5 Mold Exposure Symptoms To Watch Out For
Mold and its accumulation can be quite dangerous and it poses significant risks for your as well as your family’s health. Mold can be more hazardous especially if you’ve living in a pretty small space. Accumulation of mold in homes can contribute to a lot of health issues. Read on to find out if you're having symptoms related to mold exposure.
Mold and how do people come into contact with it?
Molds are of different types and some types of molds are toxic whereas others are not. By toxic ones, most homeowners would immediately refer to the infamous black mold. Black mold is a group of molds leading to production of mycotoxins chemicals. From the mold these substances quickly spread n to mold fragments, spores, and also on the surface with the mold formation.
Someone can quickly become predisposed to mycotoxins and toxic mold by:
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Skin contact to allergens from moldy items.
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Breathing in mold spores.
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Eating food that contacted mold, whether through direct growth or after getting transferred through washed hands.
Depending on the health and type of the person, the mold symptoms can vary as it might not completely affect the individual at all or would create toxic effects on health. Infants, children and the elderly ones with immune deficiencies and respiratory disorders are at higher risk than healthy adults, however everyone can be affected by mold, so it's absolutely critical to minimize the amount of mold wafting through the air.
If allergic individuals come in mold contact, they would typically experience one or more symptoms like:
Weakness and Fatigue - Only symptoms of weakness and fatigue are alone enough to indicate any symptoms related to mold exposure. You must also know about the differences between tiredness and fatigue. Tiredness can be caused by different reasons such and poor sleep routine or having stressful conditions. Fatigue is for much longer which would make you feel like you require too much rest.
These symptoms always need to be considered with various other factors that would easily help you to identify the underlying cause. You might also be having recurring infections of sinuses and the respiratory tracts. If these are combined with fatigue then its best to quickly consult a doctor.
Light sensitivity and Headaches - Headaches are symptoms for a lot of health conditions so knowing the exact cause might not be easy. Different factors such as poor diet, a lot of anxiety, irregular sleep patterns, poor posture, etc. all these can trigger headaches. However getting them frequently is a cause of worry, especially in combination with flu-like symptoms. This would particularly hold true if all these headaches don’t go away from painkillers.
Lack of Concentration and Poor Memory - Some factors that lead to less focus and concentration are poor diet and anxiety. However, if you’re going through severe brain fog’ episodes, then you would have to carefully look upon what your body indicates. This can be anything such as experiencing numbness, or frequently forgetting easy words. Doctors might quickly blame the issue on stress. However if these symptoms get accompanied by skin rashes or being short of breath, then these can also indicate an exposure to mold. Doctors generally look out for combination of different symptoms for pinpointing the culprit.
Mood Swings, Sweats, Blurred Vision and Red Eyes - None of these factors would indicate anything great happening. These are all mold exposure symptoms. Blurred vision and red eyes can be early signs that you’re getting exposed to external irritants. 25% of the population remains to be sensitive to mold.
Most people get immune system response for defeating toxins that occur due to mold exposure. If you fall under those 25%, then it is most likely that you would get any of these symptoms. One must know that mold exposure symptoms equally relates to conditions like Lyme disease and various other chronic issues as well. Thus, to diagnose it’s best to test. Even if you’re not going through mold allergy, your doctor would surely treat other conditions as well.
Joint Pain and Stiffness - These painful conditions can also be due to different allergies and other illnesses. However, these symptoms typically are prevalent in the fall season if you’re going through mold allergy. The reason behind this is that rotting leaves in fall season emit mold spores in the environment.
These symptoms can easily be combatted with the help of antihistamines and simple lifestyle alterations. However, mold also triggers another insidious medical condition known as, chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS). These perplexing symptoms would often leave doctors quite confused. Joint pain if quite a difficult symptom to relate with mold as it might identify different conditions like rheumatism. However, these can easily get identified with the help of a few blood tests.
Most of these mold symptoms are of different variety and these might also overlap with various other conditions. It’s best to consult with a practitioner at the earliest if you have developed any of these symptoms along with any underlying condition that you have. Catching mold allergy can just make these conditions worse while creating a lot of health troubles.
How to remove mold and avoid it in the future.
One of the best ways to prevent black mold symptoms is to get rid of all types of mold in your house. If the mold extent of the house remains to be lesser than 30 square feet of area then you would also require some basic cleaning and restoration. For this purpose the best measure is to get all mold removed by professional mold removal service.
In this regard professional mold cleaning experts would have to just get a detailed inspection of different air passages so that they can find out the root cause of mold growth and stop it. A significant benefit of employing the services from professional mold cleaners is that they simply finish all meticulous clean-up tasks.
They can easily reach all crawl ups and other rarely touched areas such as attic ductwork and higher roofing places. Mold growth is seen in humid and damp environments and the most efficient way of prevention of mold growth is monitoring humidity level in the house. Make sure that this doesn’t reaches above 50% throughout the entire day.
To prevent mold symptoms, make a regular check on humidity levels as these often changes within a few hours.
Another way to ensure your home is as mold free as possible is to hire an air duct cleaning specialist that can clean, deodorize and sanitize your air ducts. By hiring an air duct cleaning company like us, you can be sure the mold will be eliminated in hard to reach areas within your ducts, so you can focus on humidity monitoring and proper home cleaning practices.
Give us a call today if it's been more than 4-5 years since your air ducts have been cleaned by a professional, or you are feeling symptoms of potential mold exposure.
It's also important to have a thorough dryer vent cleaning to ensure your home isn't susceptible to home dryer fires!
Getting diagnosed
Doctors would easily be able to diagnose development of mold allergy depending on the condition of immune system of the person and their family and medical history. They would also suggest several tests such as:
Blood tests, for measurement of immune system’s response to the mold and checking for allergies for certain mold types.
Doctors can also further ask for blood samples for diagnosing systemic fungal infection that is mostly associated with people with weak immune system. Further testing might also be required in such cases.
If you’re looking to get every bit of mold removed from your house's interior, you have to know that is quite an expensive task and a certified mold removal expert must do this. Once the mold completely gets eliminated you’ll be assured that everyone in your home will be free from mold symptoms and the additional dangers of black mold.
Be sure to call us today for a 10% discount on your air duct cleaning to make sure you're ducts aren't pushing nasty mold through your air vents!