4 ms·

Swabs and a microscope. Oh and a degree in biology might help!

by gerdesj 10mo ago

bflesch 10mo ago
That's what I had to do to figure out source of my asthma and allergies. Without any microbiology degree and while suffering from delibitating disease it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease while in other subreddits people post their poop for analyis. In tune with the saying of "it can't be what mustn't be" ("Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf") a lot of medical professionals outright dispute mold-caused sicknesses. Their imaging can detect late stage fungal infections in the lungs and head of elderly people wholly consumed by the fungus, but they have no methods to detect early stage infections. And instead of realizing they're lacking appropriate analytical methods for mold detection they outright deny that it could be the cause of the problem. Luckily the microscopy helped me to figure out which samples to send to a professional in order to pin down and remediate the cause of my sickness.
- schiffern 10mo ago
  I gather that airborne mycotoxins also play a role in inflammation, in addition to actual fungal infections.
  - bflesch 10mo ago
    The airborne mycotoxin I was exposed to is a scientifically proven carcinogen and class A indoor toxin, confirmed by an official lab. It was direct cause of my eosinophilia/asthma/sinusitis. It is the biggest gaslighting ever because two people share a place and both have emergency hospital visits and nearly die but from totally different diseases in different areas of the body. All the communities suggest you throw away everything once you leave a mold-infested place, but most can't afford that. Many keep their furniture and regret it. I truly wish this experience upon the denialists so they can use it to gather the evidence they need. A proper cancer would've been easier because there is at least a support network and hospitals have a damn handbook for it.
    - konamicode 10mo ago
      I’ve done that - moved out of a mold infested house into a brand new house and kept some but not all belongings. Can you elaborate on risks? What do I need to watch out for?
      - mannanj 10mo ago
        So this might not be the answer you were looking for, but from my digging into this ozone treatments can supposedly kill the mold spores but they are still able to somehow harm you when you breath them in. Mold is one of those things that is supposedly so bad to have around, even when dead in the furniture, can continue to harm you. We have mold in my family's basement downstairs too and I run the ozone generator a lot to freshen the air. But unfortunately parents would never throw out the things.
        bflesch 10mo ago
        If you have too much water in the basement a very easy fix that might work for you is to remove anything that blocks drainage on the outside of your house. E.g. there should be a strip of 1m all around your house where there is only earth or light crushed stones, but no tiles or plastic. I have seen two houses where there were tiles in the garden right up to the house wall, and the cellar was wet. Once the garden tiles outside directly next to the house wall were removed, the humidity from the cellar wall was able to evaporate to the outside air and the cellar got dry again. It might be a very easy fix before you start buying expensive solutions. Maybe you have old pictures of the house before there were problems and you notice there was actually a strip of garden all around the house instead of concrete or tiles.
        ted_dunning 10mo ago
        Be very cautious with ozone generators. Mold might or might not damage you but ozone will definitely damage you even at very low levels that you don't notice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Health_effects
- quesejoe 10mo ago
  Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.
  - bflesch 10mo ago
    Viel besser! I'm happy to hear you have recovered, thanks for sharing. You're correct, the mycotoxin contamination of food products is such an important but overlooked fact. Once your body starts reacting to them your life is turned upside down. The kicker for me was IKEA furniture. I was literally allergic to IKEA furniture, and only against specific parts of that IKEA furniture. It was only happening with the newer models of IKEA furniture bought in the past ~5 years. I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture. In their recent sustainability reports IKEA has proudly mentioned how they are saving both costs and the planet by increasingly using recycled materials. They are quite light on the details but you can put together the stories across several of their publications and promotional videos. Basically IKEA uses fungal waste products from industrial processes such as aspergillus from citric acid production. These fungal waste products are used as packaging material but also as a novel fungal adhesive for their "recycled wood" materials. This novel IKEA material sigificantly reduces plastic use and is cheaper - the holy cow of sustainability. It is basically old wooden furniture shredded into wood chips and then the wood chips are throw onto a big pile where they outside in the rain (even in the official IKEA video). Then they glue the wood chips back together with the novel fungal-based adhesive. Then they put a big layer of plastic around it and use it in parts of their furniture which are a bit more hidden, like the side panels of the pull-out drawers. One can recognize it by the rugged surface. So these things are basically mold time bombs. It is wet wood chips, wrapped in plastic, and laced with fungal adhesive. The problem was so bad for IKEA that they changed the color of all components made from this from WHITE to GREY because people kept posting pictures of the slight grey mold on top of the white paint to social media. If you go on the IKEA website and look at furniture, they list the exact material name for