What is "Biotoxin Illness"?

"Biotoxin illness" is a term coined by Dr. Richie Shoemaker, MD to describe the set of symptoms that can accompany the body's response to toxins produced by mold and/or bacteria that grow in moist environments, like water-damaged buildings.

Since mold is the usual culprit behind biotoxin illness, people usually refer to it as "mold illness". In this post, I'm focusing more on mold and their toxins, called "mycotoxins, than on bacteria and their toxins. But just realize that the causal agent in biotoxin illness could also be bacteria and their toxins.

The "New" Mold Epidemic

Humans have been exposed to toxins from mold and bacteria for at least as long as we have been living in built environments (buildings). The Old Testament of the Bible contains instructions for how a rabbi should identify and deal with mold growing on the inside of a home.

Buildings have been getting moisture in them and growing mold for thousands of years, but rather suddenly in recent history, something seems to have changed. The frequency and intensity of illness resulting from exposure to biotoxins has exploded. But why?

It turns out that when mold is exposed to non-native electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs), they freak out and produce toxins that are far more toxic, and they produce hundreds of times more of them. EMFs have made a monster out of mold.

So how do you know if biotoxins from mold or bacteria are a cause of your symptoms? There are a variety of options for detecting mold or their toxins in your home or place of work as well as in your body.

Sometimes it can be easy and straightforward, but sometimes you have to go through many steps to find the evidence of mold exposure.

Detecting Mold and Bacteria in the Built Environment

The growth of biotoxin-producing mold and bacteria in the built environments that you interact with (your home, your place of work, etc) can be detected in a variety of ways.

When it comes to mold, here are the main detection methods:

1. Using a growth plate to catch and grow airborne mold spores
2. Using a swab to collect mold spores from a surface
3. Collecting dust to find mold DNA and/or mycotoxins
4. Using devices that detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air that are produced by microbes
5. Using infrared light devices that detect moist building materials to identify location(s) of potential microbial growth
6. Inspecting HVAC systems, undersink traps, and reverse osmosis units for microbial growth

Did you catrch that last one? Your reverse osmosis (RO) water purification system could be killing you! Mold often grows on the RO membrane.

If you're lucky, you can detect mold by growing mold spores on some $3 growth plates from a company like Immunolytics that you place in strategic locations for an hour and then put in a dark place for 48-72 hours to see what grows. Then if more than 4 visible mold colonies grow on any of the plates, you can send them off to have the species analyzed.

But sometimes mold or bacterial growth is hidden behind walls, under floors, or other places, and therefore their spores may not be getting into the air circulating in your home. Yet their toxins probably are getting into the air because the toxin molecules are much smaller and can pass through walls and floors.

Hiring a professional mold inspector is often called for, but even they can miss it sometimes. So if a mold inspector gives the building a clean bill of health, do not rule out the possibility that that you actually do have mold still hidden somewhere.

And guess what? Sometimes you can be suffering from biotoxin illness without a current mold exposure. You could be carrying mycotoxins from past exposures you incurred years ago.

And worse still, you could actually be colonized by mold growing inside of you, making you a mycotoxin factory. More on that later in this post.

What If You Can't Leave a Mold-Infested Building?

What if you find mold in your home or place of work, but you don't see a way to immediately get out of the home? 

First of all, if you are in a highly toxic home or work environment and are really sick, you simply need to do everything possible to get out immediately, and do it intelligently. Doing it intelligencly means that you may not be able to save your clothes or furniture without taking mold spores with you to colonize your new home.

But if your mold exposure is not making you too sick, there are some ways you can reduce your exposure within your current home or place of work. There are air filters from companies like AirDoctor, Austin Air, IQAir, Molekule (in no particular order) and others that help to clean the air. Some will remove spores and some VOCs. Others may also neutralize mycotoxins. 

You can also "fog" the building with a citrus-based antifungal solution to reduce the mold population. And you can treat your carpet, furniture, and laundry with similar antifungal products. But this does not make it safe to take these items to a new home. 

These are merely short-term solutions to help you survive until you can either get out of that environment or have the mold and/or bacterial growth thoroughly removed by professional remediators. And be careful about who you hire. Some are idiots.

For example, some think that using bleach is effective on mold. Bleach has only been shown to be effective on one or two species of mold on non-porous surfaces only (i.e. NOT wood). When used on porous surfaces (like wood), bleach can actually promote mold growth because the bleach interacts with the surface of the wood and stays there while the water in the solution penetrates the wood, adding moisture needed by the mold to grow, similar to how watering a garden helps plants grow. 

The bottom-line is do not become complacent about ongoing exposure to mold because your health can go from bad to worse at any time. Some people cross a threshold and get tragically disabled by mold for many years. 

If you're getting really sick due to mold in your home and/or place of work, get out of that situation ASAP, even if it's very inconvenient and expensive.

Detecting Mold and Mycotoxins in Your Body

If you have symptoms suggesting biotoxin illness, there are a variety of lab tests you can run on your body. 

You can test your urine for the presence of mycotoxins. Use a test that includes the mycotoxin called gliotoxin. You'll find out why in the next section. Vibrant Wellness is probably the best company for this type of test.

You can test your urine for the presence metabolites produced by mold, which can indicate that mold is growing in your body (in the nose, sinuses, lungs, or gut). This is known as "Aspergillosis" since the main type of mold that grows in humans is from the genus Aspergillus. The only such tests that I know of are the Organic Acids Tests from Vibrant Wellness and the company formerly known as Great Plains Laboratory, now called Mosaic Diagnostics.

