David Fetveit talks with HousingZone.com Web editor Erik Gabrielson about the goals of the newly formed Indoor Environmental Standards Organization (IESO) and the need for standards in the mold field. Fetveit is president of the IESO and executive vice president of Aerotech Laboratories, an environmental testing laboratory that analyzes mold samples, among other things.

Gabrielson: Tell me a little about yourself and the IESO.

Fetveit: IESO was founded last year in an effort to develop standards and training for home inspectors with regard to indoor environmental pollution problems. Obviously, mold is number one on the list right now as far as everybody's concerned and how it's being played in the media and litigation, etc. So that is the number one problem that we tackled first. Basically, we founded the organization, we created an advisory board of a number of nationally recognized experts in the [indoor air quality] and mold field. We developed a standards committee, developed some standards, had the advisory board approve the standards on a consensus basis and then developed some certification and training programs around those standards.

That was the process we did from our beginnings almost a year ago. Right now we're still a relatively small organization. We've got about 250 members and about 150 certified inspectors to date. And those programs just launched in August.

Gabrielson: So it took you only a year to develop those standards?

Fetveit: It's one thing to have industry consensus standards because we had 16 different people on the advisory board. We had the president of the IAQA, the Indoor Air Quality Association; we had the president and director of the American Indoor Air Quality Council; we had several home inspectors, home inspector trainers, engineers, lawyers; the insurance industry was represented; the mortgage companies were represented; the real estate professionals were represented. So we had a really broad brush there.

But still, if you want to have a standard that's really recognized worldwide, you would want to take it through the ANSI approval process, which is the American National Standards Institute. I'm traveling out to Michigan next month to start that process. To take standards through that approval process is going to be probably a minimum of 18 months. [It's really] third-party acknowledgement of your standards.

Gabrielson: Are any other organizations pushing for standards, or are you guys the only ones?

Fetveit: There might be other organizations that are pushing for standards, but to my knowledge there aren't any organizations in this niche that are actually working to develop standards.

To give you a little history of mold and how professionals have handled it, and as far as what kind of documentation is out there … there are two or three publications that have been circulating for the last two or three years. The most recent and most widely acknowledged is probably the ACGIH. It's called "Bioaerosols: Assessment and Control." Really, all that is is an accumulation of 10 or 12 experts — Ph.D.s and CIHs [Certified Industrial Hygienists] in the field who have personal experience. For the most part they know what they're talking about, but they just published their opinions on how they would assess an environment for mold, how they would remediate, the potential health implications, etc. It's just one person's opinion. Unfortunately, right now, that's all the industry has to go on as far as any type of guidelines.

With that being said, the IAQ industry and the mold industry is obviously much, much larger than what IESO is trying to go after. We feel that our philosophy is that when all of the mold hype and hysteria dies down, which ultimately it will, the mold issue is still a problem, and it's going to have to be addressed. And how is it addressed? Well, it's going to be addressed at the property transaction stage. Right now, if you're going to buy a house, you want to get a home inspection and make sure there are no construction faults, etc. Having a significant amount of mold in that house is going to be a very significant thing to discover. So our philosophy is that during every property transaction, you should have a home inspection, and a mold inspection should be part of that. Not only will that make it safe to buy the house and limit the liability of the homeowner, but it also limits the liability of the insurer, the mortgage company underwriter — everybody who's got a financial stake in the property, I think, ought to require a mold inspection.

Gabrielson: The standards seem to be pretty far-reaching. What are some of the key points? Does it apply only to home inspectors?

Fetveit: Yes, and actually right now, the first volume of standards that we've published are relatively limited. They're really not that far-reaching at all. Right now they're just for residential. We'll be working on some commercial inspection standards probably this spring. Really, they're just a screen of a home for mold. You can liken it to a radon inspection in the home. A home inspector can come in and get trained on how to do radon tests, take a couple of samples, look for key indicators of radon in that area, send the canisters off and get the results. Then, if it's all clear, there's a report saying you're all clear. If they find significant levels of radon, then they refer it to an expert who will come out and do a much more in-depth investigation and propose a remediation strategy.

With mold, our philosophy is that it ought to be exactly the same. We've developed standards where it's a really limited screen. They go in, they look for key indicators of water damage, key indicators of potential mold growth. Obviously, in a lot of home environments you can smell it when you walk in. Even if you can't see it, look for staining, discoloration, that type of thing. And then based on those observations, there's a really limited sampling protocol that's generated, and it actually gives the standard for how to interpret the data when you get the data back from the laboratory.

Basically, the whole philosophy is to rule out or refer. You say, "OK, I've ruled out any significant growth of mold here," or, "We found some areas that are throwing up the red flag. I'm not saying that your whole house needs to be renovated, but basically it needs further investigation." At that point they can bring in the CIH or the environmental engineer or whoever's got advanced training. It's going to cost more money to do a further, in-depth investigation, write the remediation specifications, and then you can figure out what it's going to cost to fix the problem.

Gabrielson: So there aren't any standards for the actual remediation process?

Fetveit: Correct. Not to say that we won't expand into that, but right now we do not have remediation standards as part of these standards. But again, our intent was to come up with a quick solution, which is try to get a mold inspection that's going to be under $500. Obviously, that's still more than a typical home inspection, but it's significantly less than if you were to suspect the mold problem and you call out CIH or a high-level, certified mold investigator. Right there you're going to be looking at a couple thousand dollars, typically, for them to determine whether or not you have a significant problem.

Gabrielson: What's the process for a home inspector to get certified?

