Episode 79 - RealTime Labs Mold and Mycotoxin Testing – Transcript

00:02welcome to our podcast my name is keely severson and i'm here with my co-host eric johnson and alicia swami and we are exposing mold today we are here with sherry iyer is it air or irons sherry ayers from real time labs thank you for joining us sheri oh well thanks for having me today this is a really exciting opportunity um i think uh you all are doing a really great thing by bringing attention to these mold

00:30issues and by having a platform that is readily available for people to be able to find so thank you there's a few different is it okay now yes okay we'll edit this out there's just some sound delays with my computer fine um so talk to us about real time labs we know that there's

00:56we know that there's a few other mold testing companies out there how how is real time labs different or how does it stand apart or tell us a little bit about your company sure so um real time laboratories is a mold and mycotoxin testing company located in carrollton texas and we've been around for about 15 years now

01:21and the founders of the company are two doctors dr hooper and dr bolton they met each other in medical school many years ago and so they've been working together for a very long time and you know throughout the course of their practice of medicine had encountered many situations where um you know patients were having difficulties getting treatment or being able to get to the bottom of what

01:48was causing their symptoms so um just you know throughout working with these individuals one of the things that came out as a common factor for a lot of these people is having mold or mycotoxin exposure and at the time it was something that was wasn't really getting a lot of public notice it certainly wasn't getting a lot of notice in the the medical community there you know there weren't really laboratories or a test that

02:16people could take to help them evaluate their situations and so they founded real-time laboratories as a way of you know giving people a laboratory that they can go to to have their mycotoxin testing done and really try to you know like give people another way to evaluate their situation either you know rule in or rule out mycotoxin exposure

02:42as a potential cause of their symptoms so what we really have focused on over the years is you know just having that focus around the mold and mycotoxin so there's a few other labs out there that um that have mycotoxin tests but what really sets us apart is that focus of the patient and their environment so

03:09people who are who have been exposed to mold you know you can go in and you can get a laboratory test and you know see if you're have mold in your body or if your micro toxins are coming out in your urine but where is this exposure coming from you know are you have you been exposed in your home or in in your business or somewhere that you've been to somewhere that you worked somewhere that you've traveled

03:34so we also offer mycotoxin testing for homes because you need to be able to treat your home and treat your body so this gives people another tool that they can say now that i know where i've been exposed how i've been exposed how long i've been exposed they can you know go through the actions that they need to either seek out a mold remediator or an inspector to clean their home or to

04:02remove themselves from that premises altogether because if you're you know you're trying to treat your body but you are still living in a home or going to work somewhere where you're being exposed every day to the same thing that's getting you sick you're never going to be able to get better can you guys hear me

04:28okay do you help people pick remediators uh yes we um we do have resources on our website that has a list of remediators that that people can go to so you can search by geographical area and we also have educational outreach programs that we do with our remediators to to train them and give them classes and certifications

04:56that uh show that you know that we've worked with them and that these are companies and experts that we trust to be able to evaluate your home and to be able to clean your home so that way you have somewhere safe to go back to we at exposing mold we work a lot with the hyper-sensitive population so the people that we work with don't they're not going to get healthy from like

05:22fogging or bleaching so i'm just wondering do you ever hear feedback from the people that you've tried to refer to remediators where they say like they're still not feeling well like it wasn't a successful remediation just because we know that there's so much failure in the remediation industry in general no matter how perfectly it's represented i'm just wondering if that's something that you see because on our side of the our side of the line

05:49we're like dealing with the aftermath of failed remediation usually i mean yeah i think um sometimes we do have people who will come back and say that their home has been remediated and they're still they're not they're not feeling well or they're still having these symptoms and the difficulty with that is kind of twofold number one is you know do do you still have mycotoxins or mold

06:15in your body even though it may not be in your home anymore or do you in fact still have some exposure in your in your home or at your location where you were being uh exposed in the first place and you know some of these these mycotoxins they can stay in the body for a long time and it can be difficult to to really be able to um to get that all out of your body especially if you still have mold in your body

