Critical Information for Sufferers of Chronic Sinusitis, and Mold Related Illness
Is Mold Behind Your Breathing Problems?
What Chronic Mold Exposure Does to Your Sinuses, Lungs, and Immune Defenses, and Why the Machine on Your Nightstand Deserves a Second Look
By Liz Roman, BCFHP
Have you struggled with breathing problems yet never figured out why you feel more stuffy, wheezy, or sneezy in certain places? Maybe you’ve done the inhalers, taken the allergy pills, and even tried antibiotics for sinus infections that keep coming back.
You may only think of mold toxicity as an issue if you see it growing in your shower or on your bread. But odorless, colorless mycotoxins can be playing a role if you’re waking up stuffy, clearing your throat all morning, and coughing the second you lie down.
I know for myself, I am ultra-sensitive to mold and often feel this way when I travel. I’m exposed on the plane and in hotels. This is all exposure coming through the AIR. Nobody thinks about their air quality, but it is truly the first place to start. We are breathing in 2,904 gallons of air a day. Not just the air outside. I’m talking about the air in your bedroom, the air blowing from your vents, and if you use a CPAP, the air being pushed straight into your nose for seven hours a night.
Breathing Symptoms Triggered by Mold
Let’s get into what this does to your health, starting with the breathing symptoms nobody connects to mold. These are what people bring me after years of being told its allergies, stress, or “just how you are.” When my clients report the following, I often think MOLD:
Asthma that showed up out of nowhere in adulthood, or asthma that suddenly got worse
Sinus infections that keep coming back no matter how many antibiotics you take
A hoarse or raspy voice, especially in the morning
Constant throat clearing
A cough that won’t quit, particularly when you lie down
Wheezing and chest tightness
Post-nasal drip
Loss of smell
Frequent nosebleeds, especially in kids
Most of that list comes straight from the American Lung Association, which links mold exposure to worsening asthma, coughing, wheezing, nasal congestion, sore throat, sneezing, and rhinitis, plus irritation of the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs.
Connecting the Dots
One question costs nothing and tells you a lot: Do your symptoms get better when you leave the house?
If you breathe like a different person on vacation and crash within two days of coming home, don’t ignore that. It’s your tell-tale sign to check your environment for mold.
Let’s clarify that mold and mycotoxins are not the same thing, though. Mold is the organism. It grows on drywall, carpet, wood, and dust wherever there’s moisture. But it’s often unseen, growing behind walls, under carpet, in paneling, in the AC unit, behind tile. It’s sneaky and doesn’t take a massive water event to take hold. In fact, all it requires is organic material and elevated humidity in the right conditions. Mycotoxins, on the other hand, are the toxic chemicals some molds make. They ride on the spores, they’re odorless and colorless, and they’re the poisons that hit your airway.
Dr. Andrew Campbell puts it simply in his review The Great Masquerader: Mycotoxins in Clinical Practice: molds are the gun, mycotoxins are the bullet. So if you think you cleaned the mold up or “wiped the spot off the wall,” that isn’t the end of the story. The visible fuzz is only one part. The chemicals already floating in your air are another.
Your Nose is the Front Door
The team at Micro Balance frames this better than anyone, so I’m resharing it here in case you haven’t read it.
Environmental mold is everywhere. It’s a true year-round antigen, not a spring-and-fall problem, and it’s a root cause behind a lot of allergic and inflammatory symptoms nobody traces back to it.
You breathe roughly 2,904 gallons of air a day. Mold spores are in every one of those breaths.
In a healthy environment with normal spore levels, your body handles it. Your nose filters, your immune system clears, and you never notice.
But when mold levels are elevated, your defenses get overwhelmed. That’s when mold gains a foothold, and your sinuses are a perfect place for it to land: dark, warm, moist, and sheltered.
Which is why sinus care matters so much in a mold case. If the nose is where it lands, the nose is where you intervene.
(Mold also enters through the mouth and digestive tract, where it drives a whole separate set of problems. That’s its own article. I’ve written about the gut side, including constipation, right here.)
Why Mold Causes Those Specific Symptoms
This is the part nobody explains, and it’s the part that makes the whole list finally make sense.
Four things are happening in your airway at the same time.
Mast cell activation. In sensitized people, mold antigens trigger mast cells in the respiratory lining to degranulate, dumping histamine, tryptase, leukotrienes, and prostaglandins into the tissue. That causes swelling, mucus production, and constriction. There’s an early reaction, then a second wave roughly six to eight hours later. That delay explains something you’ve probably lived: you spend the afternoon somewhere damp, feel okay, and then wake up at 3 a.m. unable to breathe through your nose. It wasn’t nothing. It was the late-phase response.
