Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.

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bflesch 2 days ago | parent [-]

Viel besser! I'm happy to hear you have recovered, thanks for sharing. You're correct, the mycotoxin contamination of food products is such an important but overlooked fact. Once your body starts reacting to them your life is turned upside down.

The kicker for me was IKEA furniture. I was literally allergic to IKEA furniture, and only against specific parts of that IKEA furniture. It was only happening with the newer models of IKEA furniture bought in the past ~5 years. I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture.

In their recent sustainability reports IKEA has proudly mentioned how they are saving both costs and the planet by increasingly using recycled materials. They are quite light on the details but you can put together the stories across several of their publications and promotional videos.

Basically IKEA uses fungal waste products from industrial processes such as aspergillus from citric acid production. These fungal waste products are used as packaging material but also as a novel fungal adhesive for their "recycled wood" materials. This novel IKEA material sigificantly reduces plastic use and is cheaper - the holy cow of sustainability. It is basically old wooden furniture shredded into wood chips and then the wood chips are throw onto a big pile where they outside in the rain (even in the official IKEA video). Then they glue the wood chips back together with the novel fungal-based adhesive. Then they put a big layer of plastic around it and use it in parts of their furniture which are a bit more hidden, like the side panels of the pull-out drawers. One can recognize it by the rugged surface.

So these things are basically mold time bombs. It is wet wood chips, wrapped in plastic, and laced with fungal adhesive. The problem was so bad for IKEA that they changed the color of all components made from this from WHITE to GREY because people kept posting pictures of the slight grey mold on top of the white paint to social media.

If you go on the IKEA website and look at furniture, they list the exact material name for every single part of the furniture - except for the recycled wood parts.

I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments. If your immune system is wrecked by covid infection and lockdown-triggered vitamin D deficiency the mold really hits hard. I do not believe that IKEA sufficiently removed residual humidity from all shipments of this material, there are too many pictures on social media that show it.

The timing really coincides with IKEA's introduction of their sustainable wood material. Too many people reported the "gray dust" that was appearing on these white pieces so IKEA simply painted them gray.

If you are located in the US and have access to a lawyer and a microbiology lab, buy some IKEA drawers and do some experiments with the material of the pull-out drawers (left and right side panels). If you can document it for a court case, it might be a big class action lawsuit.

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Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I am 99% convinced that a big part of what is reported as "long covid" is actually IKEA's mold-laced recycled wood time bombs shipped to people's apartments.

I'm glad you're better, but I'm sorry to say this is not a good take. I have a couple friends who suffered from Long COVID, one of whom eventually passed away from complications. Their conditions were clearly triggered by COVID and knowing both of their styles and tastes, I don't think they had a single IKEA furniture in their houses.

Long COVID misinformation is rampant and this is not helpful.

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bflesch 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm sorry for your loss. It's definitely a fringe theory and I didn't intend to minimize their suffering. But this theory is grounded in my personal experience and my personal analysis with the furniture at hand and my immune system, plus the input of dozens of medical professionals and hundreds of lab tests along the way. My disease fits all of the long covid symptoms listed on wikipedia and it is brazen of you to swing the "long covid misinformation" hammer when I share my personal story of suffering and healing from the thing that people like you call "long covid".

This constant invalidation of multi-year delibitating disease is exhausting. If you come up with a long covid biomarker feel free to reach out so we can test and then you can officially gatekeep me from being part of "long covid". But until then please don't invalidate my healing story.

What helped me was other affected people sharing their story and figuring out what helped them personally to improve and what not. What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.

I have healed from this stuff DESPITE OF medical professionals.

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wizzwizz4 2 days ago | parent [-]

> the thing that people like you call "long covid"

No. See e.g. https://meassociation.org.uk/2023/05/updated-booklet-long-co.... There are many conditions with a similar spectrum of symptoms, distinguished by their suspected causes: Long COVID is specifically the name where this is caused by a COVID-19 infection. We already know that COVID-19 infections aren't the only cause, because these conditions predate SARS-CoV-2 (in humans).

