Mold a problem, dead or alive

By: BRUCE KAUFFMAN - Staff Writer | Saturday, December 4, 2004 8:57 PM PST ∞

SAN MARCOS ---- When a parent complained recently that her child was sneezing and sniffling in a portable classroom at Paloma Elementary School, the search for the likeliest suspect ---- mold ---- began.

Officials said the room got a thorough cleaning, but the complaints persisted. The results of air tests that showed the air was cleaner in the classroom than outdoors did little to stem the concern. The parent insisted something in that room must be causing the child's respiratory distress.

And though such complaints were coming from neither the teacher nor other children and their parents, the maintenance and operations department for the San Marcos Unified School District kept casting about for something else it could do.

After all, even those with only short-term memories could still vividly recall a fall 2000 event at another of San Marcos' older elementary school campuses, Alvin M. Dunn. There, a half-dozen cases of pneumonia in one classroom and complaints of respiratory illness among teachers in other classrooms led to the wholesale cleaning of the school to eradicate what might well have been causing the distress: mold.

Officials such as Jim Poltl, director of maintenance and operations for the school district, decided now to leave no method left untried in the Paloma case. He said he had heard heat may have some potential; after all, it did not require the use of any possibly noxious chemicals, and so he called in the bakers.

On Oct. 30, a company called Alliance Environmental Group of San Diego came to Paloma's campus at Camino Magnifico and heated up the room in question, along with a half-dozen to which it was attached. The indoor air temperatures were raised to 160 degrees and held there for six to eight hours.

One contractor, Mark Tammariello of W.A. Stone Termite and Pest Control Inc. of Escondido, who uses heat to rid structures of pests such as termites, described the technique this way: An electric fan is placed behind a steel burner, about 4 feet long and 22 inches wide, to drive the heat through a duct into an area often enclosed by tarps. In pest eradication, thermometers inserted into dry wood monitor the temperature.

Based on pasteurization

Proponents of the heat method ---- the one used by Alliance is patented under the name of ThermaPureHeat ---- lean on the discoveries of the chemist credited with being the father of bacteriology, Louis Pasteur. Pasteur had been asked by Emperor Napoleon III to look into what could be done about the diseases afflicting wine and causing great economic losses to a key national industry.

In 1864, Pasteur made a vineyard in his laboratory and started work. It led to the discovery that microorganisms were causing the trouble and the discovery that they had a natural predator. It was heat. By heating the wine up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit, Pasteur was able to kill the offending organisms. The process, which became known as pasteurization, is now used almost universally in the production of milk and beer.

But does mold respond the same way that wine does?

Long shown in scientific tests to be an effective nonchemical way to destroy wood-borne pests such as termites, the process of applying intense heat to indoor environments for mold eradication does not appear so deeply steeped in science, specialists in the field said recently.

The trouble is that even dead spores of mold can cause respiratory distress in susceptible people, said Steve Quarles of the UC Cooperative Extension, a wood scientist at the Richmond Field Laboratory. And, he adds, dead ones can cause as severe a problem as live ones. So though heat may kill mold, Quarles said, it doesn't matter all that much in the long run.

And though there is some validity to industry claims that high heat can reduce or eliminate viruses, bacteria and such asthma triggers as bed bugs, lice, fleas and the dust mites that spread spores, heat won't do much to keep a dead spore from being harmful if inhaled, Quarles said.

It can't hurt to try the heat, the scientist suggested, but the treatment must also focus on plugging up leaks that give the organisms the humidity needed to sustain their life.

"Heat can clearly kill a spore,'" Quarles said, "but it does not make it less airborne. ... And a dead spore or a live spore would have the same effect health-wise on an individual. That's what industrial hygienists would say. So it seems that if you're just going to heat up a space to kill the spores, you also need to be going after the moisture source.

"You have to dry the building," he said, "and then you have to keep it dry. ... If you don't fix the water source problem, you are not going to get rid of the spores."

He has some assent from W.A. Stone's Tammariello, one of the local ThermaPureHeat franchisees who says the heat has proven effective for pest control, but the situation with mold is a different story. "Our firm is not using it (heat) in mold remediation, because it hasn't been totally accepted yet," Tammariello said.

At Paloma school, so far, teachers and district officials are reporting that the air smells cleaner than before and the mustiness in those portable classrooms seems to have cleared up. But officials said a particular smell that was hard to describe seems to linger, albeit less intensely, in the classroom of the apparently afflicted child. And the parent, who officials have declined to identify, said the child's problems have not stopped.

Contact staff writer Bruce Kauffman at (760) 761-4410 or bkauffman@nctimes.com.

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