Mold grows into an easy excuse

[Guest guest]

Mold grows into an easy excuse

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Lolis Elie

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/metro/index.ssf?/base/news-

20/1173251425246120.xml & coll=1 & thispage=1

Mold in public places is dangerous, life-threatening even. Except

when it isn't.

The only way to tell whether the mold in question is malignant or

benign is to ask the officials in charge of it.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was mold at Charity Hospital.

Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne went in and started to clean it.

Don burg, the chief executive of Louisiana State University

hospitals, which runs Charity, ordered the cleanup to stop because

he thought it was an unsafe environment. Too unsafe, one gathers,

even for the 82nd Airborne.

However, Dr. J. Hovland, the dean of LSU's dental school, dares

to go where troopers are forbidden to tread.

The dental school lay languishing while the 82nd Airborne was on its

cleanup mission. When dental school officials began their cleanup,

it took two weeks to pump the water out of the school.

But by the summer, the dental school will reopen. Charity, its

cleanup aborted, will never reopen, we are told.

Veterans make do

For years, wounded veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

lived amid creepy conditions at Building 18, a government facility

affiliated with Walter Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Last month, the Washington Post did a series about the facility in

which they uncovered " mold, rot, mice and cockroaches, but also a

larger bureaucratic indifference that has impeded some soldiers'

recovery. "

In response to the uproar, President Bush promised an investigation.

However, in the meantime, Building 18 is to be cleaned and repaired.

Apparently that mold doesn't present the sort of clear and present

danger that warrants moving patients out of the facility.

The mold at the shuttered public housing complexes in New Orleans is

different. Citing the danger of mold, the federal Department of

Housing and Urban Development is barring tenants from returning to

their apartments.

Apparently wounded war veterans are less susceptible to mold-related

illness than are otherwise healthy residents of public housing.

A convenient truth

Let's see if I understand this:

Sick people in New Orleans are better off not having a hospital than

they would be if they had a hospital that had been sanitized.

Dental students, and by extension, their patients, can do just as

well in a post-mold environment, provided it's been cleaned.

Public housing residents are so fragile that they cannot be allowed

to return to sanitized apartments.

Wounded war veterans are strong enough to remain in a post-mold

environment, provided a cleanup is taking place around them.

Most important, mold is like Silly Putty, easily manipulated to fit

the agenda at hand.

.. . . . . . .

Lolis Elie can be reached at lelie@... or (504)

826-3330.