain place or in a certain building, if I avoided that place at that building, the effect was vastly decreased. So I started doing experiments going into these places to see if the effect was reproducible. And it most certainly was. So what is it that could get on my clothes that I can carry home, get in my pillow in my bedding, that would cause such a incredible inhibition of my ability to breathe some definite microbial substance. I wasn't certain if it was mold, or bacteria, or what it was something from the algae. But the fact that I could carry it on my clothes, from point A to point B and reproduce its effect made it a testable concept. So that's where I tried desperately to get doctors to look into it. So when I read about toxic mold, this opened up a door to all this other information, such as the historical literature on some of the early investigations into what mold can do. And the theory that arsenic killed Napoleon while in exile in the island of Elba. That's fascinating. That's a neat piece of history. Apparently, Napoleon, after he was raising havoc in Europe, was captured and sent into exile in palatial surroundings of a mansion. With this beautiful wallpaper, shields green wallpaper, this amazing pigment is created by oxidized arsenic. And this Victorian wallpaper became notorious for creating some kind of illness but people couldn't make out exactly what it was. An Italian chemist named Gosio decided that mold growing on the glue behind this paper was processing arsenic into trimethylarsene gas, and this made arsenic which would otherwise be inert and harmless, into a volatile, airborne, hazardous chemical that you could inhale. And that's what not only made Napoleon sick, but his butler as well who was complaining of the same symptoms. So when you have several people in the same location with the same type of strange illness, then you can connect it in this way. That's pretty interesting. But of course, the doctors feel that they've disproven Gosio's gas. They tested the levels of arsenic in Napoleon's hair, which they still have samples of, and found that it was not inconsistent with other people in his family. So they go that rolls it out. Maybe they were in other places that were producing Gosio's gas, because this Victorian wallpaper was very popular. It's pretty neat stuff, they were even using it in their clothing is a pigment. So exposure to that would have been probable, I don't think they had sufficient evidence to rule it out. Yet still, the concept that some kind of molds, some kind of microbial activity, could turn chemicals, human pollution, into toxic gases, caught my attention. And I got involved in discussions in the rapid response section of the brightest medical journal discussing this, and found that this is widely reported in Britain where they call it Cot Death. And they were seeing the same kind of thing where babies laying facedown would suddenly stop breathing, and perish. And so I tried to introduce this concept, that mold is processing human pollution into a toxic gas and got absolutely no feedback except for those saying, you can't prove it because it's not in the literature. Richardson fellow, he was a chemist that was called in to investigate mold growing on plastic, we used to think that plastic was impervious to mold. That was like plastic is mold proof. So anything, anything out of plastic is going to be a way to ward off mold. If we could make houses out of plastic, that would be terrific. That would be great because no mold would ever grow. Turns out, he was like the first to notice this was not the case, signs that were plastic signs that were out in the weather and rain, were getting discolored and decomposing. And he tested these plastic signs, and found they were growing mold, very happily. So he tried to develop mold resistant plastic. And when he was working with the people making the signs, they they reported Well, it's hard to work with this stuff, because we're getting all these headaches and strange illness just by being around these moldy signs. So here is good evidence that some unknown airborne hazard was being produced by plastic that had mold all over it. Dr. Sprott of New Zealand came across the concept of mold processing chemicals into some kind of thing that could harm people. So he followed up on that and developed his vape safe system, the mattress covering because the indigenous families had a very high rate of sudden infant death syndrome. And he felt that the mold growing in the mattresses, these really old funky mattresses, were doing precisely that. And sure enough, he found that arsenic and antimony in these mattresses used as antifungals were actually being processed into the very toxic hazard that was killing the babies. And the evidence that this was found in the Richardson hypothesis and the very simple way to test that was by making a really thick plastic cover for these mattresses, but then it wouldn't work and that's pretty interesting too. Like one mil plastic, cheap plastic was not doing the trick. Something about these gases was so nasty, so volatile, that it was penetrating cheap plastic. So that's a good thing to remember for later. But a very thick, heavy duty plastic, it was very dense, did do the job and reduce the infant mortality significantly. Certainly enough that it was something that doctors could follow up on if they wanted to.