Nerve sensitization. Beta-glucan, the main structural sugar in fungal cell walls, does more than trigger inflammation. Researchers have shown it acts on TRPA1 and Dectin-1 receptors on the sensory nerves of the lungs, producing genuine airway hypersensitivity. Once those nerves are sensitized, the threshold drops. Cold air sets you off. Perfume sets you off. A candle sets you off. That’s why you cough at things that never used to bother you. Your airway nerves got turned up, and they stayed up.
Your cleanup crew stops working. Your airway is lined with cilia, microscopic hairs that sweep a layer of mucus (and everything trapped in it) up and out. Mucociliary clearance is your airway’s primary physical defense. Mycotoxins interfere with it. In lab work on human sinus and bronchial cells, aflatoxins slowed ciliary beat frequency, and media from Aspergillus cultures did the same. The inflammation itself makes it worse: the inflammatory chemicals present in chronic sinusitis further impair clearance. So now you’re making extra mucus and moving it more slowly. Hold onto that, because it explains half your symptom list.
How Does This Show up in Your Symptoms?
Let’s revisit that list of respiratory symptoms from the previous list and explain how each relates to what is happening in the body when mold exposure is in the equation:
Asthma, wheezing, chest tightness. Mast cell mediators cause the bronchial tubes to swell and tighten while producing extra mucus in a narrowed tube. Sensitized nerves make the airway twitchy on top of it. And mold acts as an adjuvant, meaning it can amplify your reactions to other allergens you already had. That’s why adult-onset asthma appears, and why existing asthma suddenly gets harder to control after a move, a flood, or a new job in an old building.
Post-nasal drip, throat clearing, hoarse voice, and a cough that’s worse lying down. These four are one problem. Your inflamed sinuses are producing more mucus, and slowed cilia can’t clear it, so it runs down the back of your throat. Standing up, gravity helps and you swallow it. Lying down, it pools against your larynx all night. That’s why you wake up hoarse, clear your throat for the first hour of the day, and cough the second your head hits the pillow.
Sinus infections that keep coming back. Mucus that sits still is a growth medium. Stagnant secretions plus a suppressed immune response is how one exposure turns into infection after infection. (More on this next, because it’s the biggest one.)
Loss of smell. Your olfactory nerve endings sit high in the nasal cavity. When that area is swollen, thickened, or blocked by polyps, odor molecules physically can’t reach them. It’s a traffic problem, not a nerve that died.
Nosebleeds, especially in kids. Chronically inflamed nasal lining is fragile lining. On top of that, Campbell notes the trichothecene toxins from Stachybotrys have been specifically associated with nosebleeds. Kids are lower to the ground, breathe faster for their size, and can’t tell you their nose feels weird.
Reacting to everything now. Sensitized nerves plus a dysregulated immune system means a lower trigger threshold across the board. Perfume, cleaning products, cooking smells, foods you used to eat fine.
Every one of those traces back to four mechanisms in one inflamed airway.
Why Your Sinus Infections Keep Coming Back
In 1999, Mayo Clinic researchers studied 210 patients with chronic sinusitis. Using a better method of collecting nasal mucus, they found fungi in 96% of them, across 40 different genera. The team concluded fungus was likely behind nearly all of these cases, and that the problem wasn’t a classic allergy but an immune reaction.
Critics jumped on one detail right away, and you should have it too: fungi also turned up in 100% of the healthy control patients. Thus, finding fungus in your nose doesn’t tell you much. What your immune system does with it tells you everything.
Ponikau’s team made that case directly in their response. Allergic, eosinophil-rich mucus was present in 96% of the chronic sinusitis patients, and they later demonstrated that those eosinophils were actively attacking fungal organisms — something absent in healthy controls and in patients with ordinary allergic rhinitis.
In simpler terms, everybody breathes fungus. In some people, the immune system picks a fight with it and never stops. That fight is the chronic sinusitis: the swelling, the pressure, the polyps, the congestion that antibiotics never quite fix.
Which explains something you may have lived through: antibiotics don’t work on fungus. If a fungal-driven immune reaction is keeping your sinuses inflamed, a course of antibiotics buys you a couple of good weeks and then you’re right back where you started.
How Chronic Exposure Impacts the Immune System
Short exposure is one thing. Living in it for years is another and it is very challenging to heal when you’re constantly breathing in the mycotoxins.
Dr. Jill Crista, the naturopathic physician who wrote Break the Mold, discusses three ways mold wears down immunity:
It damages your immune cells directly. Spores and mycotoxins harm the white blood cells that do the fighting.
