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.There is no question, however, about Saddam Hussein smotivation.For the Arab nationalist who allowed his fantasies ofruling a modern Mesopotamia to inspire the invasion of Iran andKuwait, mycotoxins must have seemed an attractive weapon.Theyare relatively easy to produce, very cheap, and some of them arehighly toxic.But did the Iraqis resume mycotoxin production oncethe arms inspectors withdrew? I asked Jonathan Tucker,43 formerdirector of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies and expert inchemical and biological weapons, for his opinion.He said that hethought it unlikely that evidence of weaponized trichothecenes willMycological Warfare75 show up, but given the major holes in our understanding of theIraqi biological warfare program, anything is possible. Like themost paranoid government advisors, I thought about this a greatdeal in 2003 and convinced myself that the Iraqi military had hiddenbuckets of weapons-grade plutonium and enough anthrax to ter-minate our species.Measured against these nightmares, flasks ofmycotoxins seem highly plausible.Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores76 And finds, with keen discriminating sight,Black s not so black; nor white so very white. George Canning (British Prime Minister 1827),New Morality (1821)Cleveland Revisitedung bleeding in infants is a serious condi-Ltion.It can result from congenital malfor-mations of the lung tissue, growth of benigntumors on the walls of blood vessels, infectionsby bacteria and fungi, and allergies to milk proteins.1It can also strike without an apparent cause.These cases of idio-pathic pulmonary hemorrhage, or IPH, are very rare, afflicting onein a million babies.If an infant dies of IPH, the cause of death isusually recorded as an instance of the larger medical enigma calledsudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS.Physicians have arguedabout SIDS for more than 200 years, ascribing the tragedy to as-phyxiation (deliberate or otherwise), neurological, respiratory, andcardiac abnormalities, inflammatory reactions, low birth weight, sec-ondhand tobacco smoke, viral infections, and a host of other causes.The number of SIDS cases has declined in recent years, due in part,perhaps, to the recommended practice of placing babies on theirbacks to avert suffocation in their blankets.2 SIDS remains, however,the greatest cause of post-neonatal infant death, striking nearly 5,000babies in the United States every year.The possibility that a parentmay have harmed the baby cannot be ignored, and though this77 intensifies the agony for everyone involved, abuse is always inves-tigated in a SIDS case.When investigators in Cleveland identifiedmold exposure as a potential cause of an IPH outbreak and beganreexamining SIDS deaths that might have involved lung bleeding,they conceived an exceedingly controversial idea.Could indoormolds have been missed as a factor in some infant deaths classifiedas instances of SIDS?When I began researching this book, I entered the toxic moldfray as a skeptic.America had embarked on a media circus that wasvilifying fungi; as a mycologist, I had intended to repaint Stachy-botrys as a harmless planet-mate.However, as I traveled from coastto coast, border to border, listening to physicians, attorneys, indus-trial hygienists, and fellow mycologists, and reading every relevantand irrelevant publication I could find, my belief in this mold sinnocence faltered.Stachybotrys chartarum can produce highly toxicspores, and the fact that exposure to this fungus can be harmful hasbeen firmly established since Soviet scientists investigated the epi-demic of stachybotryotoxicosis among horses and humans in the1940s.I don t know for certain that it killed anyone in Clevelandnobody does but I wouldn t recommend living or working in abuilding heavily contaminated with its spores.Stachybotrys andother molds are flourishing in American homes.Even if they arenot damaging our health, they have certainly subverted many peo-ple s sense of well-being.Let s revisit Cleveland.Do you know Cleveland? Located along 100 miles of the LakeErie shore, Cleveland was long chastised for its burning river in 1969;no longer choked by oil and debris, the Cuyahoga has been fire-proof for decades and is considered a recovering ecosystem.Cleveland has recast itself as The New American City. The met-ropolitan area of 2.6 million people boasts world-class museums anda symphony orchestra, fabulous restaurants, and the Rock and RollHall of Fame.Face-lifted, fur-coated patrons of the arts3 tend to livein idyllic leafy suburbs and gated communities offering private lake-front views, while across the tracks east of downtown Cleveland liedisheartening zip codes darkened by vandalized factories and ware-houses.Surprisingly few residents of this less attractive district holdseason tickets to the Cleveland Orchestra, and they are more likelyto be poor and black than rich and white.More significant than itsundeniable effect upon symphony attendance is the relationship be-tween one s melanization and access to healthcare.In a March 2000Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores78 article on the racial health gap, Dave Davis and Elizabeth Marchak,reporting for the Plain Dealer, wrote, In parts of Cuyahoga County,namely Cleveland s poorest neighborhoods, black babies are dyingat rates that would embarrass some Third World Countries. 4 Ac-cording to one version of the story I m about to tell, Stachybotrysemerged as a source of additional suffering.Rainbow Babies and Children s Hospital is part of the Univer-sity Hospitals of Cleveland, affiliated with Case Western.Rainbowis ranked among the top 10 children s hospitals in the nation.InJanuary 1993, Dorr Dearborn, a chief physician at Rainbow s Divi-sion of Pediatric Pulmonary Disease, treated a 22-month-old babyboy admitted to intensive care with lung bleeding.In keeping withthe rarity of IPH, Dearborn didn t see another case for months.InOctober, a baby girl was admitted with the same condition.TwoIPH babies in a single year was unusual, but no cause for alarm.But the girl suffered four more episodes of bleeding over the nextfew weeks, and in the following year another nine babies with bleed-ing lungs were treated at Rainbow.5 Some of the patients appearedto have been treated successfully, but were readmitted after theybegan bleeding again at home.All of the patients were black, all butone was a boy, and they all lived in the same general area in north-east Cleveland.A 7-week-old boy died after his third episode ofbleeding.The most intense symptoms were seen in a 9-month-oldgirl admitted in December 1994.She didn t show lung bleeding in-itially but was evaluated for rapid breathing (tachypnea), bluish skincolor (cyanosis, caused by insufficient oxygenation of the blood),and grunting.Other than a brief nosebleed before hospital admis-sion, there were no other symptoms of bleeding.But within a fewhours of hospitalization, the girl suffered massive hemorrhaging ofher lungs, resulting in respiratory failure.She died a few hours later.Something extraordinary was happening
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