While there are some medical conditions that occur in children and babies that you cannot do much of anything to prepare for, what you get told by health professionals might not be all there is to it. It happens to some of the best parents in the world, but they are continually told that there is nothing that they can do to stop it. They are told that the medical community has no answer. They are at the mercy of it.
SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) occurs in infants and toddlers and most often what happens is that a child is asleep in its crib and for some strange reason, he or she just dies. Just like that. North American doctors have had no explanation for this occurrence for years and continue to this day to tell parents that there is next to nothing that can be done to prevent it.
However, an answer to the cause of it might lie just on the other side of the world in New Zealand.
A study that has been going on for almost the past 10 years in New Zealand says that the reason SIDS occurs is because of the chemicals being put into our mattresses (including baby mattresses) to make them flame retardant. These chemicals include arsenic, antimony, and phosphorus and all three are poisonous to human beings. However, this by itself is not what causes SIDS. It is when mold, particularly Scopulariopsis brevicaulis, makes its way into one of these flame retardant mattresses (and you never know which mattresses contain which chemicals, there are no labeling laws), it eats the mattress material. When it begins to digest this material, it releases toxic gases back into the air and when you have your baby sleep on this mattress (especially on its stomach), it inhales these gases and dies.
This study advises that you have your baby sleep on its stomach, to wrap the mattress itself in a specially manufactured wrap to keep these gases from escaping the mattress, and to always purchase a new mattress each time you have a new baby. Used mattresses are much more likely to contain the mold that you do not want your baby to come into contact anyway, much less while it is eating these flame retardant materials. Try to keep bed materials cleaned as often as possible to keep mold from growing in the bedding, as well.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
water damage restoration companies and
Dallas Residential Water Damage Restoration Contractors.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Home Moldy Home
If I was building a new home, the last thing that I would want to find out at the last minute is that it has been being built with moldy building materials. This happens a lot more often and is a lot more serious than you might think that it is. Mold is a big problem in homes these days, either due to not paying attention to the condition of your home while you are living in it, due to a natural disaster such as a hurricane, or perhaps the most avoidable reason, it was built into the home that you currently live in.
Mold gets built into brand new homes all the time and it is not only the contractor’s fault, but also the owner’s for not paying attention to the building materials being used at the time. For someone paying to have the home built, what they need to do to help prevent this is to pay attention to what is going on at the building site and to visit it often. The building should be completely covered with a tarp until the walls and roof are totally finished and there is no possibility for rain, snow, or any other kind of precipitation to get into the house.
Before building begins you should inspect all the building materials such as the lumber, sheetrock, insulation, and etcetera that are being used. Inspect them and if you see any signs of mold at all, have them tested with a home test kit and set them aside until you are sure that they are not contaminated.
Something just as important as the other things mentioned here is to make sure your contractor and his or her workers are not storing the building materials directly on the ground. This is just asking for mold to start growing on these and this is completely avoidable by just raising the materials up off the ground. They should come into contact with the soil as little as possible, if at all.
Mold testing during different stages of the home’s development should also take place. The testing should be in the beginning, near the middle, and after the home is completed.
As long as you pay attention to what is going on around the new site of your home while your contractor is working on it, you should be able to almost completely avoid mold being built into your home.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of
Emergency Water Damage Restoration and
Houston Water Damage Restoration Which are Certified IICRC Water damage and mold remediation contractors.
Mold gets built into brand new homes all the time and it is not only the contractor’s fault, but also the owner’s for not paying attention to the building materials being used at the time. For someone paying to have the home built, what they need to do to help prevent this is to pay attention to what is going on at the building site and to visit it often. The building should be completely covered with a tarp until the walls and roof are totally finished and there is no possibility for rain, snow, or any other kind of precipitation to get into the house.
Before building begins you should inspect all the building materials such as the lumber, sheetrock, insulation, and etcetera that are being used. Inspect them and if you see any signs of mold at all, have them tested with a home test kit and set them aside until you are sure that they are not contaminated.
Something just as important as the other things mentioned here is to make sure your contractor and his or her workers are not storing the building materials directly on the ground. This is just asking for mold to start growing on these and this is completely avoidable by just raising the materials up off the ground. They should come into contact with the soil as little as possible, if at all.
Mold testing during different stages of the home’s development should also take place. The testing should be in the beginning, near the middle, and after the home is completed.
As long as you pay attention to what is going on around the new site of your home while your contractor is working on it, you should be able to almost completely avoid mold being built into your home.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of
Emergency Water Damage Restoration and
Houston Water Damage Restoration Which are Certified IICRC Water damage and mold remediation contractors.
Cleaning Moldy Fabric
Sometimes we look into the backs of our closets while we are cleaning them out and we discover an old article of clothing with a fuzzy substance all over it. If you find something like this in the back of your closet, the best thing to do is drop it immediately and go wash your hands. What you were handling was a piece of clothing that has been contaminated with mold and it has been advised to not touch mold spores with your bare hands. This can possibly cause an allergic reaction or just some skin rashes, but either way, there will probably be consequences to deal with.
Most items of clothing that are contaminated with mold can be cleaned and the mold done away with, but most of the time the mold ends up leaving stains. Using bleach to remove the stains can be effective if you are dealing with mold on white clothing, but this is not always the case and chlorine bleach is not effective in killing molds on porous surfaces. You can use a brush to remove the majority of the mold and put a pre-wash spray on it; allow this to soak for about 45 minutes and put it through the washing machine. After this, allow them to dry outside naturally in the sun. Using an artificial source of heat to dry the clothes can set the stain deeper into the fabric and if you are dealing with white clothing, the sun can actually help to bleach the fabric further.
If you are looking to remove the mold and mold stains from something that was made with real leather, you are probably not going to have any luck. Items made out of leather become discolored very easily and mold does a good job of this. They cannot usually be restored after coming into contact with mold.
You can clean off upholstery or curtains that have come into contact with mold using the same method described above and one of the best purchases you can make to keep your home mold free is a vacuum that has a HEPA filter in it. Use this vacuum and its brush attachment to suck up all the mold and its spores; the filter will make sure that the spores are not re-released into the air in your home after being collected.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of
Texas Water Damage Restoration and
Houston Water Damage Restoration Which are Certified IICRC Water damage and mold remediation contractors.
Most items of clothing that are contaminated with mold can be cleaned and the mold done away with, but most of the time the mold ends up leaving stains. Using bleach to remove the stains can be effective if you are dealing with mold on white clothing, but this is not always the case and chlorine bleach is not effective in killing molds on porous surfaces. You can use a brush to remove the majority of the mold and put a pre-wash spray on it; allow this to soak for about 45 minutes and put it through the washing machine. After this, allow them to dry outside naturally in the sun. Using an artificial source of heat to dry the clothes can set the stain deeper into the fabric and if you are dealing with white clothing, the sun can actually help to bleach the fabric further.
If you are looking to remove the mold and mold stains from something that was made with real leather, you are probably not going to have any luck. Items made out of leather become discolored very easily and mold does a good job of this. They cannot usually be restored after coming into contact with mold.
You can clean off upholstery or curtains that have come into contact with mold using the same method described above and one of the best purchases you can make to keep your home mold free is a vacuum that has a HEPA filter in it. Use this vacuum and its brush attachment to suck up all the mold and its spores; the filter will make sure that the spores are not re-released into the air in your home after being collected.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of
Texas Water Damage Restoration and
Houston Water Damage Restoration Which are Certified IICRC Water damage and mold remediation contractors.
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