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It wants the government to set up spore testing sites as New Orleans starts to gut mouldy buildings and the spores are released into homes and into the air.

"The outdoor mould spore concentrations could easily trigger serious allergic or asthmatic reactions in sensitive people," said Dr. Gina Solomon of the Natural Resources Defence Council.

"The indoor air quality was even worse, rendering the homes we tested dangerously uninhabitable by any definition."

The group tested 14 sites in the New Orleans area for mould spores over a three-day period in mid-October, some six weeks after Hurricane Katrina flooded large parts of the city.

They reported spore counts as high as 645,000 spores per 1 cubic metre (35 cu ft) inside a building in the badly flooded Uptown area, and levels up to 102,000 spores per cubic metre in the air.

Solomon said a normal level would be about 25,000 spores per cubic metre, and the National Allergy Bureau views outdoor mould counts above 50,000 as "very high."

Solomon said her group was testing again this week, and those results, due in a couple of weeks, would show if mould levels were subsiding, or if repair work was releasing more spores into the air.

"I do not anticipate that New Orleans will be a mouldy city forever, but as long as there is this much mould growing, and all this work going on, the mould is going to be stirred up, and people with allergies need to be concerned," she said.

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