every single part of the furniture - except for the recycled wood parts. I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments. If your immune system is wrecked by covid infection and lockdown-triggered vitamin D deficiency the mold really hits hard. I do not believe that IKEA sufficiently removed residual humidity from all shipments of this material, there are too many pictures on social media that show it. The timing really coincides with IKEA's introduction of their sustainable wood material. Too many people reported the "gray dust" that was appearing on these white pieces so IKEA simply painted them gray. If you are located in the US and have access to a lawyer and a microbiology lab, buy some IKEA drawers and do some experiments with the material of the pull-out drawers (left and right side panels). If you can document it for a court case, it might be a big class action lawsuit.
- adamddev1 10mo ago
  This is really interesting. I haven't been the same since I stayed in an extremely moldy place and have wondered about fungal infections/candida infection. What was the remediation, some kind of anti fungal course/Nystatin?
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    I just wanted to say: Be careful going down this rabbit hole. There is a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience on the internet regarding mold, fungus, and candida as an explanation for every vague illness. The candida forums are particularly bad at misinformation. You can find people on internet forums, Facebook, and TikTok confidently explaining how candida explains everything wrong with you and can cause any symptom, but it's not backed by reality. People can waste a lot of time arguing with doctors or trying different antifungals and supplements before realizing that their condition is not candida at all.
    - bflesch 10mo ago
      I feel you have good intentions and I appreciate your warnings but it's not like people go down these rabbit holes because they want to. They get pushed away and invalidated all the time by people like you who have the best intentions. Their appearance is uncomfortable, their symptom descriptions are vague and conflicting, and due to limited financial and intellectual resources they cannot express their disease in an optimal way, especially to stressed medical professional. Doctors WANT to help people, but their diagnostic tools are still very limited and they can't/won't do home visits and see in what kind of unhealthy environment people are living in. For healthy people from a stable environment many homes of sick people smell horrible. But if you're financially tied to such a place, and never lived somewhere else you might feel that you're not well but you cannot pin it down. The whole candida thing feels like a strawman to me. For my industry it would be a layperson coming to me with a defective computer and saying they have a trojan on their computer but in fact it is a spyware instead. I wouldn't send them home and be angry at social media to talk about trojans so much, I would help them diagnose the issue "computer problem" and then we see it is technically a spyware. 50% of population has below-average intelligence, 50% of population has below-average education, 50% of population has below-average wealth. The medical system makes it too easy to send these people back home and invalidate their symptoms just because they come with the wrong "tagline" into the meeting. And what doctors are reporting as bad influence of social media is actually that patients know of thousands of others with similar symptoms, so they will be giving more push back against gaslighting attempts by doctors. For doctors it's easier to blame "misinformation" than to actually accept the symptoms listed by the patients and see that the medical profession is far from perfect and that the current lab methods have a lot of room for improvement.
- kulahan 10mo ago
  Fungus in general is not well-understood at all. We didn't even realize until a few decades ago that it's pretty much the backbone of life on Earth. All of our research into it is highly specific (using fungi as chemical factories in pharmacology, for instance), but besides that, it's largely a very mysterious branch of life. In medical school, you learn about fungus as it pertains to a few common infections and some classes of drugs, but otherwise you don't hear much. I wouldn't be surprised if it's just not something they're willing to speak on professionally because it's a huge blind-spot for science.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease Unfortunately, this is the only way to keep a hobby subreddit on topic. Once a subreddit becomes known as an outlet for non-hobbyists looking for one time assistance, the same requests get posted over and over again until the people who want to discuss the topic get fed up and leave. Mold topics are particularly sensitive on Reddit because mold exposure is a huge red herring theme on TikTok and social media. People with difficult to diagnose medical conditions will often go through a phase thinking that mold exposure must explain everything and there are thousands of TikTok accounts and Facebook groups that will tell them it's the only explanation.
  - bflesch 10mo ago
    I understand that one cannot expect a reddit hobbyist community to compensate for a medical system that has already "failed" the patients. But if you feel your disease is progressing despite the medications the doctors give you, you will desperately try every single thing that people post on social media. The cycle of "long covid > mold > lyme > candida > parasites" can only be broken by clever people building better, cheaper analytical methods for detection of these diseases. Doctors really should show some humility and remember that 200 years ago it was an innovation for them to wash and disinfect their hands, and the guy who told them, Ignaz Semmelweis, was "red herring" chased into psychiatric asylum.

