On today’s rerun of Dirty Jobs, host Mike Rowe was assigned to break down several of last year’s Rose Bowl Parade floats, all of which were covered with old, moldy, rotting and often putrid vegetative decorations, mostly flowers and fruit.
In his usual humorous, good-natured (and justified!) way he bitched about every miserable task. But you could see that for this dirty job he wasn’t just going through the motions when he balked at tearing up a carpet of seriously moldy fruit halves without a respirator mask. The work was kicking up clouds of mold spores. The supervisor did not bat an eye at Mike’s concerns, and gave him (and us viewers) the impression that breathing in gobs of living mold spores was not in the least bit dangerous. Was he right?
(Note: I don’t think this belongs in CS, but if a mod disagrees I’ll take the decision like a man.)
It would depend on the type of mold, the quantity, whether or not the person exposed was allergic to mold or already suffering from some respiratory ailment… in other words, hard to say. Probably not good, but harmful or not is hard to determine here.
I’d think potentially pretty harmful. Molds can infect people. Besides, botanically they’re tiny mushrooms and like mushrooms are often poisonous. And they’re potent allergens. Somebody may have past experience that breaking down old floats hasn’t badly hurt anybody yet, but then the old float salvaging industry can’t have much experience, either, can they?
There are a few toxic strains of mold, but these are few and far between. Mold is the bogeyman of the new millennium. Most molds are quite harmless to human beings, and even if they cause allergic reactions in a few people, are generally harmless to the great majority of human beings.
People freaking about about any kind of environmental mold is just foolish panicking.
Just so you know, the biggest risk from mold isn’t just “allergic reactions in a few people”. The biggest risk is an oftenincurable and fatal lung infection.
Many molds of the Aspergillus and Rhizopus varieties amongst others will grow in the human lung itself. Under normal circumstances so few spores are inhaled that the immune system deals with them. However if a person is exposed to a cloud of spores for extended periods there is a good chance that some spores will successfully germinate. For a healthy (and lucky) person that usually results in a severe lung infection for a few weeks with accompanying fever, couging etc. No fun at all. For the elderly or otherwise compromised people, or for a few who are just unfortunate, the infection really takes hold. The fungus gradually digests and obstructs the lung and plugs the blood vessels leading to death through suffocation.
And the infection is a bitch to treat. There are precious few anti-fungal magic bullets and those that do exists tend to have nasty side effects. Worse yet the damage caused tends to be approxiamately permanent, with any afflicted areas thickening up and losing elesticity and much respiratory function. And just to top it off the toxins produced by the fungus increase the risk of lung cancer to a phenomenal degree. IIRC once you develop aspergillosis you have a 25% chance of developing lung cancer within the next 30 years.
So yeah, there’s a risk from clouds of fungal spores. It isn’t some made up ailment or unnecessray health panic. Working in that situation there’s a good chance of a minor infection with unknown risks for future cancer development. Not excatly trivial. There is a small but still real risk of developing an infection that is almost certainly going to reuslt in a slow and painful death.
As a health & safety type person, I can say that most definately he should have been provided with a respirator.
Given that the company seems to specialise in this work, it should have a full work procedure that employees can read, it is highly possible that the outcome of a proper risk assessment of the biological hazard would have required the task to be located somewhere isolated, there are so many things that are possibliities.
I know US laws are differant, but in many cases they are far more stringent than here in the UK, though they tend to be enforced more by personal litigation than by public agencies.
Quite simply, if this was the UK then the superviser was breaking the law and could be prosecuted.