Welcome to Exposing Mold, the podcast where I, Kealy Severson, Erik Johnson, and Alicia Swamy discuss all things toxic mold. We've been diving into the medical history of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and today we're going to talk about mold avoidance. Erik, you're kind of known as maybe the father of mold avoidance or somebody who advocates for mold avoidance for recovering from exposure so can you talk to us about how that came on your radar, and how you learned about it?
Erik Johnson:You know, when the first cluster of mystery malady, which was later called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, emerged at my old high school, where I would get sick every winter, recover during the summer, and I knew that something there was affecting me so badly, that prolonged exposure was dragging me down. I decided to look into that cluster and see what I could learn from it. And the pattern that I saw, was that what I was carrying home, in my hair, and clothing was enough to keep me from recovering on weekends. The plume in the middle of Incline Village, affected me in just about the same way that the school did and I realized that just passing through, on my way to work, was having the same effect on me and I started taking a shower, decontaminating, and doing experiments to find out just how much this was affecting me. Like one of the things that I did was walk right up to the edge of the plume, purposely allow myself to be contaminated. This was in the storm drain on Village Boulevard, right in front of the Incline High School, where the girls basketball team cluster occurred. It was on the exact spot that something was slamming me so hard that I could barely walk. And if I went home, took a shower, and changed my clothes and avoided that area, I could proceed to walk without crashing. But if I went back and tried it again, or if I failed to change my clothes, I couldn't exercise. So that was essentially how mold avoidance got started.
Kealy Severson:You were carrying something toxic on you that was keeping you sick, that was the first observation.
Erik Johnson:Yeah.
Kealy Severson:And how old were you at that point?
Erik Johnson:This was during the outbreak, when I saw how profound it was and I was 29.
Kealy Severson:Okay, so for a second, I thought you were saying when you were a student at Truckee.
Erik Johnson:I did notice at Truckee, if I rode the bus, it would knock me out. I was so eager to get a car. When I started driving to school, I wasn't getting the exposure from the buses and that helped out a lot. But that's when it became apparent to me that I couldn't park near the bus sheds, I couldn't park in the front of the school. And in the book, Osler's Web, when the story is told about the original Chronic Fatigue Syndrome outbreak, the Truckee teacher's lounge, where the one teacher who decided that there was too much for him, got in his camper, not only sat outside, but drove away from the school grounds to sit at the lake. And I thought that's amazing, because that's exactly what I did. I couldn't recover while I was sitting in the parking lot. While just moving a quarter, half mile away, that would do it. So here I am seeing the exact same pattern in the original Chronic Fatigue Syndrome cohort, as I experienced when I was there, and I thought this is a strategy. This is something I can do to decrease the effects.
Alicia Swamy:So what I'm trying to tie in my mind here is the series of events. You were being slammed by that storm drain but also by the mold that was present in the school, in Truckee High School?
Erik Johnson:Yeah.
Alicia Swamy:There were two different feelings, or maybe you can clarify it for me here.
Erik Johnson:Well, that was the problem. At this time, we were having an algae bloom and all the microbes seemed to be acting up. There was mold growing places we'd never seen it before and all the sick buildings that had been affecting people mildly, suddenly became extremely toxic. I could go down to the beach and feel some of the burning sensation from the algae on the beach. So the question I was going to ask Chronic Fatigue Syndrome researchers, should they ever come, was were the effects additive, or was it something in the air in addition to the toxic mold in the buildings that was adding up and becoming too much for people to handle? And this is why so many people got sick in the sick buildings and didn't recover? Or was it actually feeding the toxic mold and making it more powerful? In Truckee High School is really spectacular for that because it was not directly downwind of the algae bloom. It was 12 miles away, not downwind of the lake. So this suggested to me that something came in on the wind that was feeding all microbes making them more powerful. This was later confirmed by a building at the top of Squaw Valley, High Camp that later had to be torn down due to toxic mold and yet this building is literally at the top of the mountain, where you think it would be completely safe. In this strange turn of events, the first major advocate for ME/CFS was Thomas Hennessy Jr. and he had suffered from a mild flu-like illness down at the Bay Area, but he was kind of hanging in, not really, you know, getting better getting worse just continuing on with his job. And he came up to Tahoe, went skiing, went through that very building, and 15 minutes later, was laying in the snow, completely paralyzed. Ski patrol came and they were almost going to load him on a basket to carry him off the hill. He was he was that incapacitated. And after sitting there, he didn't want to do that. And after sitting here for a long period of time, eventually recovered, where he was able to take the bunny hill, basically the main, easy run back down to the launch. But I thought it was fascinating that another prominent advocate for ME/CFS had gone right through the worst building and collapsed shortly after. I thought this is surely a clue.
