Welcome to the Exposing Mold podcast where I, Kealy Severson, Alicia Swamy, and Erik Johnson are exposing mold. Today we have author Arnold Mann.
Alicia Swamy:Arnold Mann has been writing about public health and medicine for 30 years as a journalist, author and co author working with physicians and scientists to help them tell their stories of their work. Mann has also authored books on environmental illness, autism, and nutritional approaches to the practice of medicine as well as physician memoirs. His cover stories for Time and USA Weekend magazines, most notably his investigative reporting on the toxic mold threaten homes, schools and workplaces earned him recognition as one of the nation's leading environmental journalists and keynote speaker at the EPA healthy indoor air conferences. He authored the book "They're Poisoning Us," which dives into how environmental slights impact human health. In 1990 an assignment for Air and Space magazine, Mr. Mann traveled with the United States Air Force on a mission deep into Antarctica to cover a mid winter air drop to the National Science Foundation stationed at McMurdo and the South Pole. Mr. Mann has written extensively for the publications of the National Institutes of Health where he served from 2004 to 2005, as personal writer for the director of the National Cancer Institute and oversaw publication of the institute's annual progress report to Congress. Prior to his NIH work, Mann covered medical conferences for the International Medical News group, which publishes specialty newspapers for physicians. In 2009, Mr. Mann collaborated with Dr. Keith Black founder and director of the Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In his book, The Brain Surgeon, A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles. The critically acclaimed book was nominated for an NAACP award. Prior to writing about medicine, Mr. Mann served as the feature interviewer for Emmy, the magazine of the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences. He holds a bachelor's and master's degree in English literature from the University of Hawaii, where he taught freshmen composition and sophomore literature, with postgraduate work completed at Claremont Graduate University in California.
Kealy Severson:Arnold Mann who has written a book called"They're Poisoning Es." Now, we did read this book in preparation for our conversation and we found three really important points that Arnold investigated and exposed. There was an incident at Southwest Airlines where a lot of employees were poisoned by mold in the environment and some of them were so sick that they died, and some were so sick that they were permanently injured and never recovered, and none of them ever got legal retribution for their issues. Arnold in your book, you also covered the Gulf syndrome and some of the political aspects that kept that syndrome from not being honestly researched and investigated. And you also discussed in your book, the Cleveland incident in which Stachybotrys was implicated in a few cases of pulmonary hemorrhaging in infants and the CDC, a few years after that research was published, they actually brought in, or I'm sorry, I misspoke. It wasn't research that was published, but some observations that were made and some data that was collected. And years later, the CDC brought in a team of unnamed experts to essentially retract this study. Now, when you look at how this has all come about, where the organizations are seemingly avoiding any responsibility or honesty around some of the injuries that are caused by environmental damage, were you shocked to uncover this level of corruption in your investigation?
Arnold Mann:I was very shocked. It started actually with Southwest Airlines reservation center in San Antonio and it started, the whole thing started off at Time Magazine. I said to my editor, why don't we do something about sick building syndrome? This was back in'97,'98, when hardly anything was being written on it and I thought that sounded like a good idea and suited me for the professional managerial subscribers at Time, only 1 million of the 4 million readers that is subscribers of the magazine, a special piece for them. Because of what we found, because the incriminating information that we found in particular and its effect on public health, that piece was pulled out of that professional managerial section and put in the every issue of Time as the lead business story of Time that week. Going out to 5 million readers, and 200,000 copies sold on the newsstands as well. That's how important and shocking this was at the time to find out what we found out. And of course, as you know, what we found out was that not only that the airline know about how sick people were, not only did they know about the mold in the building, which is what they were saying, there was nothing to it and there was no findings of mold in the building at all. They had suppressed all information about the mold being in the building and hiding it from everybody and the employees were too afraid to bring it up because they're afraid of losing their jobs at $20 an hour for a Senior Rep. at the reservation center in San Antonio was highest paid person at San Antonio. They couldn't afford to lose their jobs and the airline was pretty much motivated by fear of legal action, which in fact, finally did come and seven of the Southwest reservations center people who have been forced to leave work, because of seizures, strokes, and being rendered basically incapable of living a normal life, joined together and sued the airline. And that's what started this whole thing up and what they managed to find through disclosure during that court ase, was that the airline knew about it from the very beginning In fact, they had done a old remediation eight years earl er or seven years earlier, wi h everybody in the building, a d all the toxic mold going a l over the place. And people we e getting sicker by minute, b the day. So that's the kin of stuff we have. I can ive you more specifics of
