"The mold is growing," he said.
Mold is growing on ears of corn, and in some fields entire stalks have toppled.
If no obvious signs of mold are visible, Mr. Whitman said, it is possible that mold is growing inside a wall or ceiling.
And while the agency advises that mold be cleaned up, it does not recommend testing to discover what type of mold is growing.
If high levels of hazardous mold spores are found in the house, Mr. Sarett said, the inspector will then make a visual inspection to determine where the mold is growing.
In cases like Ms. Lotz's, when mold is growing on the outside of the house and neighboring houses, the city can help connect them to volunteer groups, which have already cleaned mold from thousands of homes, Mr. Spencer said.
In most cases, he said, the only way to determine with certainty whether mold is growing inside a central heating system is to gain access to the coil, its lining and the blower, and take a dust sample from the surface of the components.
If the problem is mildew the directions given may be helpful but if mold is growing in the car it must be killed with no spores remaining since the mold will just continue to come back.
"I'm pretty sure that if I swabbed one of the vents and took it to the lab, and ran a routine culture on it, I'd find that some type of toxic mold was growing in the house".
The report by the Occupational Risk Control Services group in 1998 found abnormal levels of toxigenic fungi in the school, and Mr. Benassi's report on the school's sagging ceiling tiles this summer stated that "greenish mold" was growing in tiles in several areas throughout the building.
