Home is where the heart is. Home sweet home. There’s no place like home.
There are many expressions that seek to express how important home is. It’s the place where we can relax and recharge, it’s a place to connect with loved ones; it’s where we can really be ourselves. Now it’s also where more and more people are working from. For all of these reasons and more, having a healthy home is paramount. That’s why we created Our FabHaus. An ecosystem is a community of organisms and their physical environment interacting together. There is balance and harmony. Our FabHaus is like an ecosystem: the parts all work together and are necessary to create a healthy home. Airtightness is balanced by mechanical ventilation in order to prevent mould from appearing.
Sue’s story reminds us of how many people are living in unhealthy homes, and feeling “off” without even realising that their home may be the cause. As a lawyer, wife and mother of two, Sue Phoo had a busy life. In 2016, she began to suffer from extreme fatigue, respiratory issues and a lack of concentration. The need to nap often hit her at 2:30pm, and doctors dismissed it as being a working mum. After some time, she was diagnosed with depression, but that didn’t feel quite true for her. She spent nearly three years watching her health deteriorate until thankfully her dietician thought to ask about mould in her home. After some digging, they realised that her sickness began around the time she moved into her home in Darwin.
Mould assessors came into her home and discovered multiple problem areas, including a large patch beneath the floorboards of her bed. After a nasal swab and blood tests, her results came back consistent with mould exposure and CIRS symptoms. Chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS) is a biotoxin illness whereby the body is not genetically able to get rid of accumulated toxins. That’s why she was unwell while the rest of her family seemed unaffected.
CIRS was the subject of a parliamentary committee in 2018, but it has not yet been embraced by mainstream medicine. Diagnosing it can be complicated given how similarly it presents to other diseases. For Sue, however, getting the diagnosis was life changing. Her specialist suggested she fly down south for a while to see if it made any difference and within weeks she felt like a completely different person. Her family worked with experts to remediate their home and install an air filter so that she could return without severe consequences.
We love that this story had a happy ending for Sue and her family. We share it in the hopes that more people will realise how important it is to live in a healthy home. Mould requires a number of things to grow including the presence of moisture, temperature between 10 and 40 degrees, nourishment, time, oxygen and spores. These variables are present in Australia, and thus why we use passive house design to create healthy and sustainable homes for Australians. If you’d like to learn more then please get in touch with our team. We also offer retrofits for existing homes. For Sue’s full story, please click the link below.
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-12/severe-mould-illnesses-cirs-undiagnosed-australia-nt/100106416