Harmful Mold

The danger of rushing construction

The Shanghai Expo is staffed partly by several thousand volunteers and employees, some of which live in the area adjacent to gate 6 of the Expo, called Expo Village. Inside Expo Village, there are several ethnic restaurants, shops where you can buy antiques, a convenience shop and 2 apartment complexes. The apartment complexes, Donghu (where I lived) and Jinjiang (where I wish I had lived) are different in regards to their facilities and construction: Jinjiang apartments have a computer for use by the residents, machines to dry clothes, and weekly maid service, while Donghu has more land area, beautiful landscaping, and illness-causing mold inside the walls of the apartments. Several of my coworkers at the USAP have had terrible allergic reactions to the mold, symptoms of which include difficulty breathing, abnormal acne and skin rashes, nosebleeds, nausea, fever, and more. The mold is due to shoddy construction which left areas in the walls where moisture could come in, and Shanghai being as humid as it is, moisture settles in.

Eventually, our repeated complaints caught the ears of the supervisors who contacted the main office of Donghu apartments and threatened to cease rent payments on all rooms until the problem was solved. The problem has been treated as cosmetic, meaning that the staff members responsible for cleaning projects were sent to scrape the mold off the walls, scrub them, and then paint over the areas. The deeper issue is not being solved.

After Donghu failed to solve the problem, USAP staff needed proof that the rooms contained harmful mold, so lucky for us, Ecolab is one of the USA Pavilion’ s sponsors and cares about its well being. Ecolab is a chemical sanitizer-producing company that has supplied many of the required cleaning solutions as part of their sponsorship agreement. After investigating several rooms, they discovered that most of the rooms had water damage but only 2 had dangerous mold; this meant that the people who claimed illness from non-dangerous mold having rooms had to be suffering from something else entirely. Hooray for experts!

On a personal note, many of you will notice that I have facial hair in several of my pictures; this is because I was afflicted by a terrible rash and acne on my face. Since leaving Donghu, my face has cleared up significantly, so the people who said it was not due to the mold were obviously wrong.