Kealy Severson:So we started talking about the Cleveland incident and kind of differentiating between pulmonary hemorrhage and SIDS. But it sounds like both would be possible in a moldy environment because SIDS could be stopping breathing from the gaseous gas that you just explained and pulmonary hemorrhage could come from, like the Stachybotrys.
Erik Johnson:Absolutely, the parallel is in the ability of mold processing things into airborne hazards. So all I was doing is extending the same principle over to Stachybotrys when under certain conditions, Stachybotrys is combining with something in the paper, and something in the paint that's on the sheet rock, to make it especially hazardous. And even though doctors refuse to look into this, circumstantially, we see evidence for this every time we look into a sick building that has Stachybotrys, not just once or twice, every time when when you find a building with Stachybotrys, that Stachybotrys is going in conjunction with paint and sheetrock. You find people with all kinds of lung issues and bleeding and bloody noses.
Kealy Severson:Yeah, can I tell you guys a quick story about one of my sons. When he was first born, we lived about two hours from my mom who lived in a home that had a water heater break and Lake. And one day we went to go visit her. And my son was very young. He was like, less than three months old. I don't know exactly. And so first of all, every time we went there, he had his own crib there and in the room that he would sleep in, he would always have a bloody nose. Like I'd wake up, he'd wake up from a nap. And he'd always have a bloody nose. And I couldn't figure out why he always had a bloody nose in this house. So that was one thing that came up listening to this. But when we went to go visit that day, my mom was actually holding him and he just went unconscious. He just stopped breathing completely. And she just screamed, like he's not breathing. And it happened while he was in her arms. And we were like she was like resuscitating him I was calling 911. Within a matter of seconds. He like came to one was breathing, and then he went out again. And the second time it like took him longer. And this actually happen three different times. at my mom's house on three different visits. We had 911 come get him from like loss of consciousness in infancy. He's had as a just a baby, he had a heart monitor, a CT scan, they were trying to figure out like, why is he just suddenly stopped breathing. And they never did find anything. And it only ever happened three times while we were in that house while he was very, very small. To this day, like when we were in our moldy apartment when he was much older, he would have regular nosebleeds. And now that I know that's associated with pulmonary hemorrhaging. That's scary. I hope that's a warning for parents if you're in a water damage building or a really old building that you don't know how if it was restored if your kids having regular nosebleeds, please be aware that connection there.
Erik Johnson:Dr. Shoemaker connected that to some kind of pathway, the Con Willebrand clotting factors, and said something about the exposure to the toxic mold was disrupting our ability of the ability of the blood to clot. And that was something I grew up with. I just always had bloody noses every time I was in a moldy building. In fact, I could just about detect a moldy building by walking in and getting an instant nosebleed. And since I isolated Stachybotrys Chartarum as my principal irritant, learned to recognize how I felt when I came into contact with this stuff and treat it like plutonium, do everything I can to get away with it. Keep it off my clothing out of my hair, take a shower after ever since then. No bloody noses.
Kealy Severson:To that degree, I will say I know this, this son that I'm referencing, he's in a moldy middle school right now. And we have implemented your decon practices. And it's the end of the school year and he actually has not had a bloody nose all year.
Erik Johnson:So there again, we run up against our observations, which have been reproduced so many times. And we try to convey this to researchers. And all we hear is you have no studies you have no proof.
Alicia Swamy:I hope this conversation goes far and wide, especially for new parents who are worried about the situation because this is a concern for infants growing up and just you don't know whether or it's gonna happen to you or not. And maybe this story, this conversation, I hope really makes them understand that maybe there is actually this connection that is being refused legitimately for I don't know why they don't want to talk about this. And maybe they can implement their own program or protocol. But what's interesting to me is that okay, so Dr. James Sprott, they started this mattress program covering the mattresses with plastic. However, we know from past conversation that these toxins have an affinity for plastic, and they like to attach themselves to plastic. Do you think wrapping a mattress with this type of plastic materials still holds viable today with how mold is changing in the environment?