It changes how your immune genes function, so your defenses run weaker than they should.
It pushes your body toward making inflammation instead of resolving it.
And it’s not one chemical doing this. Spores, mycotoxins, microbial VOCs, and mycophenolic acid work together. The mycotoxin literature backs the suppression piece. Campbell catalogs immune suppression across ochratoxin, gliotoxin, sterigmatocystin, and mycophenolic acid. Gliotoxin, made by common indoor Aspergillus, is one of the better-studied immunosuppressants in the group. Which is why, “I catch everything now,” belongs on the symptom list. Recurrent sinus infections, one cold rolling into the next, bronchitis every winter. That’s a defense system running at half strength.
Campbell also notes that mycotoxins alter immune responses in a way that may explain why these patients start reacting to everything: perfume, cleaning products, cooking smells, foods they ate fine for thirty years. When somebody’s trigger list keeps growing, they’re not being dramatic. Something knocked their immune system sideways.
And It’s Never Just Mold
A water-damaged building doesn’t only grow mold. It grows gram-negative bacteria right alongside it, and those shed LPS, also called endotoxin. Your immune system treats it as a five-alarm fire.
NIOSH investigators in a water-damaged office building found a synergistic effect between fungal and endotoxin exposure on respiratory health. The combination did more damage than either alone. That’s part of why two people in the same moldy house have completely different experiences. It’s also why handling only the fungal half leaves the other half working on you. Some molds hit the airway harder than others – it is important to not just find the mold, but to identify it with testing!
Some molds to look out for include:
Cladosporium. Its airborne spores are significant allergens. Dr. Campbell notes they can severely affect asthmatics and people who already have respiratory disease.
Stachybotrys, what most people call black mold. Its trichothecene toxins have been associated with nosebleeds, chest pain, and pulmonary hemorrhage.
Aspergillus and Penicillium are extremely common indoors, and the source of the immunosuppressive toxins above.
And the one that should stop you: the American Lung Association is clear that even without visible mold, indoor dampness alone causes asthma attacks and other upper and lower respiratory problems. Dampness by itself because of what it carries.
Where is the Source?
Most people never find the source because they don’t investigate properly, but if you’re chronically ill you need to consider working with an environmental building inspector that understands mycotoxin illness – not just someone who went to a weekend training.
Start with your bedroom, because that’s where you breathe the same air for eight hours straight. Ask these questions to help you find the source:
Does a bathroom or shower share a wall with your bedroom? Shower walls leak into the framing behind them and you won’t see a thing.
Is your laundry room next to or under your bedroom?
Have you ever had a leak that got dried out but never properly remediated? “We ran a fan on it” is not remediation.
Do your HVAC vents smell musty when the system kicks on?
Any water stains on ceilings, baseboards, or under sinks? Condensation on windows?
Does the house have a musty smell you stopped noticing? Ask a guest. Your nose adapts.
Check the appliances: dishwasher, fridge water line, ice maker, washing machine, water heater, tumblers with tight crevices, under every sink. These are the quiet ones but I’ve seen all of them impact my clients health! One woman was so sick and the home was fine – it was the fridge waterline that was putting off spores in the fridge and in the water.
Know the clock, too. Per the EPA, CDC, and NIH, mold starts growing and releasing spores after materials have been wet for 24 to 48 hours. And the EPA estimates roughly half of indoor fungal growth is hidden: behind walls, under floors, inside ductwork.
Don’t skip the HVAC!!! Even small amounts of growth in the air conditioning or ducts means everyone in that building is chronically exposed. Your HVAC doesn’t contain the problem. It distributes it to every room you breathe in.
The Dishwasher Story
A family I am working with had their dishwasher installed in the kitchen island. At some point it got bumped. Nothing dramatic, just the kind of nudge that happens in every busy kitchen but unknowingly, that bump created a small leak. The water went into the island cabinetry, where no one looked.
Meanwhile the kids started getting bloody noses. Mom has been waking up with a sore throat and losing her voice. She just thought it was dry winter air or maybe a cold going around. BUT when they finally tested the air with the Microbalance dishes it was growing massive amounts of mold so they had an inspection done and identified the kitchen island was the culprit. The whole thing was moldy underneath the dish washer and it impacted their cabinets, substructure, all of it.
No visible mold, no dramatic flood, just a small unseen leak and a family with airway symptoms nobody connected to the kitchen.
If you have breathing symptoms and can’t find the source, the source is probably somewhere you can’t see. Keep looking anyway. That’s usually where it is.
