Joan Bennett, an expert in mold toxins, didn’t believe that mold in homes could make people sick. She had even testified in support of insurance companies fighting “sick building syndrome” (SBS) claims…But then Hurricane Katrina flooded her New Orleans home in 2005, forcing her to evacuate. She returned five weeks later and was horrified. A swarm of fuzzy green patches had engulfed everything from her prized physics books to the Turkish rugs she had bought on her honeymoon…Hurricane Katrina had caused massive power outages, and destroyed the frozen samples in Bennett’s lab at Tulane University where she’d studied the genetics of fungal toxins. So she had to start from scratch, opening a lab at Rutgers University to test her mold odor hypothesis, zeroing in on on the mushroom alcohol MVOC isolated from the mold in her home.
Newsroom Home / ozy.com