Valley testers identify troublemaking toxins

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http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0818work18.html

Valley testers identify troublemaking toxins

Brahm Resnik

The Arizona Republic

Aug. 18, 2002

Years before Brockovich and Ed McMahon discovered the dangers of

household mold, Vladimir and Bolin saw it coming. It's right there on

their company's timeline:

1450 B.C. Biblical instructions to the Israelites for Remediation of

Mildew/Fungi.

Not much has changed in mold cleanup since those instructions to the priests

(Leviticus 14:39-48). " Except priests aren't doing it, " Vladimir Bolin says.

More than three millennia later, the Bolins' Aerotech Laboratories is one of

the leading labs in the country for testing toxins in homes and workplaces

that could cause serious illnesses. Last year, Aerotech began testing for

the latest scourge: Bacteria like anthrax used to terrorize Americans.

The Bolins founded Aerotech, a company that tests indoor air, in 1993 after

their father sold his testing lab.

" We'd get the odd request to do a mold investigation, " recalled Vladimir

Bolin, 37, Aerotech's chief executive. " Then we got more and more. "

" It took everyone else a while to figure it out, " said Bolin, 36,

Aerotech's president.

It was Dan Rather, not Leviticus, who made " mold " a household word. Rather's

profile of Melinda Ballard and her mold-infested Texas mansion on the CBS

show 48 Hours two years ago is widely regarded as having created the mold

industry.

Wherever there's water damage in drywall or wood, mold can grow within 24

hours. If it spreads undetected, toxins produced by the mold may cause

nosebleeds, asthma and more debilitating illnesses like heart disease.

Mold samples account for about two-thirds of the 3,500 samples Aerotech

tests every day from all over the country. Texas is the leading state for

mold insurance claims; Arizona ranks among the top five states nationally.

Fetveit, an Aerotech vice president, says business has expanded " 1,000

percent " since the Rather report and the subsequent deluge of media

coverage. Brockovich lent her name to the cause after mold appeared in

her condo, and TV personality Ed McMahon filed a lawsuit claiming mold

killed his pet dog.

Aerotech's employment multiplied with every published or broadcast word:

From 12 workers in 1999 to 50 in 2000 to 250 last year and 300 this year.

Vladimir Bolin puts annual sales at $30 million a year.

The Bolins say success in the business is all about quickly turning around

test samples, doing quality work and promoting accreditation standards in

what's becoming a crowded, unregulated field.

Aerotech's work is similar to the medical lab that confirms a swab of a

human throat shows the bacteria that cause strep throat. Aerotech's

analysts, including Ph.D.s and microbiologists, each examine and identify up

to a hundred samples a day at their lab at an office park in northwest

Phoenix.

Most results are back out the door within a day or two. Customers such as

hospitals that need more information about a toxin will wait up to a week

for results. Those samples are stacked in petri dishes inside the lab's

" Mold Room, " where samples are cultured in the constant 77-degree

temperature.

Then there's the room the Bolins can't say much about: the new bioterrorism

lab, where scientists identify samples that could be anthrax or other

potentially deadly bacteria. The lab opened after last fall's anthrax

attacks by mail.

" We got thousands of samples in November and December, " Vladimir Bolin said.

The Bolins will say the lab did some work for government agencies during the

attacks. It also analyzes so-called non-credible threats, like spilled

sugar.

The future of their bioterrorism work depends on whether there's another

human-induced event, like the anthrax attacks.

But mold marches on through the millennia, and the Bolins are now tracking

the spores overseas. Next month, they head to Asia to look at setting up

labs there.