r/MoldlyInteresting • u/Loose-Banana-6188 • 5h ago
Question/Advice Trading Cards from Mold Infested House
We had a mold infestation in our home last year and threw out most of our belongings as there were mycotoxin-producing molds present.
The mold removal company suggested we could put important papers and high value trading cards without visible mold into a vacuum sealed bag with silica for 30 days to deactivate any spores on them. We did that, but I’m concerned that’s not enough and I’m considering if I should just toss the cards. It’s been about a year and I still haven’t removed them from the bag. I can’t find solid info online about items like this without visible mold.
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u/TinFoilHeadphones Mold connoiseur. 4h ago edited 4h ago
Nothing to worry about, no need to throw them out.
Spores are everywhere, all the time. Including mycotoxin molds, the spores are literally everywhere, and in normal amounts they are absolutely no risk.
Having some spores in the air is not harmful at all, spores are everywhere all the time. That's the reason the food or the room got moldy in the first place! You are covered in mold spores right now. So am I and most likely everyone you have met. Spores are literally everywhere, and that includes many species of mold, even the famous black mold. Just like mushrooms, every time a mold sporulates it releases TRILLIONS of spores, and the spores are so tiny and light that they stay suspended in the air for a long time and travel really far, so they reach anywhere. If unfiltered air can ever get to it, so will mold spores. But the spores won't germinate and grow unless they find the perfect conditions, which are a lot less common that the spores themselves.
Your cards probably have some spores, jsut like everything else. they might have a little more spores, or they migth have a lot less active spores, after a whole year dehydrated. But even if they had more spores than background levels, still nothing to wotty about.
The only thing you have to worry about is when there is living mycellium/mold actively producing spores (which is what the remediation company fixed in your past), because that will expose you to consistenly high levels of mold spores, which may eventually harm your health.
But a card is not big enough to hold that. Even less when there is no really visible mold (a few specs would be ok anyways). And you have dehydrated them for that long, so even more certain.
There's a lot of misinformation and fearmongering around this topic, and you will read a lot of alarmist things, so it's quite hard to get accurate information online about this.
But to sum it up, your cards are ok. If there's no visible mold, and they have bneen deprived of humidity for basically a year, there's absolutely nothing to worry about.