Alicia Swamy:Wow, that's crazy. So you're basically saying that there was something in the overarching environment, blowing through, and causing havoc and, and interfacing with these microbes. And these microbes are affecting the environment. They were killing the crawfish right, in the lakes, and making the molds grow, Stachybotrys or whatever. You know, other other molds. I always say it wrong. What's wrong with me, man? Haha. What is it, stinky butt ass? Haha. Stachybotrys.
Erik Johnson:Haha.
Alicia Swamy:Stachybotrys! There you go. So it was it was, you know, basically food for all these microbes?
Erik Johnson:Yeah, I realized that I get people angry at me for focusing on the Stachybotrys. But you see, I have to because that is the toxic black mold that acted up the most. That is the one that was documented in the original Chronic Fatigue Syndrome clusters. I can't draw attention to something that wasn't documented, they'll say it's irrelevant, but because of the fact that this was documented, and it's a toxic agent that fits the parameters for the illness that the CDC was investigating. It's a good starting point for further investigation, and then branch out and see if other microbes were acting up as well. And as it turned out, we'd had some forest fires up at Tahoe, and the firefighters were having to go out there and do mop up, put out the smoldering roots, some of them can smolder, underground for months. So they look for hotspots, dig them up and one of these teams of firefighters dug up a stump and the entire crew got sick. They were taken to the hospital on the entire crew with what appeared to be a flu like illness. And even though they said what they were doing, they were all in good health and they were digging up a stump, and they were obviously exposed to some kind of microbial toxin. There was no follow up done. I thought well, that's not right. If the microbes are acting up, there's some responsibility for medical researchers to try to put the pieces of the puzzle together and follow up on this.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah. And at this time, this is when Desert Research Institute was implementing their cloud seeding program, right?
Erik Johnson:Yeah, they've been doing it for several years prior and this was our first clue as to what might be going wrong with the environment. I mean, when you see algae blooms, microbes acting weird, you look for something overarching that could have affected the entire region. And that was the only thing that stood out. But I thought that because the illness at this time was thought to be strictly Lake Tahoe, we didn't know about any other clusters, or any widespread illness anywhere else. This brought my attention to the cloud seeding and that was specifically done in Lake Tahoe. It turns out that may have been just a lucky break. It gave me an insight into it. Because once I realized that nanoparticle pollution is increasing everywhere. I didn't rule it out. I thought Tahoe was perhaps just a particularly good example of what is happening all over the world.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, what's pretty crazy is if you go to the Desert Research Institute's website, you see where they've implemented their program with shooting up the nanoparticles into the atmosphere or wherever. And it corresponds with the map that you created. That kinda is in line where a lot of people had gotten sick. So I thought that was pretty interesting. We'll link those maps below in case you're interested in checking that out.
Erik Johnson:So when the plumes were acting up, and the toxins were acting worse, I decided to ask Dr. Cheney and Dr. Peterson, if they would help me devise a strategy of what I call the extreme avoidance, which was studying the properties of these microbes, whatever toxins they may be producing, mapping out where they are, and try to avoid them as best as possible, so that I would inconvenience myself the least. And to this purpose, I made a map of the worst locations, and I would take simply take roads around them, I would try to minimize my time in them and if I had no choice, that I had to pass through them, then if I felt to hit, too tired, to beat up, then I knew that I could decrease a lot of the effects by taking a shower and changing my clothes. So that's really what extreme avoidance is. It doesn't mean to go live in the desert in a tent. And I didn't tell anybody to abandon all their possessions. And I never said anything that anybody must do, like you must abandon your possessions. It was just a suggestion, a clue for researchers to follow up on.