Kealy Severson:The thing that I found really fascinating in a ou like, but that's later part of that book was the Gulf War Syndrome and the particular piece that just floored me even though you know, even though we're kind of aware that this happens just to read the whole story, but they were trying to frame Gulf War Syndrome as a psychosomatic illness and so when they were roviding grant funding for esearch, five institutions pplied for the grant funding nd at the time that this grant unding was available, it had lready been shown in a double lind study that this was not a sychosomatic or in your head ssue. And even after that study as performed stating that, the rant funding, whoever was llocating that money, dictated ho is going to research and wha was allowed to be research and he four institutions tha wanted to research psychos matic causes of multiple chemi al sensitivity, they were granted the money. And th one institution or fo ndation that wanted to researc chemical causes for Gulf W r Syndrome because it very m ch was a chemical injury, hey were denied. And that ust shook me, because it is rea ly a testimony to the way that r search is controlled and wh t we're allowed to know a d what is even allowed to be in peer-reviewed journal. And that to me, is almost medical fr ud. Was society just shook hen your book came out? And ow was this received? How did yo process this as you were unc vering this story?
Arnold Mann:How did I process it? When I come upon something like this, it fuels me. I'm sorry to say in the midst of all this tragedy, I just want to know why. Why is it that they didn't fund that research? Why did they suppress any attempt to find out what was going on? And I'll answer the question to the best of my ability and tell you. That with 250,000 of the 700,000 people, people, not just military people, but these are human beings going over there to fight this war. That of the 700,000, 250,000 people came back, not just sick, but in many ways very disabled. And they had an answer for it. What did they say? They said originally, that they were no chemical weapon exposures in this war. In fact, the United States military under order from the heads of the guys, bombarded the U.S., that is bombed the Saddam Hussein's toxic weapons and sent it into the brains and into the breathing of everybody on the battlefield. That's what they maybe did not want people knowing about. So the research is then given to someone who's not going to find out what they don't want found out, and that's kind of it. Does that answer the question somewhat?
Kealy Severson:Yes, thank you that does answer the question and then, I also want to talk specifically about the Cleveland incident, where they had a team of unnamed experts retract a previous scientists team findings or information. Were you questioning the reality of science and how it works when you stumbled upon this information to see things like this?
Arnold Mann:I can tell you this that I learned about this in 2000, I was speaker at the EPA conference. And I had been writing about, you know, in Time magazine and USA Weekend about toxic mold, these cover stores. I will tell you that when I got there, everybody and these were mostly industrial hygienists, wanted to know from me one thing in particular, when's your next story coming? And the reason why is because when these, these were the most, these were the highest reader response of any article coming out. I'm not pinning a feather in my own cap, I'm just saying this was a hot topic that everybody wanted to know about. And when it came out those with the highest reader of response, what the indoor environmental people at the annual EPA meeting wanted to know was, when's your next story coming out? You know why? Because they had to hire up to cover all the phones ringing off the hooks for their own business to clean up houses and stuff and look for toxic mold. That's what they wanted to know. Incidentally, the other person who was supposed to be the keynote speaker was the head of the EPA and she didn't show up. And maybe because of what was going on at the time, she just didn't want to be around for this. It's possible. I don't know.
Erik Johnson:It wasn't Barbara Spark was it?
Arnold Mann:I don't recall at this time, that was 2000, 20 years ago. But it was somebody who didn't choose to show up and speak at the meeting that I was going to be the keynote speaker at too. And I suspect that this was not something that she or he that she, it was a she, that this woman wanted to be exposed to let alone in the middle of, possibly.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, what we find very interesting, and we were talking about this and have been prolonging this conversation is that during that timeframe, it seemed like because it was such a hot topic, there was research coming out on it. We've already met some retired researchers that have done work on sick buildings and connecting that with mycotoxins and mold. And we're finding the new data that's coming out is actually telling the opposite story. That it's saying mold is a hysterical illness. You know, there's been no findings. There's no direct diseases or conditions that it causes. I just wanted to ask you, can you maybe tell us why you think that is?
