Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

28 | March 2019 width ratio of <15:1 and with no projections longer than ¼ of the body length of the spore. All sorts of unrelated fungal spores can fall under that category, including single spores of Aspergillus and Penicillium. Which brings me to one of my greatest pet peeves – consultants who assign arbitrary criteria levels for spore trap samples and then tell a homeowner that the air in their apartment is unacceptable because the Aspergillus/ Penicillium-like counts indoors are 500 spores per cubic meter higher than the outdoor levels. Seriously? What if your outdoor Asp/Pen counts were 10,000 spores per cubic meter - a number that you could reasonably expect to see outdoors in Florida or Louisiana during the summer- time. Are you still going to stick with that absurd criteria? Or how about the consultants that say the air is unaccept- able because the indoor spore levels are twice as high as those found outdoors? Are you really going to tell me that an indoor count of 200 spores per cubic meter is unac- ceptable because the outdoor sample that you took, when there was snow on the ground, only came back with 60 spores per cubic meter? Better hope that we don't end up on opposing sides in a courtroom. Robertson LD and Brandys R. 2011. A multi-laboratory comparative study of spore trap analyses. Mycologia. 103(1):226-231. Jack Springston, CIH, CSP, FAIHA, is the Industrial Hygiene Services Manager for ATC Group Services' metropolitan New York area operations. Jack is an industrial hygiene consulting professional with over 30 years of experience in recognizing, evaluating, measuring, and controlling employees' exposures to health hazards in their workplace. He has been a Certified Industrial Hygienist since 1993 and is one of less than 50 CIH's who also currently have a sub-specialty certificate in Indoor Environmental Quality. Jack has participated in and over-seen hundreds of indoor environmental quality studies. Contact him at: John.Springston@atcgs.com Robertson and Bob Brandys published a paper looking at this particular issue. They submitted 16 pre-mounted spore trap samples to seven different American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) environmental microbiology accredited laboratories for analysis. According to each of the labs, their most competent analyst in performing spore trap anal- yses analyzed the submitted samples and read 100% of the sample trace. The results were rather eye opening. To- tal spore counts from the laboratories were highly variable, with ranges varying by more than an order of magnitude. Results from the individual spore categories were also high- ly variable, with the standard deviation frequently exceed- ing the mean. Even more disturbing was the fact that only 75% of the laboratories consistently identified Cladospori- um, and only 50% of them were able to identify Aspergillus/ Penicillium-like spores. Essentially, the take-home lesson is that if you don't like the results that you get from one lab- oratory, just send the same samples to another lab. Chanc- es are, you will get completely different results. The "Subjective Science" of Mold Sampling https://vimeo.com/157923743 Speaking of the Aspergillus/Penicillium-like group, many misinformed "experts" believe that the Asp/Pen spore counts that they receive from the laboratory mean that there actually is Aspergillus and/or Penicillium present in the sam- ple, and that these counts are representative of what was in the air at the time of sampling. What some people may not realize is that this group of spores is actually comprised of hundreds of different species of not only Aspergillus and Penicillium, but numerous other types of fungi, including Tricoderma, Cladosporium, Mucor, Beauveria, and Pae- cilomyces, as well. Indeed, this reported group of spores is nearly as meaningless as "amerospores", which many laboratories report in their sample results. Amerospores is actually a morphological category of spores, which con- sists of non-filamentous, single-cell spores with a length to i

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