Erik Johnson:I have to say that I tried to implement this very system for myself. When I was in moldy buildings, I tried covering my mattress with thick plastic, and putting down a sheet or a pad that was washed in the safe place, and to see if I could beat this effect. And it worked fantastic for a day or two. And then it went back to normal. And one of the things
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, we're still trying to figure out that that they used to disprove the baby's safe system and discredit Dr. Sprott, this sudden infant death syndrome was still found to be happening in these same locations on the couch, in a chair, presumably, the couch and the chair would be another horizontal surface for mold to accumulate. So of course this could happen. So this was really a very dishonest, disingenuous attempt to discredit the observation that it did work to a certain degree, what doctors should do this, find out why it did make a difference in a positive direction, not use the fact that it didn't work in every case to disprove it. So doctors are clear and present danger to my health, to my survival, just as they have been to everybody who was in need of this information, but was deprived of it, because the way doctors are so determined to discredit it. big puzzle, right? Why are they so focused on the science and what's in the literature and what's not? Dr. James Sprott's work is in the literature. So what are they have to say now? We haven't approached pediatricians or researchers in this in this front to ask them what do you think of this research, but I'm sure that if we did, they would say this is in the past. We've moved on from now. Now we're looking at genetic enzymes.
Kealy Severson:I wanted to show you, Alicia, you had mentioned this article, you're like there's so much confusing information with these articles that are coming on. I just wanted to show super quick. Only people watching on YouTube will be able to see, it's not the podcast but the article Alicia is referring to as this article she found it says the blood marker identified for babies at risk of SIDS hailed as a breakthrough. This article essentially goes on to explain that the levels of the enzyme suggested babies were inherently vulnerable to dysfunction of the automatic nervous system. So it's saying, Oh, you're just inherently sensitive. They go on to say in the article, parents can rest assure there's nothing you could have done. That's incredibly misleading, especially when we look at mold. You don't want to tell parents there's nothing that you could do by giving them this incorrect information about this biomarker. This article was actually fact checked Alicia sent this article this like a week later, factcheck new study found potential biomarker of SIDS but calling it a cause misrepresents findings, which is exactly what she was saying, when these articles came out that this is just so it's so manipulative, and honestly, there's really just no excuse for this when we're talking about when baby's lives are on the lines, like they it's so medically irresponsible.
Erik Johnson:Yea, to find a genetic susceptibility in this butyrylcholinesterase pathway. It's good. If it's reproducible, that's fine. But of course, it still leaves open the question of why is this pathway being expressed? What is causing it? So you can see where doctors exercise this academic insanity of saying since this doesn't explain the entire phenomenon, we can discount the whole thing. We know that Stachybotrys and these toxic airborne pollutants are acting like a nerve agent, acetylcholinesterase, butyrylcholinesterase, inhibiting the synaptic function. It only stands to reason that if you've got a slight defect and this thing is a window of vulnerability, waiting to be exploited by toxic mold, you can put the pieces of the puzzle together and control the situation.
Alicia Swamy:Absolutely if they so far as when beyond just looking at the enzyme but okay, giving them a questionnaire, testing the environment saying, maybe actually, the mom carrying the child was in a moldy home, which made the child susceptible through this particular enzyme pathway. And therefore, that's why they would be at risk for SIDS. We can expand this beyond basically what they're doing and looking at it beyond that, that would be interesting to me. But it's anywhere you go. That environmental piece and allopathic medicine is just not considered. I don't know a viable reason for people's health problems. If anything, we look to the environment as maybe the a lot of the reasons why we have these health issues. And so we I guess, what I'm saying is we have to introduce this into current research, if we're going to be looking at these genetic enzymes. Let's also look at the environment and how this is playing with our genetics. Epigenetics is not hocus pocus here, environment is affecting how our genes are expressed and let's acknowledge that and use that in research moving forward.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, I find it we really need to have a discussion about academic insanity because most researchers use one flaw, one perceived discrepancy as an excuse to throw out a fantastic insight into what could lead to incredible developments.
Kealy Severson:I think we did a whole talk on academic insanity. Didn't we? Don't have a podcast on that? We'll have to post it when we link this.
Erik Johnson:We''l have to do it again because there's a lot of academic insanity out there.
Kealy Severson:All right, Erik.
Alicia Swamy:Yea, I just would like I'd like to just reiterate the fact that I'm not saying this is for all the researchers in the world, but for the majority of the researchers that we have out there today, they seem to be a real threat to human health and to society, because I don't know what they're doing and how they're getting away with this. But at some point in time, we're gonna have to have them standing in front of a court for crimes against humanity, because a lot of this stuff is insane. They just can't be getting away with this forever.
