mold-symptom.com

It's fuzzy. It's slimy. It devours the surfaces it grows on. And it reproduces exponentially by sending out microscopic spores that can waft their way into human lungs, causing asthma and other respiratory ailments.

The hazards of mold have been known for years. Recently, it has spawned an explosion of insurance claims and lawsuits, with damage awards reaching into the millions. Increasingly, it's turning up in schools, threatening the health of children and teachers.

Nearly every school system in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina has wrestled with an outbreak of mold sometime in the past 10 years. Keeping it at bay requires continued vigilance.

It also requires money -- lots of it -- sometimes more than school systems can afford. A prime example is Dare County.

Inspections over the past two years have turned up mold growth in every public school in the resort county on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Students and teachers have complained of headaches, skin rashes and respiratory distress. One teacher died after a severe asthma attack that her husband believes was triggered by her moldy classroom.

The problem was so bad at another school that it prompted the athletic director to make a public complaint. After resigning his post at Cape Hatteras Secondary School in 2001, Billy Rutledge appeared before the county Board of Education with pictures of green fuzzy mold growing in his office. Each fall, he said, he and his staff had to scrape mold off basketballs and other equipment. He said he feared the mold had caused him irreversible lung damage.

A consultant offered a $3.4 million solution, but the school division has been slow to act, spending $700,000 so far to address the problem. Officials say they can't afford to move any faster.

Mold is a major contributor to asthma, the leading chronic illness affecting American children. Asthma accounts for 14 million lost school days annually, according to the American Lung Association. The number has more than doubled in the past 20 years.

The percentage of asthma sufferers is highest in the South, and hospitals in Hampton Roads admit children with severe asthma at a higher rate than statewide.

``A whole spectrum of respiratory diseases can be triggered by exposure to mold spores,'' said Dr. Cynthia Kelly, an asthma expert at Eastern Virginia Medical School.

Exposure to mold can trigger asthma even in someone with no history of the illness, she said.

In addition, mold can trigger allergic rhinitis, characterized by a runny, stuffy nose; itchy, watery eyes and other allergic symptoms.

Further complicating the problem is mold's elusive nature.

``Mold is a very difficult thing to track in a building,'' Kelly said. ``The mold you can see is often just a fraction of the mold you can't see. If you've had a plumbing leak or some issue behind a wall that you're unaware of, the thing could be loaded with mold, and you don't know until you tear the wall down.''

After six years, Gail Brunson of Buxton had had enough of the mold problem at her daughter's school.

She pulled the ninth-grader out of Cape Hatteras Secondary School in April, two months before the end of the school year. She is homeschooling her this year.

``The place was making her sick,'' Brunson said.

Her daughter's health problems began in third grade, she said.

``At first I didn't understand what was going on,'' Brunson said. Her two older children had had no such difficulties. ``She'd just be completely lifeless when she came home from school.''

She suffered skin rashes, a raw, burning throat, headaches, sinus infections and exercise-induced asthma.

``There were times she couldn't sleep,'' Brunson said. ``She would have to go outside on the deck at night to get her breath.'' Once, Brunson said, she visited the school, took the cover off the window air conditioner near her daughter's desk and found the filter full of mold.

The family doctor diagnosed a mold allergy.

``He would put her on allergy medicine and steroids, and we'd keep her home, and she'd get all right, and we'd put her back in school. And in a couple of days we were right back at the doctor's office with the same thing.''

Between September 2002 and April, the teenager had missed almost 20 days of school and was in danger of failing. Her mother also feared that she was at risk of permanent lung damage.

``If my child were to get in the shape that Billy Rutledge is in right now, I don't know that I could forgive myself,'' Brunson said.

Rutledge, the former Cape Hatteras athletic director, was a lifelong athlete and surfer. He told the county Board of Education in June 2001 that he had developed asthma for the first time in his life because of mold at the school. After playing with his children for just a few minutes, he said, he would run out of breath.

Six months later, in December 2001, a countywide assessment of air quality in the Dare schools documented the problem. Industrial hygienists from EI Inc., a Morrisville, N.C.-based environmental consulting firm, found evidence of mold growth in every school.

Humidity is one of the major culprits. To minimize mold growth, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends that indoor relative humidity be maintained between 30 percent and 60 percent, ideally less than 50 percent.

At Cape Hatteras Secondary, the consultants found humidity levels as high as 80 percent. The highest readings were taken in the gym area, near Rutledge's old office.

In the guidance counselor's office, which had been a source of complaints about headaches and upper respiratory irritation, the consultants took samples of airborne mold spores and found a level nine times higher than outdoors. In one classroom of the adjoining Cape Hatteras Elementary School, spore counts ranged as high as 24 times the outdoor level.

The Outer Banks is particularly susceptible to mold infestation because of its humid climate and its vulnerability to coastal storms, which can bring flooding and chronic roof leaks.

The recent explosion of mold-related complaints harks back to the energy crisis of the 1970s and the resulting drive to seal up buildings more tightly, making them more energy-efficient.