Swabs and a microscope. Oh and a degree in biology might help!

by gerdesj 10mo ago

Swabs and a microscope. Oh and a degree in biology might help!

That's what I had to do to figure out source of my asthma and allergies. Without any microbiology degree and while suffering from delibitating disease it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease while in other subreddits people post their poop for analyis. In tune with the saying of "it can't be what mustn't be" ("Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf") a lot of medical professionals outright dispute mold-caused sicknesses. Their imaging can detect late stage fungal infections in the lungs and head of elderly people wholly consumed by the fungus, but they have no methods to detect early stage infections. And instead of realizing they're lacking appropriate analytical methods for mold detection they outright deny that it could be the cause of the problem. Luckily the microscopy helped me to figure out which samples to send to a professional in order to pin down and remediate the cause of my sickness.

schiffern 10mo ago
I gather that airborne mycotoxins also play a role in inflammation, in addition to actual fungal infections.
- bflesch 10mo ago
  The airborne mycotoxin I was exposed to is a scientifically proven carcinogen and class A indoor toxin, confirmed by an official lab. It was direct cause of my eosinophilia/asthma/sinusitis. It is the biggest gaslighting ever because two people share a place and both have emergency hospital visits and nearly die but from totally different diseases in different areas of the body. All the communities suggest you throw away everything once you leave a mold-infested place, but most can't afford that. Many keep their furniture and regret it. I truly wish this experience upon the denialists so they can use it to gather the evidence they need. A proper cancer would've been easier because there is at least a support network and hospitals have a damn handbook for it.
  - konamicode 10mo ago
    I’ve done that - moved out of a mold infested house into a brand new house and kept some but not all belongings. Can you elaborate on risks? What do I need to watch out for?
    - mannanj 10mo ago
      So this might not be the answer you were looking for, but from my digging into this ozone treatments can supposedly kill the mold spores but they are still able to somehow harm you when you breath them in. Mold is one of those things that is supposedly so bad to have around, even when dead in the furniture, can continue to harm you. We have mold in my family's basement downstairs too and I run the ozone generator a lot to freshen the air. But unfortunately parents would never throw out the things.
      - bflesch 10mo ago
        If you have too much water in the basement a very easy fix that might work for you is to remove anything that blocks drainage on the outside of your house. E.g. there should be a strip of 1m all around your house where there is only earth or light crushed stones, but no tiles or plastic. I have seen two houses where there were tiles in the garden right up to the house wall, and the cellar was wet. Once the garden tiles outside directly next to the house wall were removed, the humidity from the cellar wall was able to evaporate to the outside air and the cellar got dry again. It might be a very easy fix before you start buying expensive solutions. Maybe you have old pictures of the house before there were problems and you notice there was actually a strip of garden all around the house instead of concrete or tiles.
      - ted_dunning 10mo ago
        Be very cautious with ozone generators. Mold might or might not damage you but ozone will definitely damage you even at very low levels that you don't notice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone#Health_effects
quesejoe 10mo ago
Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.
- bflesch 10mo ago
  Viel besser! I'm happy to hear you have recovered, thanks for sharing. You're correct, the mycotoxin contamination of food products is such an important but overlooked fact. Once your body starts reacting to them your life is turned upside down. The kicker for me was IKEA furniture. I was literally allergic to IKEA furniture, and only against specific parts of that IKEA furniture. It was only happening with the newer models of IKEA furniture bought in the past ~5 years. I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture. In their recent sustainability reports IKEA has proudly mentioned how they are saving both costs and the planet by increasingly using recycled materials. They are quite light on the details but you can put together the stories across several of their publications and promotional videos. Basically IKEA uses fungal waste products from industrial processes such as aspergillus from citric acid production. These fungal waste products are used as packaging material but also as a novel fungal adhesive for their "recycled wood" materials. This novel IKEA material sigificantly reduces plastic use and is cheaper - the holy cow of sustainability. It is basically old wooden furniture shredded into wood chips and then the wood chips are throw onto a big pile where they outside in the rain (even in the official IKEA video). Then they glue the wood chips back together with the novel fungal-based adhesive. Then they put a big layer of plastic around it and use it in parts of their furniture which are a bit more hidden, like the side panels of the pull-out drawers. One can recognize it by the rugged surface. So these things are basically mold time bombs. It is wet wood chips, wrapped in plastic, and laced with fungal adhesive. The problem was so bad for IKEA that they changed the color of all components made from this from WHITE to GREY because people kept posting pictures of the slight grey mold on top of the white paint to social media. If you go on the IKEA website and look at furniture, they list the exact material