Advances in Environmental Health Effects of Toxigenic Mold and Mycotoxins (eBook)

Chronic exposure to environmental toxigenic molds mycotoxins, especially in water-damaged buildings is an indoor environmental health problem to which escalating health and property insurance costs are raising concerns in recent times. Hence, controversies exist, some of which are based on misunderstanding and economic motives. Nevertheless, it must be stated that molds and fungi in general have both pharmaceutical desired and toxicological undesired effects on human and animal environmental health. However, a lack of sufficient scientific interest and recognition shroud the status of molds and fungi as the most important and oldest known component of human adaptive flora to which nature provides human survival with all the basic ingredients to defend them against undesired microbial pathogenic attacks. However, because these adaptive provisions are common, they are casually neglected from serious interests in terms of vigorous research values and exploitation for human benefits. Consequently, the unraveling of the myth surrounding the complex functional ambivalence of toxigenic molds and mycotoxins may after all hold the key to human infectious disease control. This book is unique in the sense that it assumes a pioneering position based mainly on published work in peer-reviewed literature and it integrates all the facets of evidence based clinical environmental mycopathology with basic analytic laboratory scientific findings. It highlights the importance of the environmental health effects of toxigenic molds and mycotoxins and the need for further development of knowledge in this area through transnational clinical an basic science research. The overall organization of this book reflects the author's many years of research, teaching and published work in clinical neurophysiology and environmental mycotoxicology.