Kealy Severson:Erik, I know that Lisa Petrison collected quite a few stories from you and then published it as a book and placed your name on it because you were kind enough to give her that information. But this is where the term like "mystery toxin" or "ick toxin" or "hell toxin" came up. And I know you're not adverse to using mystery toxin, since it is a mystery toxin. But I know those other terms weren't necessarily yours. So I'm just bringing this up to highlight how some of the information that you've shared about mold avoidance has turned into its own thing when other people evolve it into that and that's not all necessarily your information. That's, that's being put out there. So if there's any, any other rumors you'd like to lay to rest, now's the time.
Erik Johnson:Well, yeah, um, Lisa collected those quotations from various postings that I've made in groups all over the internet, assembled them into a book, and applied some of her own concepts, such as mystery toxin. And I really had no objection to that, because it is a mystery. But with these other names, I saw a pattern where people would invent a name, and they would apply it to something specific. Is it this, entity already been settled? No, no further discussion on the matter. Whereas from the very start, I felt that the underlying cause was ultra fine particles and silver iodide, the way they were affecting the environment, and the fact that they are toxic of their own accord, even setting any other toxin aside. So I wanted to use a vague abstract term, like"agent x", or "the effect" so that people wouldn't lock it into their mind that they are looking for a chemical toxin. Because once they decide that it's a chemical they're looking for it, they shove everything else off the table. And they're not looking for the effects of metallic particles.
Alicia Swamy:Thank you for that. Erik. I wanted to circle back to something you mentioned earlier about throwing away all your belongings. This seems to be like one of the like, number one myths that I see in the groups on Facebook. Where everyone's like, I had to throw everything away, or I'm currently throwing everything away. Could you explain that further and if there's an alternative to throwing away your belongings, or dealing with your belongings during a mold incident?
Erik Johnson:Well, years ago, this was a completely unknown quantity, and there was no advice. I knew I was highly reactive to possessions that or anything that had been a Stachybotrys infested building, but I had no idea how long the toxins would last, or if they could be cleaned at all. So when I had a toxic mold problem in my own house, and was forced to evacuate, I just put all my stuff in storage. The major things that I couldn't store, I got rid of. A lot of it went to friends. I sold some of it. But I didn't really know what to expect. And I found that over time, over a period of about five years, these toxins just died down on their own. So when the internet was invented later, and I started getting into groups, and I started hearing advice, you must throw everything away. I immediately started telling them that my experience had been if you can put it in storage for five years, it might just die down. So I always advocated storage and never never told anybody to throw things away.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, there was even a person that had come out and said that they did that. They put their belongings in the storage, and they were less reactive after a year and a half. That was pretty interesting. Can you speak on that?
Erik Johnson:Yeah, there's been no studies. So we really don't know how long it takes for these toxins to die down, or if there's any effective treatment. I know a lot of people talk about ozone. But the results are so mixed that it's not reliable. So we're still very much in the research phase here. And that's what we're asking for, is that researchers do systematic studies on what kind of molds, what kind of toxins, what kind of particulates are present? And what exactly it takes to clean them off? And how long before these toxins denature?
Alicia Swamy:That's a great answer. Thank you for that. I want to move on to the next myth that I see a lot. It seems that a lot of people think mold avoidance is living in a tent in the desert.
