NEW YORK -- The asbestos problem seemed pretty scary until the crew we hired to remove it from our new home pointed out the fuzzy black mold growing in the closet.

The inescapable reality, however, was that I planned to move my family, including a newborn and a 3-year-old, into a potentially hazardous environment.

I tried to take the news calmly, hopeful the harrowing stories I've read about families being forced to flee their mold-infested homes were merely the exceptional cases that make for headlines.

The new asbestos

So, heart firmly planted in stomach, I set out to supplement my recent crash course in asbestos with some postgraduate cramming on fungus and a little-studied health scare that's spawned lawsuits, insurance claims and an unregulated cottage industry of mold testers and remediators.

"Mold is the new asbestos," said Frank Repole, the younger half of an earnest father-and-son company named Alltech Environmental Services that eventually we hired to attack our problem.

Government resources, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency, were calming, though not enough to ignore Web sites warning of neurological damage, pulmonary hemorrhage and cancer from strains such as Stachybotrys and Aspergillus.

There was only one area of absolute agreement: Mold is everywhere, an essential player in our ecosystem. It eats dead organic material like the paper coating on the sheetrock used to build walls in most homes. But since it only thrives where there's moisture, any mold cleanup will likely prove short-lived unless you first eliminate any leaks, condensation or excessive humidity.

But that's where fungal certainty hits a dead end. There are no broad medical studies on the risks from inhaling the airborne spores and toxins produced by mold, no definitive methods to test for mold concentrations and no established yardsticks for what constitutes acceptable and dangerous levels.

"Some families and individuals have gotten very sick, and some of them have had trouble recovering, and we don't understand why that is," said Dr. Claudia Miller, an allergist and professor in environmental health at the University of Texas in San Antonio. She's disappointed the government isn't pushing for more extensive research.

And while asbestos removal is governed by a raft of regulations, treatment protocols and licensing authorities, no government agency has attempted to monitor or assess the varying methods and substances used to kill mold.

Not surprisingly, with homeowner fears percolating and no one keeping watch, the free market has produced a mold rush of specialists looking to tear up your walls and slather antifungal agents around your home.

As a result, prices and methods vary widely. Many of these remediators struck me as sincere professionals who nonetheless speak with more authority than the scientific realities dictate.

"This is worse than I thought," was the alarming refrain that the first mold contractor we hired kept repeating as he went from room to room taking samples on a sticky tape.

The problem with surface sampling, many experts say, is that there's no measurement of the airborne spores that may be floating around, ready to be inhaled.

The lab results from those tape samples identified just one family of mold named Alternaria, which registered an ominous "heavy," the highest of only four concentrations on this lab's scale. Heavy was defined as anything greater than 200 spores.

A later air sample sent to a different lab produced a long list of molds in varying concentrations as high as 160,000 spores per cubic meter. It would appear that "greater than 200" can have many meanings.

And yet even a specific count holds only limited value without established standards. So when the remediation in our place reduced the Aspergillus count by more than 99 percent, it was still unclear whether the remaining concentration might still represent a health threat.

Amid such uncertainty, the EPA and others view testing as an unnecessary expense.

Our first mold inspector sent a cleanup proposal spiced with scary medical terms -- our mold "colonizes the paranasal sinuses" and may cause "meningeal tissue damage" -- and a detailed outline of some widely adopted procedures: Seal the work area, take out contaminated material, scrape and sand remaining surfaces and wash with an anti-microbial disinfectant. While all that's going on, and for a period afterward, vacuums and air scrubbers are used to suck away microbes.

Cost a shocker

Though it's best not to hire the same firm for testing and cleanup, we were anxious to go with the first contractor until we saw the price. At $17,500, it was four times as expensive as some of the other bids we received, including the unorthodox treatment proposed by Alltech.

Rather than a disinfectant that kills mold, Alltech uses a cleaning solution containing garden variety enzymes they say "eats" the fungus. Then they fumigate the entire home so the enzymes can mingle in the nooks and crannies where renegade spores may be lurking.

But because some spores surely evaded capture, we're taking other precautions: waterproofing the wall behind the closet, rebuilding it with a moisture-resistant sheetrock that contains a fungicide and mixing our paints with a mold-resistant additive. And since this a groundfloor apartment, we've bought a dehumidifier.

In discussing renovations, contractors have rolled their eyes at all these highbrow replacements for a bucket of bleach and a fresh coat of paint. No doubt our emotions have been ripe for exploitation, but what's the alternative?

"From a practical standpoint, remediating, fixing the mold makes sense," said Dr. Miller. "You don't want to wait 20 years for the data to come out."

On the Net:

http://www.epa.gov/mold/moldguide.html; http://www.cdc.gov/mold/

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