Arnold Mann:I can tell you why I think that is. In other words, why is it all in your brains, right? That it has nothing to do, it's all emotional, right? It's psychological. It's a psychosomatic illness. A long time ago, actually, I think was Robert Hale who brought it up. Robert Hale was a researcher with Gulf War. And he brought this up to me, and it was a story of Barry Marshall did anybody ever hear of Barry Marshall? He was the guy who figured out that what's it called, he was the one who figured out that stress, which has always been the cause of peptic ulcer disease. Okay, remember when peptic ulcer disease, of it was executive stress, it's all executive stress, right? Well, Barry Marshall, who was the guy who figured out that it was the H. Pylori bacteria. He was an Australian researcher, and he figured out it was the H. Pylori bacteria. When he found that out and when he published it, and when he tested it on himself even, taking H Pylori bacteria and swallowing it, making him sick. When he figured out that this was the cause and when he started curing it with courses of antibiotics, the entire medical establishment called him a fake. And they did it and they did it and they did it. Why did they do it? In particular did it because the pharmaceutical had just came out the, pharmaceutical industry with H2 blockers, which is meant to treat peptic ulcer disease. And all of a sudden the billions of dollars they were going to make on peptic ulcer disease turned into a zero, because you could cure it with antibiotics. And they got all the physicians to scream that there's nothing to it. Marshall is wrong. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And this went on until Barry Marshall was deemed right and won the Nobel Prize for his discovery. Now what's going on with regards to this condition? Is it all in our heads? Or are people standing to profit by treating people emotionally for it? Well, the psychiatrists and psychologists like they did with the peptic ulcer patients, or is it a threat to the pharmaceutical industry? It's a threat to the, of course, the insurance industry because of all the legal aspects of it. So it's all being deemed to be psychosomatic because that's the label they throw on something that they can't define, and would cost them a fortune if in fact they did try to define it as being in anyway valid. Does that make sense? That Barry Marshall is a perfect metaphor for this. Not perfect, but it's a damn good one.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, no, thank you for that. We, you know, we were just wondering why and just to go back to that those H2 blockers are now being pulled off the market left and right, because it increases your death by 20%.
Arnold Mann:That's correct. And it was just a financial issue back then. Now it's more. And everybody's not interested to say Barry Marshall's right, and for doctors to go ahead and just prescribe the antibiotics and say goodbye to ulcer disease.
Erik Johnson:When Ruth Etzel, the CDC Epidemiologist who was investigating the 1994, Cleveland pulmonary hemorrhage incident, narrowed down the suspects to the toxic mold Stachybotrys. It was just a preliminary hypothesis, it was an idea this was showing up, it seemed to fit the parameters of a toxic agent that might be responsible for the infant deaths, the lung bleeding. And from what I understand, in order to cast doubt on this, they framed it as if it was a study rather than a hypothesis and said it was a poor study design, and you haven't proven your case. So therefore, we can toss this out when basically all it was was a request for further research.
Arnold Mann:Correct.
Erik Johnson:So the entire framing of this as a poor study design was a tactic, because it wasn't an actual study. It was simply a preliminary starting point for further research into
Arnold Mann:And it was also very, very suggestive, because the toxic mold. they looked at homes of people who had infants, where there was no Stachybotrys, and then they looked at the homes where the infants became sick and they died and there was Stachybotrys and there was no crossover there. It was actually a very suggestive study, because they were looking at both sides of this coin. And they were looking for more research, which of course was was stopped and never started again.
Erik Johnson:Well, I believe that I've got a example of corruption that can fit right in there with the rest of them and that is the creation of the chronic fatigue syndrome because I was a survivor and prototype for the Holmes 1988 chronic fatigue syndrome. I was involved with the creation of the syndrome and I initially refused to get involved because I already knew that I was being affected by toxic mold. The researchers wanted to find a virus and I pointed in fact, the other survivors pointed at the toxic mold in the buildings and said this is something that needs to be looked into. And when they said well, this really shouldn't interfere because when researchers come to investigate, when this syndrome is coined, and more researchers will get interested, then we can straighten all this out. I go fine. So I volunteered. And it turns out that several years after the CDC concluded that they had no idea what was causing people to get sick in these buildings. We did discover Stachybotrys, which turns out to be the same one in your articles. So when your articles came out, I grabbed them, took them to the chronic fatigue researchers and said this is it. This is the same mold that was overlooked at ground zero for chronic fatigue syndrome. And by then they had decided that they only wanted chronic fatigue syndrome to be a virus so they refused to factor this in. And that situation continues to this day.
