Shock as woman discovers cause of sickness was in her room the whole time

The United States is known to many as a land that’s brimming with large and inviting homes, in equal parts due to what’s presented in Hollywood movies and what’s actually on offer in reality. It’s a country where over 1 million people migrate to per year on their quest for a different—or better—life.

But behind the shiny exterior, many homes, and the people who live in them, have been affected by toxic mold and fungal infections that have emerged in hidden corners of the properties they’re living in.

In 2021, at least 7,000 people in the U.S. died from mold and fungal infections, while more than 75,000 are hospitalized every year, according to findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is what happened to close friends, Nicole and Delaney, who both began suffering from a series of health issues at the same time, after moving into an apartment together following their graduation in 2017.

“We were well on our way to starting our career paths in the competitive corporate worlds we’d chosen, and we’d just moved into our first post-grad apartment, ready to take on our 20s with genuine excitement,” the University of Southern California (USC) alumni told Newsweek.

“But everything began to shift after we moved in. We started experiencing raging insomnia, gut issues and crushing fatigue. Little did we know that they were just some of the symptoms that would plague us for years of our lives, all of which were brought on by toxic mold exposure.

“We slowly started to put together the pieces of our very complex health puzzle and learned that the exposure had triggered a host of health issues, some of which include virus activations, autoimmune diseases like hashimoto’s [thyroiditis] and celiac disease, hormone irregularities, parasites, heavy metal toxicity and gut problems,” they added.

Of course, the pair went straight to their individual doctors when they first began feeling consistently unwell, but were both told that despite the debilitating symptoms they were battling on a daily basis, “they’re fine.”

They eventually discovered that the cause of their shared condition was their shared home.

Healing From Toxic Mold Exposure

After the dust had settled, literally and figuratively, the friends placed all of their energy into healing themselves from what they had been through. They both decided to pursue a master’s degree in functional medicine and nutrition, and have since launched a private practice that can support people who are concerned about mold-related issues.

The friends now sell at-home mold-testing kits and courses to help safeguard more living environments from the often hidden dangers of mold.

“Instead of thriving and living the 20-something life we had anticipated, our worlds became consumed with researching and trying every possible therapy—Western, alternative or integrative—in an attempt to heal ourselves from the chronic symptoms that we’d lived with on a daily basis,” Nicole and Delaney, who would prefer to keep their full identities private, said.

“We overhauled our entire way of eating by adopting a nourishing, anti-inflammatory diet. We stopped using conventional, hormone disrupting products and made the switch to a non-toxic lifestyle in order to continue to reduce our toxic burdens. Detoxification, gut healing and nervous system regulation were absolutely essential pieces of our healing.

“We are passionate about spreading awareness not only because mold was the trigger for all of our health issues, but also because toxic mold is simply becoming more and more pervasive, with over 50 percent of buildings in the U.S. now having a toxic mold problem,” they added.

Sharing Their Story Online

The pair were left stunned when they discovered that their home, the place they were supposed to feel at their safest, was poisoning them without their knowledge. Their mutual hurt prompted them to inform others about the dangers of black mold.

Their desire to spread the word on toxic mold exposure led to the pair dabbling in content creation. They now have over 37,000 followers on Instagram where they are known as @thedetoxingduo.

One of their more recent videos, which has been viewed more than 9 million times, outlined how Nicole suffered from more than 20 painful symptoms of toxic mold exposure before finding out what was driving her ill-health.

“When you have pounding headaches, unrelenting fatigue, tremors, weakness, joint pain, abdominal pain and 20 other symptoms, and a doctor says that you’re fine, but it turns out you were being poisoned by hidden toxic mold,” she’d shared in the viral post.

“Toxic mold exposure can cause up to 40 different symptoms across different organ systems of the body. Mold toxicity is a multi-symptom and multi-system illness,” the pair captioned the post.

“Toxic mold acts as an immunosuppressant and can break the backbone of your immune system, allowing for other pathogens and infections to thrive. Certain strains of toxic mold release mycotoxins which are lipophilic, meaning that they can permeate into our tissues and organs and even cross the blood brain barrier,” they told Newsweek.

Can Mold Really Kill?

Sadly, it can, and it is a growing issue in the States. One more common type of indoor mold, candida auris, has a mortality rate as high as 60 percent. Cases of candida auris exposure in the U.S. rose from 10 in 2015 to 700 in 2020. Other forms of indoor mold have also claimed too many lives.

Floridian Christian Childers, 26, lost his life in 2023, following a severe asthma attack that was bought on by the toxic mold that lay hidden in his Englewood home.

When Hurricane Ian shook Florida in September 2022, the bungalow rental home that Childers and his partner Kendra Elliott shared on the central Gulf Coast town became swamped under 5 inches of water.

Although the water subsided just days later, toxic mold began to grow on the couple’s walls, ceilings and air vents.

Hurricane Ian had wreaked unimaginable havoc on the state, and as a result the family were forced to board up the rooms where the mold was at its worst while they waited for services to find the time to tend to their concerns.

At the time, emergency units were overwhelmed with cases that they considered more “urgent,” which came in the form of finding housing for the thousands that had been displaced by the natural disaster.

As the weeks dragged on, Childers experienced fatigue and shortness of breath. He suffered two asthma attacks that required hospitalization and died after a third that struck on Christmas Eve 2022.

Toxic mold remains a concern in the U.K. too. Anxieties about the state of certain housing estates and individual properties made headlines in 2022, after an inquest revealed that a 2-year-old boy named Awaab Ishak had died because of exposure to mold.

The child had passed away in December 2020, four years after the Ishak family first moved into the Rochdale Boroughwide Housing home in the north of England.

The family had made many complaints and given warnings to their council and housing association about the state of the property prior to Awaab’s death. Many housing association tenants in the U.K still live in conditions that are classed as “uninhabitable,” because mold and damp thrive in them.

What if You’re Worried About Your Home?

Bethany Uribe is a mitigation division supervisor at ASAP Restoration LLC, a water damage restoration service in Arizona.

“If you find mold in your home, what to do next depends on where the mold is, how the mold got there, and how much mold there is,” Uribe told Newsweek.

“If you find mold on a random wall with no pipes running through, then the odds are strong that there is a roof leak causing the drywall to become soaked and moldy. In this scenario, unless you’re an expert roofer and mold remediation specialist, it’s best to call a professional.”

“If you find a small patch of mold in an area that gets regularly wet anyway, like in between the bathroom tiles on the grout lines, you can likely use a mold and mildew cleaner to safely kill or scrape it out of existence,” she added.

Uribe says that the remnants of a flood can cause mold, even if you’ve eliminated all of the standing water. This is because the water has often times had long enough to seep into areas where it can’t easily be dried up.

“Seep water that sits stagnantly beneath any floor will almost always cause mold to grow in places where you won’t be able to address it and then it can spread,” she said.

“Toxic black mold is not a joke. There are some people who get exposed to black mold and nothing happens. There are other people that have significant reactions to even a tiny spore count floating in the air. Each individual reaction should dictate the response needed if exposed to mold.

“If you know for sure that you have been exposed to black mold, and you are experiencing symptoms of typical exposure, then it is wise to seek a medical professional for assistance and evaluation,” she advised.

Is there a health issue that’s worrying you? Let us know via [email protected]. We can ask experts for advice, and your story could be featured on Newsweek.