Mold is a serious threat, especially in areas such as the Deep South, where moisture and humidity pose a constant problem for HVAC contractors.

Even though mold remediation could potentially open a new revenue stream for HVAC contractors, some believe their peers don't take mold nearly seriously enough.

 

"The majority of air conditioning contractors, at least the ones we see here, don't have the necessary state mold remediation license; they don't want it," said Mike White, ASCS, CEO, Clean Air Systems of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana.

 

"They're interested in selling boxes to people, and that's it. I've gone in behind some of these guys who've installed a brand new air conditioning system, and we've found mold growing on the ceiling and blowing out of the duct work. [The customer] wants to know why they weren't made aware of the mold." Read more

The state has fired the supervisor of an inmate work crew that used shoddy and potentially dangerous work practices in cleaning up asbestos, records show.

They said their industry saves lives and brings roofs, walls and pipes to some of the world's poorest people.

 

The industry's wonder product, though, is one whose very name evokes the opposite: asbestos. A largely outlawed scourge to the developed world, it is still going strong in the developing one, and killing tens of thousands of people each year.

 

"We're here not only to run our businesses, but to also serve the nation," said Abhaya Shankar, a director of India's Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association.

 

In India, the world's biggest asbestos importer, it's a $2 billion industry with double-digit annual growth, at least 100 manufacturing plants and some 300,000 jobs.

 

The International Labor Organization, World Health Organization, the wider medical community and more than 50 countries say the mineral should be banned. Asbestos fibers lodge in the lungs and cause many diseases. The ILO estimates 100,000 people die every year from workplace exposure, and experts believe thousands more die from exposure outside the workplace.

 

The asbestos executives who gathered in the ballroom of a luxury New Delhi hotel wanted to knock down those concerns. The risks are overblown, many said, and scientists and officials from rich Western nations who cite copious research showing it causes cancer are distorting the facts. Read more

Amid growing concern that fungicides are fuelling the rise of resistant and life-threatening fungus in Europe, China and India, a microbial sleuth says it is time to start filling in the gaps in Canada.

 

As a first step, biologist Jianping Xu says his group at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., hopes to start testing fungi circulating in southern Ontario's farm belt this fall.

 

"We plan to take samples in the environment and compare them with what we see in patients in the hospital," says Xu, who has collaborated on several international studies that point to resistant fungi as a growing and serious health threat.

 

He and his colleagues say agricultural fungicides known as triazoles, which are sprayed on everything from corn to canola in Canada, appear to be driving emergence of fungi that are resistant to not only agricultural fungicides but closely related medicines. Triazole-based drugs are the first-line defence against Aspergillus fumigatus, which can cause a range of conditions from wheezing in asthmatics to deadly lung infections in individuals with weakened immune systems.

 

Aspergillus is a ubiquitous fungus that feeds on dead animal or plant matter and spreads by producing spores that float through the air. The fungus, common in soil and compost heaps, causes serious infections in more than three million people a year. Read more