The tighter buildings reduced fresh air circulation, said Robert Jacobs, an environmental engineer at EVMS.

``By reducing air exchange rates, we created buildings that trap pollutants,'' Jacobs said. ``For a school, that makes a horrible environment.''

Correcting the problem might require an extensive overhaul of a school's air-handling system, he said. Other mold-fighting measures include aggressive testing for mold spores, extensive cleaning and, in some cases, removal and replacement of contaminated building materials.

The price tag for such work can be hefty.

Chesapeake spent $1.8 million replacing the ventilation systems in three mold-infested intermediate schools three years ago. In perhaps the most expensive job reported, a school system in St. Charles, Ill., spent $13 million on cleanup and repair of an infested high school.

In Dare County, some trace mold's ill effects back almost a decade.

In January 1995, Sally Dyal, a 46-year-old English and French teacher at Manteo High School, suffered an asthma attack at school. Within 24 hours she was dead.

``She knew it was the mold in the school that was causing her to breathe bad,'' said her husband, David Dyal. ``She complained several times about it.

``She had had asthma all her life, but when she was around mold, that just kicked it off and made it worse. She could walk through the school and tell which classrooms had more mold, just from the way she could breathe in them.''

In early 1999, a parent lodged a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on behalf of her son, a student at First Flight Elementary School in Kill Devil Hills. The complaint alleged that the child, who had asthma, could not tolerate the mold in the school and thus was being denied his right to a public education. To protect their privacy, the names of the parent and child have never been made public.

As a result of the complaint, the school system hired a consulting firm, E3 Designs of Kitty Hawk, to prepare a plan for solving air-quality problems countywide.

The consultants' report, delivered in October 1999, found that schools throughout the county lacked any provision for introducing outside air.

Most of the schools were designed without air conditioning. Later, air conditioning was added but with no means of ventilation. The result was that warm, moist air was cooled to room temperature, causing relative humidity to soar and producing condensation on walls and ceilings -- ideal conditions for mold growth.

To fix the problem, the consultants recommended overhauling the mechanical systems in eight schools at an estimated cost of $3.4 million.

The county made the recommended improvements at First Flight Elementary and the adjoining First Flight Middle School in 2000, but three years later, none of the work proposed for the other six schools has been done.

A five-year, $100 million capital improvement plan calls for all the schools to be upgraded by 2007. For some parents, that's not soon enough.

``They keep saying, `We're going to renovate,' '' said Karen Cobb, who has a son at Manteo Elementary School. ``But a year is a long time in the life of a child.''

School officials say they are making a good-faith effort to solve the mold problems, but they are hampered by the cost.

``In the last three years or so we've had a major emphasis in our schools on maintaining the facilities,'' said Jim Winebarger, director of maintenance and construction for the Dare schools. ``I think we've made great strides. But this is an ongoing thing. It's never a situation where we can say we're done. That means not only man-hours, but it also means more money. All these things come with a price.''

Major components of the mechanical systems at several county schools are at the end of their life cycle and there is no money to replace them, Winebarger said. ``This past cycle, out of a very large budget request for capital maintenance, we got almost nothing,'' he said.

An insurance claim to recover the county's mold-related costs was to no avail. The schools' policy contains a mold exclusion. Many insurers have added such provisions as mold claims have proliferated in recent years.

The county has implemented several lower-cost maintenance measures to combat mold growth, including regular roof inspections, periodic cleaning of ventilation systems, prompt replacement of water-stained ceiling tiles and opening windows to increase air circulation.

David Oaksmith, chairman of the Dare County Board of Education, said the current board inherited a variety of air-quality problems and has been aggressive about addressing them.

``When you live on the coast, you're going to have mold,'' he said. ``But we have a corrective action plan for each school. We track these things down and correct them. I think we've got it completely under control now.''

The latest countywide air-quality survey by the school system's consultants, in April, found pockets of elevated carbon dioxide -- a measure of inadequate air circulation -- in nearly every school. In five schools, some of the readings were twice the recommended maximum.

The consultants also found water-damaged ceiling tiles in six schools and mold spore counts above outdoor levels in three schools.

There are continuing health complaints, too. In an air-quality survey last year, allergic reactions and sinus problems were reported among staff and children in four classrooms at Manteo Elementary School.

``I really do have a concern about the number of sick children,'' said Anne Creef, a first-grade teacher at Manteo Elementary. ``Parents come in and say, `I don't understand why my child's sick. He was never sick before.' ''

Two years ago, Creef said, she had to scrub pink mold off the walls of her classroom at the beginning of the school year.

Earlier this summer, the Board of Education halted a planned remodeling of Manteo Elementary amid concerns of some board members that the proposed work might not adequately meet the needs of the school. Last month the board decided to spend an additional $18 million on new construction at Manteo, together with Kitty Hawk Elementary and Cape Hatteras Secondary schools, instead of renovation.

Air-quality concerns were among the key factors driving that decision.

"There could be a significant environmental issue when we start to renovate that school,'' Dr. Walter Holton, a board member from Manteo who favored new construction, said at a recent board meeting. ``You don't know what's behind that drywall.''