name for every single part of the furniture - except for the recycled wood parts. I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments. If your immune system is wrecked by covid infection and lockdown-triggered vitamin D deficiency the mold really hits hard. I do not believe that IKEA sufficiently removed residual humidity from all shipments of this material, there are too many pictures on social media that show it. The timing really coincides with IKEA's introduction of their sustainable wood material. Too many people reported the "gray dust" that was appearing on these white pieces so IKEA simply painted them gray. If you are located in the US and have access to a lawyer and a microbiology lab, buy some IKEA drawers and do some experiments with the material of the pull-out drawers (left and right side panels). If you can document it for a court case, it might be a big class action lawsuit.
adamddev1 10mo ago
This is really interesting. I haven't been the same since I stayed in an extremely moldy place and have wondered about fungal infections/candida infection. What was the remediation, some kind of anti fungal course/Nystatin?
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  I just wanted to say: Be careful going down this rabbit hole. There is a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience on the internet regarding mold, fungus, and candida as an explanation for every vague illness. The candida forums are particularly bad at misinformation. You can find people on internet forums, Facebook, and TikTok confidently explaining how candida explains everything wrong with you and can cause any symptom, but it's not backed by reality. People can waste a lot of time arguing with doctors or trying different antifungals and supplements before realizing that their condition is not candida at all.
  - bflesch 10mo ago
    I feel you have good intentions and I appreciate your warnings but it's not like people go down these rabbit holes because they want to. They get pushed away and invalidated all the time by people like you who have the best intentions. Their appearance is uncomfortable, their symptom descriptions are vague and conflicting, and due to limited financial and intellectual resources they cannot express their disease in an optimal way, especially to stressed medical professional. Doctors WANT to help people, but their diagnostic tools are still very limited and they can't/won't do home visits and see in what kind of unhealthy environment people are living in. For healthy people from a stable environment many homes of sick people smell horrible. But if you're financially tied to such a place, and never lived somewhere else you might feel that you're not well but you cannot pin it down. The whole candida thing feels like a strawman to me. For my industry it would be a layperson coming to me with a defective computer and saying they have a trojan on their computer but in fact it is a spyware instead. I wouldn't send them home and be angry at social media to talk about trojans so much, I would help them diagnose the issue "computer problem" and then we see it is technically a spyware. 50% of population has below-average intelligence, 50% of population has below-average education, 50% of population has below-average wealth. The medical system makes it too easy to send these people back home and invalidate their symptoms just because they come with the wrong "tagline" into the meeting. And what doctors are reporting as bad influence of social media is actually that patients know of thousands of others with similar symptoms, so they will be giving more push back against gaslighting attempts by doctors. For doctors it's easier to blame "misinformation" than to actually accept the symptoms listed by the patients and see that the medical profession is far from perfect and that the current lab methods have a lot of room for improvement.
kulahan 10mo ago
Fungus in general is not well-understood at all. We didn't even realize until a few decades ago that it's pretty much the backbone of life on Earth. All of our research into it is highly specific (using fungi as chemical factories in pharmacology, for instance), but besides that, it's largely a very mysterious branch of life. In medical school, you learn about fungus as it pertains to a few common infections and some classes of drugs, but otherwise you don't hear much. I wouldn't be surprised if it's just not something they're willing to speak on professionally because it's a huge blind-spot for science.
Aurornis 10mo ago
> it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease Unfortunately, this is the only way to keep a hobby subreddit on topic. Once a subreddit becomes known as an outlet for non-hobbyists looking for one time assistance, the same requests get posted over and over again until the people who want to discuss the topic get fed up and leave. Mold topics are particularly sensitive on Reddit because mold exposure is a huge red herring theme on TikTok and social media. People with difficult to diagnose medical conditions will often go through a phase thinking that mold exposure must explain everything and there are thousands of TikTok accounts and Facebook groups that will tell them it's the only explanation.
- bflesch 10mo ago
  I understand that one cannot expect a reddit hobbyist community to compensate for a medical system that has already "failed" the patients. But if you feel your disease is progressing despite the medications the doctors give you, you will desperately try every single thing that people post on social media. The cycle of "long covid > mold > lyme > candida > parasites" can only be broken by clever people building better, cheaper analytical methods for detection of these diseases. Doctors really should show some humility and remember that 200 years ago it was an innovation for them to wash and disinfect their hands, and the guy who told them, Ignaz Semmelweis, was "red herring" chased into psychiatric asylum.