What Damp Walls Do to the Body That Lives With Them

This analysis pooled the epidemiological studies assembled by the US Institute of Medicine to put a number on something long suspected but rarely quantified. Across 28 comparisons, living in a home with dampness or visible mould was associated with higher odds of respiratory tract symptoms, cough, wheeze and current or previously diagnosed asthma, with most central estimates falling between 1.3 and 1.8. Twenty-six of the 28 confidence intervals excluded no effect, which is why this sits among the more settled findings in indoor environmental health. What the analysis could not do is prove causation, and it found far weaker links to measured spore counts than to simple visible signs, which suggests the damp itself matters as much as any single organism. For a woman who has been told her cough is stress or her wheeze is age, the state of her walls is a reasonable thing to rule out first.