Fetveit: They just need to go to our Web site and pick a date, fill out the application, send in a check and show up for class. It's a two-day course, 16 hours. It covers mold basics, kind of intro to mold. If they don't know anything about mold it gives a rundown on all the potential sources. [There's] hands-on training using equipment and actually taking samples, taking tape samples and swab samples. Then, step-by-step training on the standards, exactly what the standards call for, what the limitations are, how to follow the procedures, and then once they get the data, how to interpret the data and generate a report. And then they take a 75-question exam at the end, closed book, and if they show proficiency with the standards and pass the test, then they become certified.

Gabrielson: Does that certification last for one year? Do they have to take continuing education?

Fetveit: Correct. There's continuing education after that, and they'll need to be recertified after one year.

Gabrielson: Do you think the mold hysteria has been overblown?

Fetveit: Absolutely. Certainly, when you see media reports of people burning down their homes and kids going to the hospital, even though it may have been true, certainly the way it's reported … creates additional hype. But certainly that doesn't take away from the reality that mold is a problem and needs to be addressed. I think it's even a bigger problem right now because you've got 35 states where the insurance commissioners have opened the door to the insurance companies to say you don't have to cover mold if you don't want to. So many insurance companies have excluded mold from their insurance policies.

If you're a homeowner and you've got a slow leak behind your dishwasher, for example, and a whole wall in your kitchen becomes contaminated with mold, and you have no idea that it's there, and all of a sudden your kids become more asthmatic and start to experience some of these health problems, your insurance company is not going to cover it. What are you going to do?

Unfortunately, right now, the people who are really making money off of the mold hype are the lawyers. Because when you get a situation like that, their only option oftentimes is to pick up the phone and call a lawyer, because they're going to have to move out of the house. It takes attorneys to go in and say, "We're going to try to sue your insurance company because they're not paying for it. Let's sue the builder because the dishwasher was installed improperly. If there was a home inspection, let's sue the home inspector because he should have caught it when the house was purchased." In a lot of cases the Realtors are getting sued because they should have noticed it when they came through. [The lawyers will] try to get anybody they can.

Gabrielson: How big is the problem of unqualified inspectors doing their own testing and possibly overcharging people?

Fetveit: It's a problem. There are a lot of people out there that are certainly playing off of people's fears surrounding all the media hype and everything else. But I think that's beginning to die down as well. I would hope that consumers become a little bit more educated. Certainly that's always going to be a problem in any industry, and certainly there was quite a bit of abuse over the past year, but I think that's on the decline.

Gabrielson: Do you have anything else to add?

Fetveit: A lot of people assume that when you say we have standards, they think, "Their standard for mold is 600 in air." And that's not the kind of standard we've set. We've set a standard [that's] basically a procedural standard. This is how you go in, this is how you look for mold, this is how you take the samples, and this is how you interpret the data.

House Bill 5040 that Congressman Conyers [D-Mich.] introduced into the House last year called for the EPA to set threshold limits for mold. I [think that's] absolutely impossible. There are just way too many factors that affect levels of mold and how they're going to affect human health. So what's really going to have to be established is what amount of mold is acceptable to be growing, how many square feet, or what type, those types of things. Because right now, the industry guideline is that no mold growing in your house is a good thing. But airborne levels fluctuate minute to minute, so trying to set a limit for airborne levels is going to be impossible.

Gabrielson: Have you taken a look at the Texas Medical Association's report that didn't find a connection between mold and any type of human disease? [Read an interview with a TMA member about this report.]

Fetveit: Yes, I did see that, and that was actually sponsored by some of the insurance companies, and it was skewed by the insurance industry. They've got some of the same players the insurance companies are using who are still saying that smoking is not harmful to your health. So a lot of those studies have to be taken with a grain of salt.

I was reviewing a study from Inhalation Toxicology … This paper, for example, [says], "Spores of aspergillus versicolor are isolated from indoor air, but moisture-damaged buildings provoke acute inflammation in mouse lungs." And so they've proven inflammation and development of leukocytes when they're exposed to aspergillus.

There's another study that was done up in Canada. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation studied 15,000 houses in 30 different communities in five geographic regions of Canada, and they associated asthma and allergy in children to elevated levels of mold and bacteria and allergens. As long as the insurance companies don't want to pay to cover, they're going to wait until there's a lot of scientific evidence in favor of mold causing health problems before they're going to be forced to pay.

Lead is another great example. [A] Ph.D. determined back in the '70s that lead poisoning was a serious problem for kids. The insurance companies and some of the manufacturers of the products that used lead — the lead paint and lead-based gasoline companies — developed a whole bunch of studies that totally debunked him, put him out of business. They basically called him a fraud, that he made up all of these studies and papers linking lead to health problems. It wasn't until 10 years later that he was actually justified, when other people started saying, "Yes, my study shows that, too." Finally, they had to take lead out of gasoline and lead out of paint. Certainly, there are people who have a vested interest in going out and saying mold is not a problem … which is unfortunate, but to be expected. There's billions of dollars at stake.

Gabrielson: The truth might lie in the middle.

Fetveit: It does. I weigh the insurance company saying it's absolutely not a problem, and on the far end of the spectrum you've got the hype of, "It's killing me, burn down your house," and you're right, reality is in the middle. Mold is a problem. What I think is going to come out of the next year or two is the significance of mold on allergies and asthma, especially in children. No, I don't think it's killing them. There certainly are extreme cases where that could be the case, but I don't think that's the common thing. I think most homes that have mold, you're going to be looking at development of allergies and asthma in children from an early age — that's probably going to be the most significant health effect. That's important. I think people are concerned about that.

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