Erik Johnson:From the very start, when I proposed extreme avoidance, was mapping out the sick buildings, the storm drains, the locations I wanted to stay away from, the entire purpose was so that I wouldn't have to be so reactive that I would wind up living in the desert. So extreme avoidance is really a strategy to remain in town and maneuver as comfortably as possible, around source points. I know I picked a bad term, I shouldn't have called it extreme avoidance, but I was kind of winging it, and had to invent something on the spot. That's what I came up with. I thought about changing the term to strategic evasion, or strategic perceptification, something to indicate that I was actually putting a little effort into this. But I found the internet groups did a really peculiar thing. When I started to describe my strategy, they would spread rumors saying that, well, Erik is telling everybody to avoid everything, even water stains, even the mere thought of mold, to abandon everything, go live in the desert in a tent with no friends, family, and only rattlesnakes and scorpions for company. And when I realized that they're going to rail against my description of going to the desert, to get a taste of what it was like to get clear, I thought, Well, fine. I can let these people sort of weed themselves out. And from that time on, I started saying, well, I went to the Godforsaken desert. And that was pretty effective because that's, that's exactly what people said, they, they got so angry, that all the people that had a natural disinclination to listen and try out the experiment, kind of took themselves out of the equation.
Alicia Swamy:That's funny. That was my original perception. Before, you know, I understood your thoughts and ideas behind mold avoidance. I, my husband, and I did go and live in a tent in the desert, you know, and I have to say, I felt pretty damn good. You know, I felt really, really good in like Death Valley and other places. But then I started to understand that I, I'm still okay, in the city, it's just in certain areas, I have to be careful, because I start having symptoms. Once I started learning more about you, and you were providing me with more information, I started to understand, okay, my life doesn't have to be in a tent in the desert. I just have to learn how to navigate buildings and environments, and kind of what you said the source points.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, I did actually go live in a tent in the desert for a while, because I wanted to maximize my recovery. But in terms of expressing this to other people, I just said to do it as an experiment. I called it to "get clear", getting clear, get a taste of what it's like to be free of mold so you know what you're shooting for. The other thing is, Lisa invented the term sabbatical. And to me, that's a paid leave for when you've done your time at school, you get your summer vacation off of a leave of absence. And the term that I always liked was mold hiatus.
Alicia Swamy:Are we doing what these researchers are doing now? Eril? Are we reinventing terms? Haha.
Erik Johnson:I think we've got excellent, English is an amazing language. It's very descriptive. I think we have very good words for just about everything we need to describe and there's really very little need to invent new ones.
Alicia Swamy:You're right, you're right. I'm just, I'm just yanking your chain over here. We know we know what we know it as mold avoidance, so let's keep it. Like CFS, mold avoidance. Let's keep it at that.
Erik Johnson:The other thing is, when I say mold avoidance, I really mean mold avoidance. If I wanted to say bacteria avoidance, or toxin avoidance, that's what I would have said. I see that more and more people are using mold avoidance as a euphemism for anything that bothers them. And this is a mistake and it's going to play into the hands of deniers and doctors that don't want to listen to us. So I am in favor of being fairly precise about vocabulary. But at the same time, I don't see any reason why people try to say that you can't say mycotoxins or you can't say toxic mold. Because when I say toxic mold, I'm referring to the specific toxic mold such as Stachybotrys, Chaetomium that are known toxin producers so there's absolutely nothing wrong with expressing it that way.
Alicia Swamy:Absolutely. Thank you for that. I wanted to move on to another myth that you had, again mentioned earlier, people are under the impression that they have to pursue mold avoidance by themselves, they have to leave not only their belongings, but their family behind.
Erik Johnson:Well, everybody has to act according to the dictates of their own circumstances. And if their entire family is drenched, I can see where they are driven to a point where in order to survive to maintain their health, they might have to abandon their family. It all depends on how reactive they are, and how cooperative their family is. Because if you can talk your family into conducting a certain degree of mold avoidance, so they're not carrying contamination home with them, then you should be able to conduct cooperative effort in keeping toxic molds out of your environment, have a safe zone where you can recover.