If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID. "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.

> What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.

I half-seriously want to propose "doctors flat-out refuse to think about your condition" as a diagnostic criterion for chronic fatigue syndrome.

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bflesch 2 days ago | parent [-]

It is a horrific disease and there are many who have it much worse than me. But I also nearly died from this.

> If you've correctly concluded that your symptoms were caused by something other than COVID-19, then by definition you did not have long COVID.

The symptom onset correlated both with covid infection and with covid vaccination.

> "Long COVID is actually caused by IKEA furniture fungus" is misinformation, and your experience with a similar condition doesn't give you immunity from criticism.

Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture. But in my informed opinion there is a correlation, just as with the covid vaccine, and it would make sense to do both scientific and judicial discovery of this correlation.

Due to lacking medical methods one might most likely never be able to show that long covid is caused by a certain mycotoxin plus a certain covid strain hitting the body at the same time, or a certain mycotoxin weakening the immune system enough for long covid symptoms to appear.

But IKEA is/was aware of the problem as they change color from white to gray, they actively hide facts about these materials from their product detail pages, and their own videos demonstrate that it is very likely that shipments of their product were soaked in humidity. And if you soak wood in water, wrap it in plastic paint, and then put it into a room with 30% humidity it is like a fungal growth booster no matter what the person who lives in that apartment does. The water wrapped inside plastic will create micropores in the plastic and try to diffuse outside, thereby creating perfect conditions for mold growth. This is what I think IKEA has done, and I think they tried to hide it.

As mold-based materials are growing in popularity both due to lower costs and sustainability factors, the dangers of mold-based materials that are shipped with too much internal humidity need to be researched and remediated.

PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.

	▲	wizzwizz4 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture. Can you please explain how this isn't evidence strong enough to immediately reject your "all long COVID is caused by IKEA furniture" theory? > But IKEA is/was aware […] they actively hide facts […] This is classic conspiratorial reasoning. You observe that group A do activity B to cover up activity C, which – if activity C causes situation D – would help cover up situation D. You then treat this as evidence that activity C causes situation D, and/or that group A is complicit in knowingly causing situation D; but this doesn't follow, no matter how much it feels like it does. This kind of conspiratorial reasoning is extremely seductive – as I know from experience. I was never able to reason myself out of belief systems shaped like this. I'm hoping that laying this out abstractly will help bypass this – that you can look at the shape of the argument, go "yeah, that shape of argument is exceedingly questionable", then let that cognitive dissonance sit in your mind and gradually break apart the conspiratorial thinking over time – but I'm not really expecting it to help you. I got lucky, because my conspiratorial beliefs (about big tech being evil cyberstalkers who collect and sell everyone's personal information) were never validated by others, and I began to doubt them (despite the mounting evidence), until I started to consider non-conspiratorial alternative explanations. It turns out, those have a lot more evidence to support them (as I'm sure most of HN is aware). This eventually allowed me to construct general models of the world where the "bad guys" are not necessarily omniscient, and these have served me well across a wide variety of topics. > PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it. Please stay away from these. They are not healthy to someone with your mindset. You already know that the medical establishment is sceptical of the existence of ME/CFS, and only grudgingly acknowledges Long COVID: you don't need to expose yourself to repeated testimony from people with grudges and a vested interest in holding your interest.

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b112 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is an interesting theory. And if valid, will probably bite IKEA down the road.

But I do have to say this in jest. Silver lining?:

I had to throw away so much IKEA furniture.

	▲	bflesch 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I understand the joke but high-quality furniture is expensive, and only recently IKEA went from "good value" to "horribly overpriced". Generally IKEA's goal of sustainability is noble and their transparency is appreciated, but the way they handled this issue reminded me they are a very profit-driven company with customer service set up to deflect issues and minimize cost. The best furniture one can have are family heirlooms from old-growth wood, but it is both expensive to place them and to move them.