Kealy Severson:But they are tied by where they get their funding too.
Alicia Swamy:That's true. But then it's like, where does the buck stop for some people? What is it that you need to do and understand for you to say, this is not right? Morally, ethically, I cannot proceed? It seems like people are just pushing the the "Go" button on the gas chambers these days, and they just have no qualms or quarries with it. And I hate to go that extreme.
Kealy Severson:That's a really good plan. It's like where's the personal integrity of the of the individual researchers? Why aren't they standing up? Why aren't? Why are we the ones with no credentials asking these questions and then when we have observances as a sick patient population, we're told we can't be believed, heard, listen to investigated, and no one can be curious, because it's not already in the literature. Of course, it's not you guys won't even listen to us talk, no one's going to research it. And if people if the researchers really cared about anything other than just dollars, which there are people too, they have families to take care of, Look, I get it, but it's at what point? I don't know at what point you just put your integrity first or like the bigger picture first, if you don't have to live with the permanent ramifications of selling out for stupid research, I guess it doesn't really affect you. But like, it's gonna require people standing up and demanding more of themselves in this thing for us to make a change because it does seem like researchers are controlled to some extent by who they get their funding, what the funding is approved for, what they're allowed to look at. Dr. Ron Davis just said CFS is like a leper, he didn't use that word, but it's a leper in the research community. No one wants to give dollars to it. He's just raising money from his direct social media audience.
Erik Johnson:Yet at the same time, Dr. Davis refuses the very clues that we're talking about. So that's why I was forced to say that Dr. Davis himself seems to suffer from this academic insanity. And I'd like to give a little red flag for people who are too eager to throw out useful clues. And it's when they say, but not every buddy in the building is sick. If anybody in the building is sick, that is something that you could look into, anybody if it's one person, you could look into it, if they rushed to that idea that we can rule out one person's illness because a colony in one corner of a building didn't affect everybody in the building. They've got that clue crushing mentality.
Alicia Swamy:Absolutely. And even the the SIDS thing if you have a child that dies in a home from SIDS, that can be a major clue, that maybe you have a serious mold problem that can then extend to you and your other inhabitants in that home as well. It's sad that it has to get to that point. But at this point, I don't. I don't have an explanation. I think for me, the most tragic thing is when infants and children are dying. That's extreme for me. I think as a researcher I would really want to figure out what the hell's going on there. But I don't know what's going on, what's going on within that realm, I guess we'd have to look more into it or even push them to, to really look into this information. Earlier, when you were talking about Ron Davis and being academically insane, I hope that whoever's listening to this conversation creates an anonymous website that just has a list of names and photos of all the researchers with a little stamp that is academically insane according to patient advocates.
Erik Johnson:I would love to have a discussion with Dr. Davis about this, there was nothing I would welcome more than the opportunity to just sit down, publicly moderate it. So you know, this doesn't get out of hand, because obviously, you could wind up being very acrimonious. But let's just sit down and talk about the original chronic fatigue syndrome incident and see if we can make any sense of it. That's all I ask.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, cuz at the end of the day, your your care and your concern is for people, you have a genuine care and concern, you have this knowledge, you have this history, you were the prototype for this syndrome that is basically mold illness, and let's call it what it is already, after so many years. Let's get the people the help that they need. Let's get them on track to look into their environment and see what's going on there. But it's really like you say it's really not that hard. It really could take a few minutes to respond to this and we can move forward. And so we need to just stop with this nonsense in this this insanity and find some solutions.
Erik Johnson:That's probably a good place to wrap it up.
Alicia Swamy:Thank you everyone for joining us today was a great conversations about SIDS. And we also did talk about CFS a little bit and they all seem to go under the same umbrella and how the name changes and and the original evidence to what's evolved to now, all seems to be pretty similar. So we're not really sure what's going on in the doctor and academic community, we really hope that some changes began because there are lives at stake meet we really want to prevent further suffering and further deaths and and especially protecting children is extremely, extremely important. So again, please check us out exposingmold.com We offer consultations, we have a great support group. We're always providing awesome information on our social media pages. And be sure to tune into our LIVE's. They're really fun that we have a great time with our audience and just talking about the latest and greatest information in the mold community and what's going on with doctors and researchers. And yeah, we love when you guys participate. So again, please check us out and we will see you guys next time.