Alicia Swamy:And that kind of goes with what you were just describing, just making sure that you are following strict decontamination protocols.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, when I go into a building, and I feel mold hits, which is a sense of brain compression, unease, the sense of doom and despair, heart palpitations, I step outside and I will actually sniff my clothes to find out if I can induce further heart palpitations. If I get a reaction to my clothing, or if I just sense that it's on me, that tells me that I need to decontaminate. If the building gave me hits, so I know there was something there, but I wasn't necessarily carrying the contamination on me, then I know I've got more leeway. It's not quite as dangerous and I probably will go ahead and decontaminate anyway, just as a way to keep myself safe. But not always. If I get a really minor sense of exposure, and I get out of the building, and recover immediately, and have no lingering effects, then I won't even bother to decontaminate.
Alicia Swamy:What does decontamination look like? What is it that you would do?
Erik Johnson:If I have really strong mold hits from my clothing, then I will drop my clothes at the front door, throw them outside, proceed immediately to a shower, and wash my hair thoroughl,y and changing into fresh clothing. I will then take the clothes outside, grab the with tongs or gloves, immerse them in water, so they won't cross contaminate and then I can deal with them later. I can either take them to the washing machine, or just put it off. But I find that if I get contaminated clothing, really badly contaminated, and don't do anything about it, just throw it in a pile or in a bag and let it sit for a while. It feels like the toxins will depart the spores and fragments and absorb into the material, the cloth itself. And the reason I think so is because if I immerse my clothes quickly after exposure, or wash them right away, they always clean up easily. Whereas if I let them sit, I can wash them over and over again and they may not clean up at all. So I think there's a time value here. The quicker you can wash your clothes, the more easily the spores and fragments will be washed out, the less likely the toxins will ooze out of the spores and fragments and get into the material, at which point they are almost impossible to clean.
Alicia Swamy:Wow, that's pretty interesting. I know when, that's something that you had recommended to me, so my husband and I were really strict on that. And my husband would just look at me like what the hell are you doing? You know, I would throw my, you know, do you know in Bruce Almighty when Jim Carrey, he just like throws his clothes off, I would literally do that. You know, and just like say, hey, throw it in a bag, go run in the shower. And when you're going through it, it feels so crazy but you know, this is what you have to do to survive.
Erik Johnson:The one that I wear to the symposiums when I'm climbing Mount Whitney, that's actually kind of a symbolic jacket. The reason you see it in all my pictures is because that's been with me throughout my mold experimentations and I actually went to doctors and when it was contaminated, and told them, now I've deliberately been into a sick building and now my jacket is contaminated. I washed and changed my clothes, but my jacket I left, it's still contaminated. And you can test me right now because I'm getting heart palpitations from my jacket. And if I take my jacket off, the heart palpitations will go away. So we can confirm immediately right here with the stethoscope, how this contamination phenomenon works. And the doctor's response was, well, I believe that you've developed a senseless fear of mold and you've invented this idea in your mind that there's something really toxic on it, and by taking off the jacket, you're symbolically freeing yourself of this exposure and relieving yourself of this invention in your mind. And I'm going you son of a bitch, it's on my jacket, you jerk.
Alicia Swamy:You should offered him to wear it and see how he felt.
Erik Johnson:I think that unless you're hyper sensitized, he wouldn't feel a thing and that would only serve to disprove your case. Yeah, other people have tried that, that they've led doctors and researchers to sick buildings and they go well, I don't feel anything. So this is really a hypersensitization phenomenon. And if you look at the Truckee teachers, the original cluster, they recovered on weekends, and during the summer, they could withstand the toxins, until they got that virus that went through, the Tahoe flu the 1985, China flu that went through. And it was the combination of the flu and exposure to the sick buildings that put them under the curve, created some kind of permanent immune damage, and their inability to recover from then on. And that is the syndrome that was called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Alicia Swamy:Thank you for hitting that point. I wanted to continue on, we just have a few more myths that we've seem to find in these groups. And one of them is people seem to think that they can treat themselves solely with herbs, supplements, brain retraining programs, medications, and some feel that they're almost superior to mold avoidance. Can you just clear the air on that?
