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WHAT IMPACT DOES BLACK MOULD HAVE ON HUMAN HEALTH?

Black mould isn’t just unsightly, it can – as the tragic case in Rochdale showed – also affect human health.

Professor David Denning, an infectious diseases clinician with expertise in fungal diseases and chief executive of Global Action For Fungal Infections (GAFFI) explains that there are three ways in which mould can cause health problems.

“Mould contains allergens, and in the same way that other allergens, such as those found in pets, can cause asthma, so too can mould,” he explains. “When you live in a mouldy house, you can breathe in spores and hyphae [filaments that make up the mould] and when they arrive in the

lung, the allergens on these can trigger an allergic reaction in the form of asthma. In some cases the mould can actually grow in the lungs and produce allergens in situ, too.”

But it’s not just the mould and the allergens themselves that are problematic.

“When you go into a mouldy environment, you can smell it,” says Prof

Denning. “That’s because in exactly the same way that you can smell a glass of wine before you drink it, mould gives off volatile chemicals. High exposure to these volatile compounds can give you dry eyes, headaches and make you feel tired.”

Finally, there’s a less well understood aspect of mould’s impact on health.

“A lot of fungi, or moulds, produce what are called metabolites [by-products that are formed through the day-to-day existence of an organism] – for example, alcohol is a metabolite of yeast,” says Prof Denning. “Some of these metabolites are toxic, and known as mycotoxins, and while the liver is generally very good at getting rid of toxins, if you’re heavily exposed to them, this may cause problems.”

But there’s not a huge amount of data and understanding on this.

“In Britain, we measure mycotoxins in food all the time to prevent mouldy food getting into the food chain, but we don’t routinely measure them in people,” says Prof Denning.

As a result, the extent of the health issues that mycotoxins can cause, how they manifest, and how much exposure you need to suffer from them is very poorly understood. In the UK, it’s usually only alternative practitioners who will offer tests for mould toxicity, but there are those who do believe that mycotoxins can cause a range of symptoms, from headaches and migraines, through to fatigue, muscle cramps, brain fog and even loss of cognitive function.

HEALTH

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2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

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Daily Telegraph