1 BUILDING MOISTURE AND HEALTH: WHERE WE STAND

Dampness and mold (D/M) in buildings are consistently linked to poor respiratory health of occupants. D/M-related health effects include the development of asthma, asthma exacerbations, respiratory infections, and upper and lower respiratory symptoms.1, 2 Despite the long understanding that living in a damp or moldy home is bad for your health—Leviticus 14:33-54 advises the destruction of homes with recurring mold—the specific agents that cause the health effects have still not been identified.1, 2

When D/M occur, current public health guidelines typically recommend steps to remediate the building: identify and eliminate sources of building moisture, dry or remove wet materials, and clean or remove moldy materials.3 Fundamental questions remain: how much D/M is too much and should trigger immediate remedial actions; after remediation, was it good enough? We want to be able to set protective threshold levels that would specify both what to measure and how much is unacceptable for health. To achieve this, we first need to identify measurable D/M factors for which we can show that the more exposure to the factor, the greater the health risks; that is, factors correlated strongly with health effects in a “dose-related” way. Ideally, the measured factors would be the actual dampness-related causal agent(s) of disease. However, because we do not know what those agents are, until they are identified we could use other, easy-to-measure indicators of D/M as surrogates, if they were strongly associated with the health effects. Then, we would need to quantify the dose-response relationships of these agents or surrogates with the most important health effects, so that we could set maximum exposures acceptable for health. Figure 1 summarizes a simplified version of this process.

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