You can also test your blood for antibodies to mycotoxins using the test from MyMycoLab. Since antibody levels decline over time after active exposure, this test can provide insights into past versus present mycotoxin exposure. And if you are a poor excretor of mycotoxins (thus producing low exrection in urine), this test can uncover mycotoxin exposure via antibodies. Unfortunately, the last time I checked, this test did not test for antibodies to gliotoxin, the mycotoxin that I mentioned is important for reasons covered in the next section.

You can test your blood for a suite of biomarkers that are often affected in biotoxin illness and constitute the basis of Dr. Richie Shoemaker's approach. This is probably the most and expensive approach, and it does not tell you which mycotoxins are involved, which can be important to know for the process of removing them from you body.

You can swab your nose to test for mold growing there using a test from Microbiology DX.  And if you have severe, persistent sinus symptoms and other indicators of mold exposure, you can get a CT scan to detect the presence of a "fungal ball" in your sinuses.

Most people do not need all of these tests, but sometimes it can get quite involved and expensive. So it helps to have a strategic approach based on the clues you currently have in order to choose which tests to do, in which order, to obtain maximum actionable information at minimum expense.

Detoxing From Mold and Mycotoxins

Overcoming biotoxin illness can be challenging because of how biotoxins, especially mycotoxins, affect the body.

Mycotoxins are highly inflammatory, which is why Dr. Shoemaker also refers to biotoxin illness as "Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome" (CIRS). And inflammation in the nervous system, liver, and other systems of the body causes reactivities and blockages that interfere with excretion of mycotoxins.

Inflammation in the nervous system and immune system can cause conditions like mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and dysfunction of the vagus nerve that controls the function of visceral organs, including the all-important detoxification processes of the liver. In these situations, the body can react to nearly every attempt to increase excretion of mycotoxins. So you have to proceed with attention to calming these reactivities and/or move slowly.

Inflammation in the liver interferes with phase 1, phase 2, phase 2.5, and phase 3 of the detoxification process, causing a backup of all toxins in the body, not just biotoxins. 

And most people that succumb to biotoxin illness have genetic variants that reduce their ability to move mycotoxins out of the body, which is probably why they succumbed to the illness while family members may have been relatively unaffected.

So the most effective way to get mycotoxins out of your body is to individualize the detoxification process to your genetics, the specific mycotoxins affecting you, and how the mycotoxins are affecting the systems of your body, especially the nervous system, immune system, and liver.

If you don't take a highly individualized approach, various things can go wrong. For example, if you are dealing with the mycotoxin called gliotoxin, you may react very strongly to sulfur-containing compounds that are often used to help the body detoxify, such as glutathione and lipoic acid. In this situation, you would need to choose less common strategies for mold detox.

Even without complications like reactivity to sulfur-containing componds, you will have the smoothest sailing through mold detox if you approach it strategically, doing some "pre-tox" before you dive into full detox.

Pre-tox often includes calming an over-reactive nervous system and immune system, removing "interference fields", opening "drainage" (attaining consistent daily bowel movements, better liver function, bile secretion, lymphatic drainage, etc), supporting mitochondrial and adrenal function, or other measures. 

Then in the detox process, it's important to know if you just need to remove mycotoxins or if you're also colonized by mold actively growing inside of you. If you're colonized, you need to use antifungal agents to kill the mold occupying your nose, sinuses, lungs, and/or gut.

In order to remove mycotoxins that your body is not expelling efficiently on its own, you must chose the right binders and support nutrients that are most effective for the particular mycotoxins present. 

It is generally a complex process, so it's best to work with somebody that knows the landscape and can create a customized map and help you navigate your way through the process. 

How to Choose Somebody to Help You Navigate

Biotoxin illness typically does not occur in isolation. Usually, there are other things going on in your body as well. So going to a "mold expert" that tends to see everything in terms of biotoxin illness may only get you so far, or it could have you spinning your wheels, wondering what you're missing.

If you have mold illness, but you also have another condition like traumatic brain injury, psychological trauma, intestinal dysbiosis, mitochondrial and/or adrenal or thyroid dysfunction, etc, you may need to address all conditions in a coordinated fashion to get the best results with the least struggle. 

Your best bet might be to work with somebody that has a broad, holistic view and a comprehensive approach to assessing root causes and properly sequencing steps to correct imbalances, deficiencies, toxicities, etc. 

That's what I had in mind when I developed the Bio-Individual Blueprint system. This system starts with a deep-dive assessment process to uncover as much as possible about the imbalances that have developed, as well as map key aspects of your metabolic and genetic bio-individuality. 

Then we get to work moving through strategically-sequenced stages and steps to "tune-up", "clean-up", and "level-up" your biology. To learn more about this three-stage, nine-step system, go here to download the Bio-Individual Blueprint Roadmap PDF and watch the video. 

If nine steps sounds intimidating, don't worry ... the last few steps are all about age reversal and are a bonus to the other steps. Plus, most people only need to focus on several of the core steps in order to solve their main health challenges.

If you'rd ready for a more complete approach to recovering your health, access the Bio-Individual Blueprint Roadmap PDF and walkthrough video here.

By the way, despite the fact that I have mentioned Dr. Richie Shoemaker in this post and have great respect and admiration for the man and his contributions to the understanding of biotoxin illness, I do not follow the Shoemaker Protocol. The reason for this is that I (and many other mold-literate practitioners) believe that some of his ideas are incorrect, and some aspects of his protocol are overly complicated, unnecessary, and even counterproductive or harmful.