Arnold Mann:Yeah. Yeah. If it had been a virus, it would have been much more difficult to point the finger at anybody and say you're responsible too.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, I'm not sure why the medical mind behaves this way. You would think that they'd be interested in solving the puzzles, you know, getting additional clues, evidence, but just like with Barry Marshall, that's not how they are.
Arnold Mann:No. I don't know exactly why. You know, I will tell you something, a very dear friend of mine, one of the top diagnosticians in Los Angeles, when I wrote the book, I gave him a copy of it. He got back to me, and he said, you know what is this talking about people with, in this case,it might have been called multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue, etc. But this epidemic? And he said, Oh, half those people are nuts. That was his answer to me. And in my answer to him was, what about the other half?
Erik Johnson:Some of us can be nuts. We can't all be nuts.
Arnold Mann:What about the other half? So even if you're going to say that, what about the other half?
Erik Johnson:But as you pointed out, the vested interests have already established and entrenched themselves in whatever they want to pursue, and they cannot be dislodged at this point.
Arnold Mann:That's true. That's very true. And when the Cleveland infants, they had some serious vested interest. Of course, the insurance industry and the mold bloom nationally, was taking off like crazy with Melinda Ballard's $32 million verdict and everything else that goes with it.
Erik Johnson:I had been absolutely certain that when I sent this article about Melinda Ballard, to the chronic fatigue syndrome researchers, and informed them that we actually found this toxic mold in the sick buildings where clusters occurred, I would get an instant response. I didn't expect that they would behave in a really anti research manner. I was just going to say that we really need a sociological investigation into why these researchers behave the way they do, because we thought, if we present them with good solid evidence, they will be compelled to respond. That's what integrity is all about.
Arnold Mann:And the question becomes, where does their funding come from? Because on the university level, in particular, the funding comes from industry hugely so and industry related foundations, etc. And that's the problem. I think. You know, with Southwest Airlines, I was wondering what kind of response they were going to have to this time magazine article that lit up the damn globe. And I don't mean to put a feather in my cap but it really felt like it. They crawled under a rock for a week until it went away. That's all they did. Not a word, not a call to me. Nothing. Not a call to Time, not to the newspapers, magazines, when the San Antonio Current did a four page story on on the women and with an interview with me and everything. Not a word.
Erik Johnson:With researchers, if they can ignore it for two or three days, they consider it's been dispensed with.
Arnold Mann:And that's it. Yes, but that doesn't happen here and it's not going to happen here.
Erik Johnson:When in the San Antonio reservation terminal was chronic fatigue syndrome brought up at any point?
Arnold Mann:Oh, constantly. Chronic fatigue or full body weakness they call it. It wasn't just the fatigue, yes, chronic fatigue. But it was an entire body weakness where they could barely stand up from their seats at times. So yes, it was it was very much a part of the spectrum, if you will.
Erik Johnson:And there was no discussion of actually looking into what this chronic fatigue syndrome was all about?
Arnold Mann:Not back then No,. None whatsoever. You had Andrew Campbell, who was talking to the gals, and examining them as a doctor on the outside. And that was about it.
Erik Johnson:My motivation in agreeing to serve as a prototype for this new syndrome was that chronic fatigue syndrome, researchers will have to be interested in evidence. So therefore they will respond to whatever we find in the sick buildings. And then when mold researchers begin to emerge, they're going to wonder if their paradigm is connected to this famous syndrome. So with two different professions, all converging to look at the same thing. It would be impossible not to connect toxic mold with the syndrome.
Arnold Mann:Yes, yeah. And this is a kaleidoscope of symptoms caused by something that we just don't understand in terms of how it works, but we do know that it has an extreme neurologic effect on its victims, and this includes big time the chronic fatigue syndrome.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, at lower levels, it seems that the immune dysfunction leaves people open to so many other infections, that it's impossible to really say, Okay, you've got this specific symptom, because instead you've got cancer, or you got aspergillosis, or you've got a fungal infection, or bacterial infection.