Another Sneaky Culprit: Your CPAP
CPAP therapy is a good thing. If you have sleep apnea, it protects your heart and your brain. Nobody here is telling you to stop using it.
But look at what a CPAP actually is:
Warm
Dark
Wet, with a chamber of standing water
Enclosed
Pointed directly at your airway
Running six to eight hours a night, every single night
If someone asked you to design a device that grows mold, you’d design that.
What the Research Really Says
There’s a lot of fear-bait online about this, so here’s the actual state of the evidence.
What’s well supported: researchers have cultured both bacteria and fungi from CPAP parts. A microbiome and mycobiome analysis of CPAP devices found fungi in tube and filter samples, and concluded that attention should be paid to the potential for bacteria or fungi to pass from the device into the patient’s respiratory system.
Equipment age matters. In a study of CPAP interfaces, every culture plate came back positive for growth. Gear older than six months had significantly more fungi and higher colony counts. Washing helped, but on interfaces older than six to twelve months, repeat washing couldn’t bring the counts down, and researchers suspected the silicone itself gets harder to disinfect over time. (This was a conference abstract, so treat it as a signal rather than settled science.)
Humidifiers are their own category. Reusable ones have been flagged as reservoirs for opportunistic fungi including Aspergillus and Fusarium.
The honest takeaway: your CPAP can absolutely become a reservoir, especially when the gear is old and cleaning is inconsistent. Whether it makes you sick depends on your immune status, your allergies, and whether you already have reactive airways.
If you have asthma, chronic sinus problems, or a known mold history, you’re not in the “probably fine” group. You’re in the group that needs to be meticulous.
Signs your machine needs attention:
A musty or sour smell from the mask or hose
Pink, black, or slimy film in the water chamber
Cloudy residue or discoloration inside the tubing
Waking with a sore throat, stuffy nose, or headache you didn’t have before
Coughing or wheezing that started after you began therapy, or after you got lazy with cleaning
And remember: if there’s mold in your bedroom, your CPAP is pulling that room air through its filter all night. Cleaning the machine while ignoring the room solves half the problem.
How to Clean Your CPAP Properly
This is extremely important as this is often a hidden source of toxicity. I use two Micro Balance products in this routine. Both are botanical, made from citrus seed extracts, and part of the Environmental Treatment Protocol developed by Dr. Don Dennis, the ENT surgeon behind the EC3 line.
Every day:
Wash the mask and cushion. Warm water, mild unscented soap or baby shampoo, clean cloth. Not antibacterial soap. Nothing scented.
Empty the water chamber. Every morning, without fail. Standing water is the entire problem. Don’t top it off. Dump it, rinse it, dry it.
Mist with EC3 Mold Solution Spray. Once everything is washed and dried, give the mask, tubing, and water chamber a light mist. It reduces mold spores on surfaces without bleach, ammonia, or harsh chemicals.
Let everything air dry completely before reassembling. This is the step everybody skips and the one that matters most. Mold needs moisture. Putting a damp machine back together undoes the whole cleaning.
Once a week: the deep clean:
Take it apart. Unplug the machine. Remove filters. Disconnect the hose. Pull the humidifier tank. Separate the mask into headgear, cushion, and frame.
Wash with fragrance-free soap first. This lifts the face oils and biofilm that build up all week. You have to get that layer off before anything else can work. Soak tubing and mask parts 30 to 60 minutes, then rinse well.
Then soak in this solution:
2 cups warm distilled water
1/2 cup EC3 Laundry Additive– That additive is antimicrobial and does great work here. Side note: it’s also excellent for cleaning your washing machine, another notorious mold trap nobody thinks about.
Rinse thoroughly with clean distilled water. Never leave residue on anything that touches your face or airway.
Dry completely. Lay everything on a clean, lint-free towel. Air dry, out of direct sunlight. No hair dryer.
Handle the filters. Reusable filters get squeezed through soapy water, rinsed, and dried fully. Disposable filters get replaced, not washed.
Never do these:
No dishwasher, no hair dryer. High heat warps and melts parts.
No bleach or ammonia. The residue is toxic to breathe, and you’ll be breathing through it all night.
No scented soaps. Same reason.
Never reassemble anything damp.
Never skip the filter. A clogged filter drags dust and allergens through the whole system.
One thing to note: most CPAP manufacturers specify mild soap and water in their manuals, and using anything else can technically affect your warranty.
What I Do, in This Order
People find out they have mold and immediately start killing things. That only works if it is an isolated issue – we need to think day to day, long term so here’s how I address this because we know we are exposed daily.