Erik Johnson:Well, when I realized that there are mold toxins, I got a lot of my information from the multiple chemical sensitivity world where they're familiar with concepts like "spreading" where you can be reactive to one primary irritant, the one that triggered you, and overtime, if you fail to stay away from it, you will develop more and more layers of secondary chemical sensitivities. And part of their paradigm, the chemical toxicity paradigm is when the body can't tolerate these things, it will try to store them in the tissues so they can be given off gradually. So you don't have an overwhelming cytokine cascade. So in theory, these toxins you can handle and not just mold, but pretty much any chemical, the body will store it in the toxins, and it will keep it there until the body feels safe. Now all these herbs and supplements and detoxification regimens are based on the idea that this, and the binders, especially the ones that all the binders that you're supposed to send to your intestines to get through the toxins. Well, what happens if you are not in a safe enough mode for the body to release these toxins, so they're not getting into the blood and the intestines to be absorbed and removed? So I think that most of these supplements and herbs are a complete waste as long as you remain in an exposure situation. Whereas, or experienced by going to the desert is that once clear, the toxins where the body feels safe, detoxification occurs so naturally, that none of these things are even needed.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, I think Kealy and I definitely have had some experiences with that. I mean, I remember just doing everything under the sun when I was sick. This is before knowing it was mold. I mean, a perfect diet, exercise, stress, I mean, just everything under control, and nothing was working, and I was getting worse. And it wasn't till I removed myself from that home, I was actually able to finally breathe and heal and get much better. I'm not 100% no way, shape or form, but I am so much better than being in that toxic exposure.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, during the Incline outbreak, there were a few others of us who started practicing mold avoidance. None of us were studied. But two of the really interesting cases, and these were mentioned in"Osler's Web" was an engineer and a maid at the local casino that got sick in the basement of the casino, which everybody knew was loaded with moldy carpets that had been making people sick for years, was the engineer and the maid actually met at a support group and I just got to discuss the mold phenomenon with them. And they told me, yeah, everybody knows that the basement would make people sick. But if anybody talks about it, they get fired. So these two became essentially star witnesses for the mystery malady. They were mentioned in the book. They were Dr. Peterson's patients. They did all the therapies, none of them worked. And eventually, they decided they were both sick, and felt like their lives were a wreck, they hooked up, they got married, and they moved to Reno, to get away from the moldy buildings, found employment in a much better casino down there, and recovered about 80% of normal, simply by leaving the area and taking some efforts to stay away from mold.
Alicia Swamy:Good for them, good for them. I wonder what they're doing now.
Erik Johnson:You got to see a mold marriage story with a happy ending.
Alicia Swamy:I know we got to get those two on so we can really, you know, they can dish out their their story, and hopefully, they're still married. Anyways. So my last myth on the board, well, maybe not last, unless Erik has any more that he would like to bring up. The last one that I have is, I won't be able to live in a house again, how do I live normally, now that I'm ailing, and dealing with mold illness?
Erik Johnson:Well, when people become so reactive, that they're having problems with just about everything, formaldehyde, pesticides, carpet fumes, diesel exhaust, the works, it feels pretty hopeless. But just as in the multiple chemical sensitivity world, when you start peeling away the secondary reactivities, life gets a heck of a lot easier. And as it turns out, there does seem to be something so specific to the mold phenomenon, that if you can hone in on that, that life can become quite easily, you know, tolerable. Most buildings, in fact, come back to being tolerable, you can see that I'm in one right now and having zero problems in this place. I don't sense any Stachybotrys here. If I go into a building that has Stachybotrys, I still get the mold hits. It doesn't knock me to the floor. I can tolerate it now for short periods of time but that's the one thing that threatens to put me back down. In all other aspects, I could return to a completely normal appearing of life.
Alicia Swamy:So what you're saying is the root of these layered multiple chemical sensitivities is mold.