Arnold Mann:Well it can cause, I think the immune system to become distracted to the point where it can't do its job. And that bacterial or viral infections might have an upper hand in such an environment. Is that possible?
Erik Johnson:Absolutely. That's exactly the pattern.
Alicia Swamy:Erik's, I don't know if you can see what's behind him, but this is chronic trichothecene mycotoxicosis maybe indistinguishable from CFS. I mean, T2 tricothecene mycotoxins, I just wrote about this the other day that they completely impair the immune system and allows it to, you know, invite these bacterial infections and inhibits it to be able to fight these off so.
Arnold Mann:Well, they don't necessarily invite it. But what they might do is distract it to the point where it's unable to do his job. If you take a nasal, if you take a nasal steroid, to treat nasal problems over a period of time if you use that it suppresses the immune system in that area and you wind up with a fungal infection. It's called oral thrush. Why did you get it? You always have fungus in your body and in your mouth. But when the immune system becomes suppressed in that area, or if it's distracted, for that matter, that's when the fungal will take off and take over. And that's the way that works. That's known. That's right.
Erik Johnson:And we've also found that specific Stachybotrys toxins prevent cell division, they're powerful protein synthesis inhibitors. They actually stop cell mitosis. So the body cannot regenerate.
Arnold Mann:Let me tell you something. It This is what you were talking about that really stimulated me. And that is that a researcher once said to me, and you wonder why would nature put mycotoxins in Stachybotrys? There's got to be a reason for it. And a researcher once said to me, that is the means by which Stachybotrys is able to take over its environment. When a building becomes wet, the first thing to come in and Aspergillus and the other molds, and then after about a month in comes Stachybotrys, and it stakes out its territory, as he said, by using mycotoxins to put the other ones out of commission. So what does it do in the human body? Do those mycotoxins do the same thing by putting out systems putting system out of commission? And that made sense to me. A lot of sense.
Erik Johnson:Well, after I saw your articles, and learned about Stachybotrys, I made contact with researchers, got a full education on it, and since we made the correlation in the original clusters of chronic fatigue syndrome, the ones that were investigated by the Center for Disease Control, and were the basis for this new syndrome, there were some other clusters in sick buildings down in Sacramento. So these were considered to also be examples of chronic fatigue syndrome, even though they weren't subjects of the original study. But they were accepted as being congruent with chronic fatigue syndrome. So it was a simple matter to just pick up the phone, call the survivors, the teachers from these buildings in Sacramento, and said, Well, did you find Stachybotrys? Yes, they did. They knew all about it. So we've got repetitive examples of Stachybotrys showing up in clusters of chronic fatigue syndrome. We've got abstracts written by researchers claiming that they're looking for clues. And so now it's just a matter of getting to them to accept this evidence and put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Arnold Mann:And get the funding to do so. And not go against those who have funded them in the past in the process. That's what's going to be tough, I think. And the insurance companies will worry that if Stachybotrys does get branded for what it has been doing, let's say to the to the human neurologic system, it's going to make a lot of people who have been sick up until now suddenly feel that they can sue. Whether it's the landlord or the insurance company who didn't take care of it or whatever.
Erik Johnson:Well, it really looks suggestive that in the late 1990s, after such an enthusiastic reception to Stachybotrys where the Center for Disease Control, their scientific investigation appeared to be perfectly normal, and they threw everything in the reverse. And all of a sudden, researchers were finding it extremely difficult to get any funding. There was every request they put in for a study, to get support for a study on toxic mold, suddenly ran into all kinds of roadblocks and was denied completely.
Arnold Mann:If you want to understand the whole thing for me, for me to see this, and what I found and what shocked me so much was that after the CDC did their study about Stachybotrys and pulmonary hemorrhaging, hemosiderosiss, after they did that study and found there to be a connection between the two, the Stachybotrys and the bleeding out of the lungs of these children. When they found that out, the new group called in to review the information that those researchers used to make their assumptions or whatever it was. The new group called in, number one, they had all testified in mold cases prior to this on the sides of defendants for insurance companies and landlords. Those were the ones reviewing the CDC findings. And number two, the director of the CDC, the new director of CDC, who called in that study was the immediate past president of Prudential Insurance. And prior to him, that CDC director had all been the previous president of Prudential Insurance. Both of them had been presidentially appointed. And it's not a left right thing. It wasn't a Republican. In fact, in this case, it was Bill Clinton, who appointed this immediate past president of Prudential Insurance to be the CDC director. What a conflict of interest. It goes to the top and it goes on both sides. It doesn't even have a party. It's just there.
