Where Did All the Mold Go? 

    It dawned on me the other day that I’ve not heard anything about our old friend mold for some time. Years in fact. 
    A few years ago, maybe 20 by this time, mold was all over the place and scaring the bejebbers out all of us. We had all kinds of mold. Some benign and some highly toxic. It got so bad that if some school kid wanted a couple weeks’ vacation, all he had to do was go to the principal with some black gunk stuck under his fingernails that he had scooped off his plate in the cafeteria, and claim that it came from some other place in the school. Of course, he would have had to smear some of this gunk around that spot as well. 
   The school would be shut down in a heartbeat and kept that way until the mold people had been there and done a through inspection of the place. Like I said, between the scientists, media, and people who suddenly found out that they could make a good living searching out and destroying mold, it kept the rest of us on edge all the blessed time, wondering when we would ourselves succumb to some kind of mold. 
    Mold came in a rainbow of colors, the very worst being black mold. (I always wondered if there wasn’t something racial in that designation.) If black mold was found in a building, you might as well, in most cases, kiss it goodbye. The building that is. No one was dumb enough to kiss black mold. 
    When the mold people showed up it didn’t make you feel any better. They were clomping around in their hazmat suits like robots while sounding like Death Varder. Just having them on the premises made you want to leave, whatever the mold situation turned out to be. If these guys found mold, then they were hired to get rid of the mold, if that was possible. 
    Now it always seemed to me that there was a slight convergence of interest since the people who said that you needed them were the same people you needed. They were telling you how bad the situation was and at the same time what it was going to cost to remedy the situation. It was a win-win situation for the mold people. Nice work if you can find it. And building owners stood still for this. But that’s just how desperate and scared we were.
    If anyone in an office building developed a cough, the first thing that came to mind was mold. The fact that this person had spent the last weekend with three sick, coughing, runny-nosed nephews and nieces crawling all over him, was not considered pertinent. The building would be vacated until the mold people could make a ruling. 
    How many good buildings and businesses were unnecessarily laid waste because of mold, we’ll never know. But as I said at the beginning, I don’t hear about mold anymore. Did it go away, or did we reevaluate its toxicity? If someone knows please enlighten me. Thank you.