06:42so um that's one issue and then the other issue is that you know in the individual's home if it has it's been remediated but um what you know where did the raw materials come from that your house has been remediated with did you have something replaced and that came from something that is also already moldy i know that's kind of a stretch but you know that there's so many variables involved that to say that

07:07a house has been fully remediated you know like this these molds can they can hide they can you know they get into cracks they get into your ventilation so all that needs to be really thoroughly cleaned out and you know the remediators are trained on how to to do that they're very good at what they do but the fact of the matter is that there's just so much to go through that they have to be extremely thorough and

07:33extremely diligent and do follow-up testing in the home to make sure that wherever the mold was that they got it out yeah i have a hyper-sensitive patient that i work with who had like the best mold tester the best remediation company the house was cleared with testing afterwards and this guy's life is in shambles and it it seems to us that there's a type of

08:00immune system injury that can occur past the point of toxins showing up in the system um which is just something to think about on our end you know um so can you talk to us a little bit about the validation and processing of of your tests of the test results yeah sure so um we are real-time laboratories is accredited by an organization called cap which is the

08:28uh college of sorry um oh gosh give me one moment you can edit this out right okay so real time laboratories is accredited by an organization called the college of american pathologists and we abide by those guidelines when we're performing any validations or evaluating any tests they have very

08:57rigorous stringent guidelines that we have to abide by those are even more stringent than what is required by clia or what is required by medicare so the first thing when we're evaluating a test is you know doing a rigorous study of publications um you know doing our literature search and making sure that we have a um peer-reviewed sources showing us

09:24that the method that we're proposing is going to be clinical clinically relevant and then once we go from there then we perform a analytical validation the components of an analytical validation is to look at every aspect of the test and make sure that we are understanding exactly how our test is going to be performing in a laboratory because although there are lots of

09:51variables that you know as a laboratory we can't control we can try to educate the public about how to collect a specimen and the timing and those sorts of things but the things that are in my control is how is the test performed in the laboratory so that usually um what that entails is purchasing a stock of you know the analyte so in this case a mycotoxin

10:16from a manufacturer so that's going to be 100 pure it's going to it's going to be something that we know exactly what it is so that's what we start with we start with something that we know exactly what it is and then the next thing that we will do from there is we perform what is called the accuracy study so for the accuracy study what we're going to do is we are going to take our

10:41pure stock that we have and we're going to measure it and verify that okay we think that we're detecting the mycotoxin when we run our test knowing that we put a pure mycotoxin in it we get the results that we're expecting if we run something that doesn't have the mycotoxin in it we are not measuring anything so that's the first thing that we're going to do to verify that our test can

11:06accurately detect the mycotoxin the second thing that we're going to do is we're going to measure the precision so what the precision is is taking repeated measurements of that mycotoxin and that can be taking measurements over several different days having several different users perform that doing it at different times of the day doing it with you know a different set of chemicals in the laboratory that we purchased on a different day so we

11:34want to try to capture as many of the variables as we can in this precision study to show that okay if you know i can pick two different people running the test on two different days they're going to get the same results because you know we don't want to have a test that's not going to be reproducible we want to remove that sort of variability the next component is going to be called the limit of detection or the

12:01sensitivity and what that is is determining what is the minimum amount of mycotoxin can we detect in our sample so you start with a stock that's a high concentration you dilute it down you know one one to two one to four one to eight until you have a range of concentrations from very concentrated to very low concentrations test all of those samples and then

12:27determine all right the lowest amount of concentration of mycotoxin that we can find in this sample is you know maybe one part per billion or 0.2 parts per billion and then set that is the limit of detection that's the sensitivity of the assay and a good assay will have a very sensitive limit of detection um there's also a test called the specificity that test that we do so if i

12:53have 10 different mycotoxins but i'm only looking for one microtoxin let's say i'm only looking for ocratoxin or i'm only looking for gliotoxin does my test detect the correct mycotoxin and only the correct mycotoxin none of the others because what we don't want is to have a patient that um you know has something that is being excreted out in their urine that's causing a false positive when we're