Erik Johnson:I believe that is a substance that is being emitted by mold and that's the reason why I keep asking researchers to look into mold because if they really look hard at it, I think they can't help but stumble into whatever this mysterious substance is.
Alicia Swamy:So this substance is really, from what I'm hearing, is knocking people down and just kind of opening the floodgates to sensitivities, from chemicals to viruses to pretty much anything that could harm the body.
Erik Johnson:Yea, the circumstantial evidence keeps pointing back at one agent, one mechanism that seems to tie this whole thing together and as we've discussed, I believe that mechanism is nanoparticles. I mean, they have the ability to attract and transport toxins. So it always seems reasonable to me that in the nanoparticle form, if you have silver iodide, the cloud seeding particles, combined with whatever sticks in them, whether it's formaldehyde, or S. Atra toxins, the Stachybotrys toxins, that they are going to be easily inhaled and this might serve as a primary cause for all this secondary stuff that we see going on around us. During the Tahoe outbreak, people pointed at just about every chemical, every VOC, every pesticide, anything that they could possibly think of and it was very confusing because it all happened at the same time. And when I tried to get rid of all the confounders, the only thing that I could find, as a common denominator, was the cloud seeding. So that's what brought my focus to bear on nanoparticle pollution is a prime mover in the mystery illness.
Alicia Swamy:Wow. And I think that's an issue with a lot of people who are dealing with mold is we think it's just the mold. Right? We we are fascinated by it. We are consumed with it. We're like what is going on? It's mold. But what you're saying and what you're theorizing and actually not theorizing there's a lot of evidence out there is nanoparticles are grouping up with these toxins, and they're able to bypass the blood brain barrier and able to elude the immune system and causing havoc in our bodies.
Erik Johnson:Yea, the original Chronic Fatigue Syndrome cohort, they asked researchers, they asked the Center for Disease Control specifically for help with what was in that room and when they brought up the word mold, the response was well, there's no reason to look because mold can do that. At that time, mold was thought to be just an analogy. So they reverted back to asking, we'll just briefly look into the room. What do you want us to look into in the room? There's nothing in there. There's no copy machine that's rolled out, this carpet, what would you like? And Gerald Kennedy asked CDC epidemiologist directly to look into the filters. Clearly it was in the air, it was something they could feel that they were inhaling. So if they were to only look into the filters, they couldn't help but stumble into whatever this unknown substance was. That's all it would have taken. So from a researcher point of view, if you have something that is so specifically associated with making you ill, there's no reason to divert to other unrelated factors. Why not just look into the very thing that the people are pointing out, and stick with it until you find the mechanism that explains it.
Alicia Swamy:Thank you again, for tuning in today. It's been wonderful story, and it is going to continue unraveling. Today, you got a little taste of the nanoparticle theory, which we will definitely dive into even more on another episode. But our next episode coming up, Erik will tell his story of when he was in the army and when he had his first exposures. I know a lot of people are wondering who is Erick? What is his background? How does he have any type of authority in providing information on mold avoidance? And we're gonna dive into that. Erik, again, served in the military, and has had some interesting experiences and has a lot of training in biological decontamination protocols and that's what makes him an expert on dealing with mold and that's why he has developed amazing decontamination protocols for people dealing with mold, because he's had extensive training in that. So we will go ahead and provide that information to our listeners in the upcoming episode. So stay tuned, again, to those who have donated. Oh, my God, Dee! I want to just shout out Dee real quick. I don't know how to pronounce your last name, so please forgive me. But I was taken aback when I checked my email and I saw how much you donated. I am so grateful for you. We are so grateful for you and grateful for everyone that has donated to our campaign here. And again, we are just sitting on this money and we are using it for the podcast and just trying to figure out what we want to do this podcast going forward. Again, if we want to turn it into something larger, it's a possibility. And we look forward to that we look forward to unraveling thos possibilities. So again, than you so much, please Like, Shar, Comment on our content a d donate if you can to o r GoFundMe and Patreon account. Thank you so much and we wi l see you next tim