Mold Magazine Re: Defense gets dose of own medicine.

[Guest guest]

The following 'study' is the one discussed in Mold Magazine as

to why it did not pass -Frye.

Risk from inhaled mycotoxins in indoor office and residential environments.

Int J Toxicol 2004; 23: 3-10. Robbins CA, Swenson LJ, Hardin BD

Slang for the above study is: " Veritox 2004 " .

All of the above listed authors are principals in the litigation defense

support of Veritox, Inc. formerly called GlobalTox, Inc. Veritox 2004 is just

easier to say.

They have an earlier albeit quite similar one from 2000. " Veritox 2000 " .

Mold Magazine

Publishing,

May 25, 2006

Jury Awards $2.3 Million to Sacramento Family Displaced by Mold

" SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A California state court jury found the insurer for a

Sacramento couple guilty of bad faith and negligence in hiring remediation

contractors and awarded family members more than $2.3 million in damages on May

1. Harold v. California Casualty Insurance Co., et al., No. 02AS04291

(Calif. Super., Sacramento Cty.)....

.....Defendants called Saxon, M.D., of UCLA Medical School; and Coreen

A. Robbins, MHS, Ph.D., CIH of Veritox in Redmond, Wash.

Robbins countered plaintiffs’’ experts’ opinions on mold hazards and the

remediation procedures and opined that the couple could have moved back into

the house after Westmont’s repair work was completed.

Judge Kenney held a -Frye hearing before trial and limited Robbins’s

testimony by precluding any reference to animal studies of mold hazards.

Reviewing Robbins’ deposition testimony, Judge Kenney concluded that the

basis for her testimony on mycotoxins and human exposure was a literature

review, which he found insufficient.

'Also, when I reviewed the DHS report from April of 2005, DHS, Department of

Health Services was talking about the fact that they were unable to

establish personal exposure levels at this point in time based on a lack of

sufficient information, and yet Dr. Robbins is asking to take an even greater

step and

go beyond establishing, for example, a personal exposure level and jump to

modeling, which is far more tenuous and far more unreliable even in

establishing something that is as hard as a personal exposure level. So those

are the

difficulties I’m having with Dr. Robbins’ testimony,' Judge Kenney said.

The judge said that he is familiar with the use of animal studies and

derivative models for humans and that such models are commonly accepted in the

scientific community, but he said he is not sure such models for mycotoxin

exposure would pass a -Frye test for admissibility.

'My fundamental problem is in looking at it from a Frye standpoint I

just didn’t see kind of acceptance in the scientific community with regard to

what she had done that would allow it to be sort of presented as such,' Judge

Kenney said.

'Modeling has severe limitations, and one of the difficulties I was having

here was this reliance upon animal studies to jump to a modeling conclusion

generally with — again, I’m speaking from my own experience because there

is

nothing here in this transcript — generally one will use the data that one

can

receive either from animal exposure studies or other information to then

input in a model to make a determination with some degree of reliability,' the

judge continued. 'Here I’m not hearing any of those things. I’m hearing

essentially this jump from a literature review to a postulated model to a no

harm

result "

Sharon Kramer

[Guest guest]

The thing that I find very disturbing is that they are continually raising

the bar for mold injury cases in a way as to make recovery by plaintiffs so

hard as to be practically impossible. That begins to expose the entore

system as a sham because it fails completely to protect people from injury

by acting as a deterrent to those who would ignore maintenance to make more

money. If, say, one out of a hundred people who were sickened by mold were

to succeed in suing the responsible party, that might provide at least the

illusion of possible prosecution to builders, landlords, and the like.. But

the effect of the current system is to make the number who recover so small

as to be almost negligible relative to the number hurt.. much less than one

tenth of one percent, I would guess.

The only way to stop this is to start suing the local and state governments

involved in non-enforcement of health and safety in cases where that is a

big factor - along with the responsible commercial entities.

Because any governmental agencies that look the other way are at this point,

encouraging the worstening of the situation.