It doesn’t matter if you live in Raleigh, Cary, Apex… NC or Pennington, N.J., having a mold in your house where ever that house is located can cause serious  health problems for people living in it.

Here is the story of Caitlin Murray. She is now 5 and healthy, but that was not the case 3 years ago:

“She would have terrible headaches and her face was swollen and she’d throw up sometimes for seven to 10 days,” Jill Murray, her mother said. “They tested her for cystic fibrosis, for leukemia, all kinds of diseases and they couldn’t find anything wrong with her.

A Scary Find

In the basement, Murray checked inside a crawlspace. There was mold everywhere.

“And with that we just got out,” Murray said. “We literally took the shirts on our backs and left.”

Caitlin’s suffering went on for three years before the girl finally felt better. The Murrays’ experience is not unique. Because modern homes are more tightly sealed for energy efficiency, water — which mold needs to survive — gets trapped inside.

“Mold spores are everywhere,” said Meg Hamilton, CEO of Hamilton Thorne Biosciences. “They’re in your house, in your attic, on the street, in your living room, in your kitchen. It’s a question really of how much and what species.” Some molds are worse than others, said Tom Kelly, a director of the indoor environments division at the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

If you know you have a mold in your home the most important steps are to determine exact cause of it, clean/remove it and inspect the previously affected area a month later, just to make sure that all the traces of mold are gone. If you think you might have a mold in a house but you are not 100 % sure it is always a good idea to have your property inspected by professionals, they are trained to recognize mold problems and know proper ways to treat them.