CHAPTER 25, continued
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Q uietly, the next member of the Magnificent Seven joined the Hampton Bays fighters. The teacher—we’ll use the pronoun “she” for this discussion—was fine working in the remediated area of the school as long as she took CSM. But when she saw what the others were doing, she joined the rest of the Mold Warriors by simply stopping CSM, and monitoring symptoms, VCS and labs. To no one’s surprise, she was another “case.”

James Havens’ Dad brought him to Pocomoke for the standard w ork-up that he couldn’t get in Hampton Bays. His mother couldn’t come, but joined the visit by phone. The tragedy here is t hat the evaluation is so simple. As his father said, “At first I didn’t know what was making him sick, but now the cause of James’ illness is so obvious. The tests are so easy to do. What is g oing on that I have to drive seven hours one way to get some results?”

In a way, it was completely absurd that these people had to risk illness to go to school. Here was a large group of sick people from t he building, including Pat (who even had a positive blood test for Stachybotrys toxin), each exposed to ongoing water intrusion, lack of aggressive cleanup and no remediation of the Stachybotrys, Chaetomium, Aspergillus and Penicillium, yet the school said everything was fine. When I ask experts in remediation what should have been done to clean up the molds at Hampton Bays, they all say a whole lot more than what was done.

And then the board bet their whole case, relying on air quality c onsultants’ and Dr. Cheung’s opinions. Despite multiple chances to change their minds, the administrators wouldn’t back down. Why be afraid of four young children, two Moms, two teachers and a country doc from Pocomoke?

In the meantime, Fisher Haines’ story was covered in several articles in the Hampton Bays newspaper, The Southampton Press. Everyone in town now knew he, too, was quite ill after he’d attended school. His repetitive exposures trial data were incredibly powerful. How could any logical person—eliminating those “experts” whose opinions weren’t based on science—not recognize his illness?

The school is silently destroying Fisher, despite protective use of CSM. Carolyn was so angry, she told me she wished the doctors for the Board would “just sit down and shut up.”

The end came in a simple letter to the Superintendent of Schools. I told the woman in a letter written at 12 o’clock, April 23, 2004:

“As per our agreement, I have monitored a cohort of individuals with illness familiar to you and your consultant p hysicians. You have obtained a court order demanding testing for toxigenic fungi in Pat Romanosky’s home, even though we have shown her to be well in the home, off chole- styramine. You have had Ms. Romanosky and Fisher Haines examined by Dr. Cheung. These patients, and Matthew and Stephanie Williams, as well as one of your staff, followed a diagnostic protocol to confirm that the school still contains illness-causing elements in the indoor air.

“Each of these patients became quite ill when re-exposure to t he school was the only new variable in their illness. Prospective documentation of illness with recrudescence of symptoms, VCS deficits and changes in laboratory biomarkers for mold illness confirm the diagnosis.

“It is time for you to stop denying the truth about mold illness in your schools. Please initiate a proper clean up, together with a building-wide health survey to determine the e xtent of the illness in students and staff under your administrative r esponsibility. While I am glad that you have ordered a number of clean-up items, though each was accomplished only after unnecessary argument and delay, the limited number of items your school has undertaken never corrects the fundamental problem of mold contamination, in my experience.

“I will be happy to discuss the proper procedures for group health screening with you, as it is unlikely that either of your consultants will know what constitutes a sound approach to diagnosis, given that they couldn’t recognize obvious mold illness in two cases previously.”

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