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Cultivating a nose for mold

A Safety Harbor man trains dogs to sniff out the spores, pinpointing their source and saving homeowners time and money.

By JUDY STARK
Published February 5, 2005

	[Times photo: Carie Pratt]
	Bill Whitstine holds Max, an 11 month beagle mix at the Florida Canine Academy. Max is training to be a mold dog, to be able to sniff out mold in different structures.
	[Times photo: Kinfay Moroti]
	Trainer Brandy Smith works with Hunter, a bird dog who is learning to detect mold. Most of MoldDog’s trainees are pound puppies, many of them mutts.

If you can train a dog to sniff for gasoline or bodies or drugs or bombs, why not mold?

That's the question some insurance companies posed in 1998 to Bill Whitstine of Safety Harbor, a former fire marshal whose arson dogs often detect accelerants after suspicious fires.

Now he has trained 71 dogs to pinpoint the location of mold, an increasing source of health problems and insurance claims. Whitstine's dogs are sniffing for spores in at least 30 states and as far away as Canada and Finland, and this spring he'll send some to Japan to detect both mold and termites.

"People have an idea they've got mold in their house. The question is, where is it?" said Whitstine, looking fit and trim in black cargo pants, black boots and a gray T-shirt that bears the logo of his Florida Canine Academy, of which the mold training business, MoldDog, is a subsidiary. The back of the shirt says, "We bring the lab to you."

The dogs' accuracy in pinpointing mold is the advantage, he says.

As for the dogs - most of them pound puppies, lots of them mutts - "These are energetic dogs with a good drive who like to work," said Brandy Smith, 24, who trains the dogs with Whitstine. "It's not work to them. They like it. It gives them something to do."

"Seek, seek, seek, seek, seek," Smith commands Cosmo, a 2-year-old blue tick beagle, as she walks him around "the wheel," a wooden disc with metal arms that support small dishes. In each dish is a container with a different substance: dog food, termites, bits of metal, baking soda and some bits of wood or drywall embedded with mold, in this case stachybotritis, known as black mold. One of the containers is empty. When Cosmo identifies the mold container, he sits, then Smith commands, "Show me." That's the signal for Cosmo to point repeatedly with his nose at the mold. He is rewarded for the correct answer with hugs, "Good boy," and kibble.

At the training facility in Safety Harbor, the baseboards and windowsills are hinged so the trainers can hide packets of mold. The dogs patrol the room's perimeter, sitting and pointing when they identify the smell.

Air sampling can identify the presence of mold spores in a room, Whitstine says, but not the precise location. The dog's ability to specify the exact location means owners need not rip out all the baseboards and drywall to find the mold, possibly dispersing it even further when they tear the room apart. That means remediation is faster and cheaper, he says. Or a dog may instantly identify an old chest of drawers or an heirloom family trunk as the source of everyone's respiratory distress.

Whitstine recalled a home that had been cleaned three or four times, but air tests kept showing the presence of mold spores. A dog was able to identify the source of the remaining contamination: a single carpet tack strip that was still covered with mold.

He estimates that it costs 25 cents a square foot to have a dog check a home, or $500 for a 2,000-square-foot home. That includes limited air samples in the contaminated area. To test simply by taking air samples, he said, costs $100 per sample, with an average of two samples per room.

Each dog undergoes 800 to 1,000 hours of training, over two or three months, learning to identify 18 families of mold with at least 1,000 different molds in each family. Whitstine sells the trained dogs for $12,500, which includes five days of training for two handlers, to operators of mold detection services.

Whitstine's bomb-sniffing dogs perform the routine tests required by the Coast Guard for gambling ships and cruise ships. He said he is about to start work with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission: He will train dogs to sniff out the indigo snake so its numbers can be counted to determine whether it should be declared an endangered species. He has appeared on Animal Planet, HGTV and CNN.

Does this really work?

A study presented at an indoor air quality conference sponsored by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers says mold dogs can be "a very successful method for locating hidden microbial damage" but cautions that the dogs must be "correctly trained, led and interpreted."

Some mold remediation businesses, researchers and animal advocates scoff, saying that human followup and confirmation are required anyway, and a dog and human will cost more than a human alone. They question the dogs' accuracy, the possibility of false positives and the health risk to dogs.

Whitstine doesn't claim a 100 percent success rate. He estimates that mold dogs' findings are validated more than 90 percent of the time ("It's not a silver bullet," he acknowledges) but says studies show that a visual inspection by humans is accurate only 30 percent of the time.

"You can't rely on air sampling and visual inspection," says Jason Earle, founder of Lab Results LLC in Princeton, N.J. Two years ago he took one of the first dogs Whitstine trained, a lab mix named Oreo. "I can't see through walls. Doing only a visual examination is like a mechanic inspecting your car without lifting the hood."

As for air samples, he said, sometimes mold is visible but air samples give a negative result. Or everything looks clean but air samples show a high volume of mold.

"The dog is another slice of the pie, extremely reliable if they're trained properly and there's a solid relationship between dog and handler," he said. "A dog by itself is a waste of time. It's just one screening tool. It's like a baseball team. You have a better chance of getting meaningful results if you use every arrow in the quiver. You have all different tools and the dog is the hub of it."

Sometimes, he said, he can readily identify mold without using Oreo, but clients are disappointed: "It's as if people are paying to bring her in to see her more than to find that mold."

The dogs do not develop respiratory illnesses from sniffing mold, Whitstine says, because they purge themselves by blowing the air out through their nostrils. "They sniff, they don't inhale," Whitstine said. Every dog that goes outside smells mold, he said, since mold is everywhere. Arson dogs sniff gasoline, accelerants, carbon monoxide and fumes from plastics or foams, but they are unaffected, he said.

If a wall is black with mold, or an area is so badly contaminated that Whitstine has to wear a mask, "my dog's not going in there," he said. The dog's services of pinpointing the mold's location aren't needed in that case. "I would never bring my dog into that."

MoldDog is online at www.mold-dog.com or can be reached toll-free at 1-800-665-3363.

[Last modified February 4, 2005, 11:03:08]