Filter your air, always! You cannot out-supplement 2,904 gallons a day. Get a real air filter with true HEPA and carbon stages. Jaspr is and IQ Air are solid. Bedroom first, since that’s your highest exposure by hours, then your main living space. Change HVAC filters on schedule, and if the vents smell musty, get the ducts looked at. Also think about your car filters and replace them often! Test your car if you’re skeptical!
Prevention is king. The unglamorous work that does the most.
Keep humidity under 50%. Buy a $10 hygrometer. Stop guessing.
Fix leaks fast. You’ve got 24 to 48 hours.
Dust with a damp cloth, not a dry duster that relaunches everything into the air. HEPA vacuum and use EC3 cleaning wipes.
Clean the vents: registers, returns, all of it.
Wash bedding hot and dry it fully. Your face is on it eight hours a night, right next to the machine.
Clean your washing machine and dishwasher. Gaskets, dispensers, filters, drums.
3. Take care of the front door. Your nose meets everything first, so rinse it. Nasopure nasal rinses clear mold, debris, and bacteria out of the nasal passages before they settle in. Add CitriDrops to the rinse for a mold- and bacteria-targeted irrigation or keep CitriDrops Nasal Spray on hand for after a known exposure. 2 drops each nostril, twice a day.
4. Rebuild the immune system. If mold can push your immune system one direction, support can push it back the other way.
These are a few products I would recommend to support the system including the descriptions from Micro Balance, but I would also strongly recommend you clean your environment and dishwasher/washing machine with the cleaning products I discuss in my other blog as well.
Beta Glucans is a purified beta-1,3/1,6-glucan. Beta glucans are studied for their effect on macrophages — the immune cells that patrol, recognize, and clear foreign debris, including fungal antigens.
Chitosan-BioFlav combines chitosan, chitosan oligosaccharides (COS), rutin, and luteolin—four well‑studied ingredients that work together to support detox pathways, immune balance, and overall cellular resilience. Chitosan acts as a gentle, fiber‑like binder in the GI tract, while COS offers broader systemic support, helping the body maintain balance during environmental or lifestyle stress.
Sinus Defense 2.0 is a homeopathic spray built with transfer factor molecules and pathogen information, designed to help the immune system identify intruders faster and respond more efficiently.
CellTropin is a homeopathic sublingual formulated to support pituitary function and hormone balance.
The basics still matter alongside them: vitamin D, vitamin C, B complex, zinc, omega-3s, magnesium.
And the freebie – open your windows (as long as air quality isn’t showing high mold) and get outside every day. Daylight and fresh air, I recommend a couple short walks daily as you’re able!
Above all of it, the first rule of toxicology: get away from the source. No supplement will work great if you’re constantly exposed. You’re essentially trying to detox while retoxing.
Start here this week
Clean your CPAP hose and mask. Right now. If it smells like anything, act today.
Get mold screening plates. See what grows and test it to identify the mold type.
Walk the house. Under sinks, behind the toilet, around the windows, washer hookups, dishwasher. Every wall your bedroom shares with a bathroom or laundry room.
Notice the pattern. Do you breathe better on vacation? Get an inspection.
Start rinsing your sinuses. This fight is won or lost at the front door.
Filter your air always. Even without a known mold/mycotoxin issue you should be filtering your air.
The Bottom Line
Mold is an exposure problem, not a housekeeping problem.
Your nose is the door it comes through, 2,904 gallons a day of opportunity. Your sinuses, your lungs, and your immune defenses are what pay for it.
And if you’ve got a machine blowing air into your face all night, that machine deserves the same attention you give your drinking water.
Clean the air, find the source, remove it, rinse the nose and rebuild your defenses.
About the Author:
Liz Roman, BCFHP, is a Board Certified Functional Health Practitioner and the owner of FitMom Functional Health. She works with women worldwide on gut health, detox, and root-cause healing. Find her on Instagram @thepoopqueen.
With thanks to Micro Balance Health Products for the entry-route framing and product information used in this article.
This article is for education only and is not medical advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Talk to your provider before changing how you use or care for a prescribed medical device, and before starting any new supplement.
Liz Roman, famously known as The Poop Queen, is a Board-Certified Functional Nutritional Practitioner and Master Restorative Wellness Practitioner, specializing in gut health and holistic healing. As the Founder and Co-Owner of FITMOM, a top-tier functional nutrition practice, Liz is dedicated to uncovering and addressing the root causes of digestive disorders, hormonal imbalances, autoimmune challenges, and metabolic health issues.
Liz is also the co-host of the Top 100 podcast in alternative health, The Health Revival Show, where she shares powerful, down-to-earth health strategies that empower women to reclaim control over their well-being.
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