Virologia e Micologia
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A Simple, Cost Effective and Rapid Air Borne Mold-Monitoring Model Developed in St. Kitts for Ensuring Global Public Health Safety and Food Security

Elise Landa, Harish C Gugnani, Atandra Burman, Kristen Duman, Zachary Ciochetto, Harleen Saini, Irshad Prasla, James Bassford, Torib Uchel, Samuel Park, Alyssa Mahon, Nalliene Chavez and Girish J. Kotwal

The morbidity and mortality caused by pathogenic and opportunistic air borne molds (ABM) has been on the rise. ABM are not confined by national boundaries but can travel distances over time and can cause respiratory dysfunction, crop damage, food spoilage and serious meningitis outbreaks due to contamination of pharmaceuticals. Presence of mold spores in abnormally high numbers can present hazardous risks to human population world-wide causing mycosis, hypersensitivity reactions or poisoning by mycotoxins. Tropical places and places receiving heavy rains in the monsoon season can end up with a massively higher mold count and the aftermath of hurricanes and floods can result in dangerously high levels of mold counts in the environment. ABM does not uniformly affect the population but is more dependent on individual hypersensitivity, age, nutritional status, vegetation, ventilation etc. While the world has been acutely aware of particulate and minute organic and inorganic pollutants from automobile emissions and industrial release of gases in the air, the presence of molds in the environment has received little attention until the recent outbreak of Meningitis, which resulted in over 60+ deaths and 100s of hospitalizations in the USA. There is an urgency now to develop the tools that can be universally adopted to monitor the mold count in the air around the landmass of the world and then to characterize the type of mold to be followed by ways of cleaning the environment of harmful molds. Here we propose a simple, cost effective and rapid model for monitoring molds that does not require sophisticated infrastructure to gain initial insight of what is in the air in terms of molds we breathe locally and assess the impact it could have. Developed countries could certainly go steps ahead in terms of sophistication in identifying the molds such as by use of PCR but for now to establish a baseline of what is the mold count and what are the general types of molds in surrounding air, a simple low cost model could be a start. Our results from assessment of molds on an island nation have revealed that mold count varies within certain regions and settings. The diversity of the molds is proportional to the mold count. Most molds found can cause little direct harm to individuals but can contribute to crop damage and food spoilage. Overall the benefit to the inhabitants in getting to know the types of molds in the surrounding air they breathe is going to be of considerable benefit.