Erik Johnson:And then add to this, the CDC epidemiologists, Ruth Etzel, who so brilliantly noted down to Stachybotrys was suddenly a pariah. Her research came to a dead stop. She was basically run out of the CDC.
Arnold Mann:She went to the World Health Organization and then she caught the same, she wound up having the same thing happened to her when she went over to the EPA. And it was with regards to the to the lead poisoning in the children that she made a big deal of and all of a sudden, she was fired from the EPA, too. So she's had quite an experience.
Erik Johnson:Dorr Dearborn also attempted to gather additional research about pulmonary hemorrhage from Stachybotrys, did find many examples of this, tried to use this to get more investigation and substantiate his earlier hypothesis and there again, hit a dead stop.
Arnold Mann:Yeah with more and more babies coming in with pulmonary hemorrhaging, which is expected to be seen so rarely, hardly ever. And he had 50 of them by the time my article came out. He had 50 babies with pulmonary hemorrhaging coming in by the time that article came out, and they were more nationally, they did a brief survey. And it and it continues to be so and by the way, in the military housing now they're having a problem at one of the bases, Fort Bragg. They have just such a cluster of infants dying, and they say there's nothing to say why they're dying. Three infants died in the same house from three different families. And there's nothing to say whether. The only thing they found that was reported, and was reported by the researchers was that there was toxic mold. They found mold, but you know, that's nothing.
Erik Johnson:Well I've toured many sick buildings and you can just look around and say, Wow, there's a lot of people here with nosebleeds.
Arnold Mann:Yes, right. Melinda Ballard, all of them have nosebleeds. You're right. That's a typical manifestation.
Erik Johnson:These people are waking up every morning with blood on their pillow.
Arnold Mann:Yes. All through the military too in those moldy homes. Yes. And then the children that have the hemosiderosis, bleeding out of the lungs because their alveoli are not completely formed and very fragile. And those mycotoxins get in there, and they do to the alveoli in those infants lungs, what it does to probably the nasal passages in people who are coughing up blood.
Erik Johnson:Doctors like to imply that if you get out of the mold, your problems are over. And yet we find that Stachybotrys in particular has demonstrable pulmonary arterial remodeling. So it's permanent damage from this.
Arnold Mann:And now they're starting to find associations between this and the autism spectrum. That's starting to come out. I know one of your recent guests on this podcast was talking about that.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah. Dr. Andrew Campbell came on telling us the link, you know, he's in Mexico doing this research. So it makes me wonder, you know, I'm not speaking on behalf of Dr. Campbell, but in my own mind, I wonder is he going there because he can't get the funding here?
Arnold Mann:Yeah, I believe possibly, yes. I can tell you that other research has been done. And, in fact, it's a public study, in fact, making this, I won't call it an assumption, but say, but let's just say they really think there is a link. And I did some writing on Autism. And the Autism is believed to be starting in the first trimester of pregnancy, when the brain is forming in a toxic environment and you have proliferation of nerve fibers to receptor sites. And in fact, it was found recently that people who have autism have a proliferation, they have four times the number of nerve fibers going to receptor sites, inside and outside their body, which accounts for a lot of distraction in people who are on the spectrum. And this is the recent science on that.
Erik Johnson:So those of us who have tried to get federal institutes, and even our own trusted ME/CFS researchers to look into this, have been stonewalled we've been put off. We've been unable to get their interest, even though this is really well documented. To me, this is tantamount of research fraud. Evidence this wrong, it seems like a researcher would be obligated to at least take a look at this evidence.
Arnold Mann:I think there's a word here that we need to use. And I'll say what it is scandalous. It is absolutely scandalous. And you don't want to be on the wrong side of the scandal.
Erik Johnson:Well, my basis for volunteering to provide a tangible link between the toxic mold phenomenon and the chronic fatigue syndrome is that with evidence like that, they wouldn't dare to deny it. Because if they were exposed, they would lose their credibility. And yet, I find that this doesn't seem to bother them at all. They tell me well, chronic fatigue syndrome has moved on since then, we changed the definition, we've created a new definition. So your old evidence no longer applies.
