09/26/2026
I never thought this day would arrive. I’m so grateful awareness of mold/fungal illness is now “mainstream”. I barely survived mold illness. My chronic illness started when I lived in a moldy home at 20 years old. I searched for my diagnosis and treatment to heal it for 22 years. It took me 22 years, 4 years beyond my medical degree, to learn it was MCAS and finally heal. Mold causes MCAS. COVID and vaccines also are known to cause MCAS. Any stressor can trigger it. Immune systems are becoming significantly overwhelmed and triggered. I see it every day in my clinic. Patients that come to me for traditional acupuncture, not even seeking SAAT, also have autoimmune issues and/or food allergies. You can’t have autoimmunity or cancer without having MCAS first. Of course there is more mold/fungal illness now. Our immune systems are treading water. As long as you’re not currently living in mold, SAAT and Auricular Medicine can put it all into remission. I am proof and 95+% of my patients are proof.
🚨 Federal officials have now acknowledged what thousands of families have been living with for years—mold-related disease is spreading faster than the medical system can name it, diagnose it, or treat it.
At a Sept. 18 HHS Mold Surveillance Roundtable, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a growing number of U.S. adults and children are sick from mold and other fungi, often for years, while doctors miss the cause.
“This will be the beginning of an effort to educate the public, to educate physicians,” Kennedy said, “so that everybody who’s affected by this disease can get some help.”
The human cost is already on the record.
CDC figures cited at the event include about 7,300 fungal-disease deaths a year, tens to hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and millions of outpatient visits, with invasive mold infections killing 50 to 70 percent of those who develop them.
Officials warned those numbers almost certainly understate the true burden, because there is still no comprehensive national surveillance for all fungal diseases and most medical schools still do not teach physicians how to find them.
Kennedy made the stakes personal.
He once lived in a house so contaminated it had to be torn down; nearly all of his children were affected, his wife was “very, very badly affected in many ways that doctors couldn’t understand,” and one son saw 89 doctors before a chronic mold infection was identified.
“I worry about the many other Americans who may not have found the solution,” he said—people living with brain fog and “all of the other crazy stuff that this does to you every day.”
CDC Director Erica Schwartz said clinicians must start asking whether invasive mold or another severe fungal infection is why a patient is not getting better.
The agency pledged more than $1.5 million to the patient group MyCARE for education, along with millions more for research and for state and local lab and surveillance capacity.
Doctors who treat these patients say the waiting rooms are filling with young mothers and children.
Blood tests can detect mold antibodies, they report, but recovery does not begin until the source is found and removed.
Engineered wood, prior water damage, pesticide load, immune disruption, and even electromagnetic exposure were all raised as possible reasons the problem is accelerating.
On autism, the reporting is stark but not settled.
Research has not proven that mold causes autism, yet some studies have found elevated mycotoxins and mold-related antibodies in autistic children, and clinicians say mycotoxins can hit the same already-vulnerable systems harder.
That is a warning light, not a closed case.
Kennedy’s question now hangs over federal health policy: What is causing this explosion, and how do we stop it?
For families still bouncing between specialists with no diagnosis, the roundtable was less a conclusion than an admission that the system has been looking in the wrong places.
