EM DISASTER RELIEF

Dear Mathew,

I want to brief you on what we accomplished in this last trip into the Gulf Area.

Contrary to our trip in there right before Christmas when I had gathered together 7 other volunteers to work with me, I went in alone this time and only had one local volunteer who worked with me for 2 days, spraying homes.

The strategy at this point of The Earth Organization (TEO) in the Gulf area is to get EM utilized broadly to clean up the heavily contaminated area: soil, water, and mold. Since mold is the biggest ruin for the local people, and EM is the solution to that, there is an opportunity here to be of considerable help to the local people while making EM known and well thought of.

Just to give you some data on how bad the situation is there: The NRDC (National Resources Defense Council - one of the most prestigious environmental organizations in the US) sent a scientist in to test the mold spore levels in the area. It is considered dangerously high mold when, inside of a house, the mold spores get up as high as 1300/cubic meter. In houses that hadn’t been remediated, the spore count was around 650,000/cubic meter. In buildings that had been fully remediated with bleach and other toxic chemicals, it was down to 20,000/cubic meter (still dangerously high in terms of long-term health consequences).

Then outside, it’s considered dangerously high above 13,000 /cubic meter. The outside air in the flooded areas was testing out at 80,000. Areas nearby that weren’t flooded tested out around 48,000 and in areas at quite a distance, around 20,000 because the mold spores carry so far. So, just walking around in the hurricane-affected Gulf area is a serious health risk. Children and people living in this environment day in and day out are in danger.

Symptoms of mold poisoning include things like serious, long-term respiratory problems, coughing, irritated throat and nasal membranes, headaches, memory loss, difficulty concentrating, pulmonary hemorrhaging in infants, serious asthma and allergy attacks requiring emergency room visits, and hypersensitivity pneumonitis (a pneumonia-like disease that has long-term health effects). I shudder to think of the number of children who are going to be labeled with ADHD and given Ritalin, when they are just having a reaction to the mold.

Within 15 minutes of me driving into the area I started feeling choked up, irritated throat and nasal passages and it just gradually got worse the longer I was there. I only stayed in New Orleans proper for 3 days, but the effects were unmistakable.

I ran into 5 people in 2 days who had had “pneumonia” in the past couple of months. I knew it probably wasn’t pneumonia but was the pneumonitis mentioned above. Doctors aren’t trained in mold symptoms so there will be lots of incorrect diagnoses over the next several years. Almost everybody has scratchy throats at the minimum, runny noses, thick phlegm causing them to frequently try to clear their throat. And lots and lots of people have far worse symptoms.

And this is in the winter time. When it warms up in the summer, the mold will go wild. This is not a light situation. It is an extremely dangerous and huge situation and not enough is being made of it in the press. In fact, this is pretty much being hidden so that people wouldn’t get scared away from coming to Mardi Gras, or from coming back to the area. The actual mold-spore numbers reported by the press are way less than what they actually are.

Ideally New Orleans and the surrounding area would get crop-dusted with EM.

OVERALL STATS:
500 gallons of EM distributed.
4 houses sprayed
27 individual briefings done
New groups allied: 7

The plan is to raise considerably more funds for the next trip into the area, pull together a group of at least 5 or 6 people and go in for a couple of months. We could make a huge impact on the area with specific focus on activating 1) local churches, 2) productive relief centers, 3) local government-level officials.

Mathew, we so appreciate the donations you’ve made to us in EM. There’s no question that we could use more. I’m trying to raise the funds to be able to buy EM from you for these activities, but if it is possible for you, on your end, to also continue to raise more funds to cover the costs of donating and shipping in more EM for us to distribute, it would help enormously. At this point, the people in the Gulf area have, for the most part, been abandoned by the rest of the world. Yet the disaster is ever-present and the long-term health consequences of all of this are going to be an even bigger disaster if we don’t get the area turned around environmentally.

One way or the other, I want to send you and your staff our most sincere thanks and appreciation for your help.

Very Best Regards,

Barbara Wiseman
International President