Arnold Mann:The question becomes, what is the risk/benefit ratio to change and what we've been saying and coming out with the truth. And a risk benefit ratio for them is still off the charts in the way of risk. I think that's probably what's going on here. It's sad, more than sad.
Alicia Swamy:I just want to say thank you for your book, your book has pointed us in the right direction. The book's name is"They're Poisoning Us." So check it out on Amazon, we'll have a link below. But you know, it's pointed us into all these directions with all these experts. And you as an investigative journalist, in your opinion, how should we deal with this? Or or in your role, how can you deal with this kind of scandal and all this stuff going on? I mean, can you recommend anything that people in our audience listening is there anything that we can do with our own time and our power to make this known to reveal this so that way, people like us who had suffered from mold illness can actually get help?
Arnold Mann:Just keep going for the truth. Stick with that. It might be a big distraction to talk about how these guys are stopping us from this and that stopping us from that, that could be a distraction. And you'll wind up with more coming in to defend them because there's more money out to be made. But if you just keep going after the truth, sooner or later that truth is going to win out. That's what I think. That's as an investigative journalist, that's what I live by, is just finding out what the heck is going on here and exposing it. And then again, and again and again, until nobody dares stand up again. Until they all hide under their damn rocks and the scientists do their jobs.
Erik Johnson:I actually asked Dr. Barry Marshall that very question, what does it take to get through? And he told me, evidence will eventually prevail.
Arnold Mann:That's what I'm saying too. I agree with him completely. He's a genius. He he should have gotten a Nobel Prize for just that statement.
Erik Johnson:Well, it was it was clear that he literally had to give himself the infection and cure under supervision in order to get his story looked at.
Arnold Mann:Exactly.
Erik Johnson:So we are in a similar very, very similar situation. Where simply proffering evidence just providing evidence to researchers isn't sufficient. We need to like up our game a little bit, take it to the next level, really embarrassed them for not acting like real researchers.
Arnold Mann:Yes. I suspect you're right if there were only a bug at the bottom of this, but there are so many bugs at the bottom of this one. So many different kinds of exposures. Stachybotrys mycotoxins, tricothecene mycotoxins, that's one of them, one of the big ones. And there's other exposures as well. And getting to the bottom, this is much more difficult than finding a bug and holding it up.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, I think the change is really going to come from the mothers of the world, who are sick and tired of watching their children come home from a sick school, just totally beat to death, and bleeding.
Arnold Mann:You are so right. And I'll tell you what, you've completely nailed it. Because in the military, with all the sick buildings the husbands can't come forward, because their jobs are on the line. And a story that I'm writing about, that I was writing about, I'm still going to do is called military wives go to war, because that's the way this thing has finally come to Congress. They can't ignore them. And maybe the mothers of all these children should get together and say, Cleveland is real, it's here too.
Erik Johnson:Absolutely.
Alicia Swamy:If you can make that happen and and have them acknowledge that I mean, bless you and bless your heart, because we have been fighting on our education front, one of the people that investigated and said Stachybotrys is not connected. And we've been fighting this guy for a while. So if you can get them to acknowledge that that would be absolutely incredible.
Arnold Mann:Yeah. You know, there was in the Cleveland story, there was a family that came to me. But what happened finally was that they accepted a bunch of money from the insurance company, and it was over and they just went away. So it's not easy. But like one of the military wives said to me, she said, there's a lot of mad mama's out here. And that's one way to go after this thing. Good, I agree with you.
Erik Johnson:About the Cleveland incident is if I understand this correctly, the Center for Disease Control, initially pressured Dorr Dearborn to call it pulmonary hemosiderosis, which is a fairly narrowly defined illness. It's generally genetic and it is measured by a buildup of hemosiderin, iron, in the macrophages.
Arnold Mann:Interesting.
Erik Johnson:And this wasn't actually present in the Cleveland infants, there was a slightly different mechanism. So they actually said your hypothesis of hemosiderosis is incorrect, as a means to act as if it wasn't happening. So that's kind of a dead giveaway. If somebody insists on calling it hemosiderosis rather than pulmonary hemorrhage, it's a distraction.
