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Health Canada warns that mould in air can cause eye, nose and throat irritation; coughing and phlegm build-up; wheezing and shortness of breath; and allergic reactions.

Museum officials are consulting contractors and say they don’t know how long remediation will take. Until that work is finished, the museum will remain closed.

Contacted Thursday evening, museum spokesman Olivier Bouffard could not say whether the museum had tested for mould prior to its discovery during the maintenance operation.

However, he noted that an asbestos seal was installed last year, and since then the museum regularly tests for the substance’s presence. None was detected during the weeklong maintenance, he said.

The presence of mould is the latest episode in the museum’s long-running woes. Since 1967 when it opened, the museum has been housed in a building once owned by a bakery. The location was meant to be temporary, but last year the “warehouse” off St. Laurent Boulevard welcomed its 20th million visitor to a building that is widely acknowledged to be inadequate for the museum’s needs.

“It looks like a dollar store,” former president Denise Amyot told the Citizen in 2009. “I’m ashamed of that. It’s not functional like it should be. I do not think we should celebrate the 150th anniversary of Canada (in 2017) at that location.”

The cramped quarters have meant that most of the vast collection — roughly 98 per cent of it — cannot be displayed. There are storage buildings with cars, aircraft, electrical generating equipment, boats, bicycles, snowmobiles and many more artifacts from Canada’s technological history that the public never sees.