Arnold Mann:I'll tell you what's interesting, in my mind, somebody once said to me, genetics loads the gun environment pulls the trigger, and that made a lot of sense to me. Yes, certainly, infants are going to be maybe more at risk, because of their genetics would might make them more at risk for the hemosiderosis or bleeding of the lungs, or whatever. But that doesn't take away the villain in this case, which is in fact the mycotoxins.
Erik Johnson:I mentioned my background how I was familiarized with toxic mold prior to chronic fatigue syndrome incident, where I was in the military, and my nuclear missile unit was sickened by toxic mold down in the basement. And it was so devastating that my unit was actually removed from the active service roster for rate of illness. And while some people think that the military was completely familiar with toxic mold back in the 1970s, my commander called the biological warfare division to come out and investigate. They attached no importance to it. They said, Well, it looks bad, but you know, clean it up. And my commander told me that if the rate of illness did not subside after cleaning up the mold, that he was going to order an emergency evacuation, he's going to literally take the entire unit and move us out to the field. Within a couple months after getting all the mold out of the basement. The rate of illness did go down and people started to recover again. So that was my primer for what happened later when a flu like illness hit my region at North Lake Tahoe, and all the people in the sick buildings had the worst outcome, it was identical.
Arnold Mann:Yeah. You know, the one thing that I found and you, you folks are all very much aware of this is how Stachybotrys mycotoxins were used by the Russian military and it's in our own military handbooks as a chemical weapon called yellow rain and how it's in our military handbook, and we have a documented with a military saying how these mycotoxins can cause all manner of disease, in society and on the battlefield. And now they're telling everybody in the housing, military housing, oh, Stachybotrys doesn't cause anything but a little allergic reactions. And there it is in the military handbooks.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, their product is doubt. If they feel that they can cast any kind of uncertainty on a situation, then they can delay for a while, and then just move on to other things and forget about it.
Arnold Mann:And their motivation, is the fact that they have privatized all the military housing. They've farmed it out to private companies and they've been covering up the bad work that these, housing these private housing companies have been doing in terms of the plumbing and everything. And the ignoring of the mold that has made all these people sick. And the military is as much involved in this cover up as those housing private housing companies are too, because they're all liable.
Erik Johnson:Did you ever hear about the 1992, Sacramento Twin Towers complex, sick building syndrome incident?
Arnold Mann:I think so, refresh me.
Erik Johnson:It was the major Center for California, State Department of Public Health, and many other government offices. And 1000s of people in this building which suddenly became, well, not suddenly, they've been having problems ever since the building was open. But it gradually got worse until it was so bad that they called for an investigation. The Center for Disease Control actually came out and this was 1992. They did a survey and found it about 20% of the occupants in this building had symptoms consistent with chronic fatigue syndrome. So their conclusion at the end of the study was that these buildings do have a risk factor for chronic fatigue syndrome. And two years later, the very same investigators. Keiji Fukuda and Dr. William Reeves wrote a new chronic fatigue syndrome definition, which said that there were no known risk factors for chronic fatigue syndrome. Yeah, their own study did not agree with their new chronic fatigue syndrome definition. So this is really like a smoking g n for CDC corruption.
Arnold Mann:Yes, yes, at every level, and it leav s you speechless sometimes, as t what could possibly motivate a human being or a collection of t em to behave in such a reprehe sible m
Erik Johnson:How can they get away with such corruption in plain sight?
Arnold Mann:It's not plain e ough, we're gonna make it m re plain.
Alicia Swamy:Thank you veryone for joining us today. e're so grateful to have Arnold n the podcast today. We've bee actually waiting for this mom nt for quite a while. We're jus so excited to have him bec use he is one of the good guy, his investigative jou nalism is superb. All his oth r books that he has done and wri ten about in the medical fie d are amazing. And the num er one book that could def nitely benefit all of us is rea ing "They're Poisoning Us," just to understand what's going on. You know why when you go to the doctor, does the doctor not recognize that you're even ill? Well, there's a lot of political makeup behind that. And a lot of insurance stuff behind that. So if you want to go ahead and check that out and check out the reasons why your doctor doesn't know how to treat you? Read hi book, we'll go ahead and pos that below. Also, make sure t like, share, and subscribe t our content. And make sure t donate to our GoFundMe an Patreon pages so we can kee this podcast going. Thank yo again and we'll see you nex time