Trafford and Manchester Pest Control

Dust mites, as previously explained, are irritating microscopic creatures that cause many people to feel miserable in their own homes. While they’re alive, their waste product resides in our mattresses and when they die, their dead bodies remain. Both of these things create the protein that sets our eyes itching and watering. So what are we to do?

Statistics show that dust mites live in our bedrooms more than any other room. Therefore, that should be our first step in the war against them. Let’s look at some popular myths about controlling dust mites in your mattress (all of which are floating around on Yahoo Answers offering BAD advice):

1) Raid/Febreeze/Windex Your Bed: Spraying cleaning products and fragrances on your mattress will NOT do anything to get rid of the dust mites. Instead, you’ll just be sticking your face into chemicals every night and probably harming yourself further. You will also be creating a fire hazard by covering your mattress with flammable substances. Very few chemicals have been proven to effectively KILL and DENATURE dust mites at the same time.

2) Sweeping the Mattress: Don’t. Dust mites do not live on the surface of your mattress or pillow. Instead, they burrow down and take up all 9-16 inches and cannot be reached by a broom. If you do this, you will just be stirring up dust and irritating your allergies even more. You will also not be solving the problem.

3) Airing out your Mattress: Some people believe that if you haul your mattress outside once a month and beat it than the dust mite proteins will disappear. While dust mites prefer the cooler temperatures of an air-conditioned home, they will not die because of some sunshine. Beating them will only leave a headache and not cause them to abandon to the grass below.

4) Saran Wrapping Mattress: Yes, there are people doing this. They are literally buying rolls of saran wrap and going to town on their mattress and pillows. Uncomfortable and highly ineffective solution. Since the saran wrap is not only large piece, you will continue to have areas where they can slip through and from where the proteins can become airborne. Not only that, most plastic wraps are treated with chemicals and you’d be further exposing yourself to possible allergens.

So we know what NOT to do but what is the easiest, most effective solution? Doctors recommend that you enclose your mattress in zippered encasings that are proven to trap 99.95% of all allergens – dust mites included. This method of containment is non-toxic and practical for anyone’s budget and bedding desires. These covers come in a variety of fabrics and usually have one of two methods for protecting you. In my opinion, the most comfortable method is the encasings that are tightly woven so that their mean pore sizes (the spaces between fibers) is less than 5.0 microns. This method allows for 100% cotton options and opens the door to organic bedding choices.

The second method is to buy encasings with urethane membranes fused to the inside. These are perfect if you’re protecting your children because they are waterproof and guard against “accidents” hurting the mattress. Generally these are made of polyester fabrics and are cheaper than the non-membrane ones.

In either option, it is important to get a ZIPPERED encasing for your mattress, box spring, and pillow cases! The zipper and specialty fabrics will ensure that you are protected against dust must protein. After you take this important step, you will just have to worry about minimum up-keep!

Remember: you will never be 100% rid of dust mites but you can control your environment and minimize them. Ideally, you want to cut the problem down to 1/10th to 1/100th of what it was before.

And finally, the answer to one important question I know I had when I started researching dust mites: won’t dust mites just live on top of mattress encasings?

After calling up AllergyStore.com and asking them, I found that technically, yes. However, they will exist in a significantly less population. More importantly, if you wash your sheets and pillow covers each week in hot water, you will remove their food source and kill/wash away the dead bodies and potential protein.

A little investment in protecting your bedding and you will be feeling better in no time.

UCF Alumni interested in products and services that help people deal with indoor environmental issues.
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Dust mites are not creatures that appear only in youth hostiles and boarding houses. They are at this very moment living and dining comfortably IN YOUR BEDROOM AND IN YOUR CHILD’S BEDROOM. You can SEE a mosquito, a cockroach or a bedbug so that’s a reasonably fair fight. Since dust mites can’t be seen by the naked eye, they are definite favorites in this battle. You are losing!

Your bedroom is swarming with hundreds of thousands of them! Microscopic, eight-legged, spiderlike, sightless dust mites, so ugly that you would jump back if you saw them under the microscope. These microscopic critters feast and grow fat by munching on your cast-off dead skin cells.

But there is no true symbiosis here because while these little buggers survive on your yummy cells, they, in return, irritate  and damage your respiratory system! Humans are super sensitive to proteins left behind in the mites’ feces. Are you disgusted yet?

You spend about one third of your time sleeping. Your breathing is less guarded while you sleep.  You shed most of your skin cells in the bedroom. The resulting damage is not “if.” It is “when.” Watch a child having a severe asthma attack and you know that none of us can afford to play “out of sight, out of mind.”

In ancient times when the life expectancy of a human being was less than half a century, cumulative damage wasn’t that threatening. Your ancestors were more likely to be felled by severe diarrhea, typhoid, amebic dysentery, a flu epidemic or tuberculosis. Several of my ancestors unfortunately died by falling off their horses. There is no written record as to a possible quantity of whiskey involved. But I digress. These days you will live enough blessed decades for the mite-poop to have a very long time to mess with your quality of life.

Your mattress, box springs, and pillows are prized territory for mites since they thrive in dusty, dark, humid, warm places. The jury is still out about the value of special mite-proof bedding to protect you from exposure but there is much you can do before making that relatively expensive purchase.

A perfect bedroom is bright, cool, and dry.  A perfect bedroom is free of upholstered furniture and ALL clutter. A perfect bedroom has a floor that can be wet-mopped. Perfect bedroom drapes should be of washable material or they should be replaced with blinds or shutters.

Dust at least once a week using cloths that actually collect the dust rather than wafting it from place to place.

Vacuum once or twice a week using a sweeper with a HEPA filter. These machines are a bit more expensive but remember that while you can empty your sweeper bag, some of what you inhale stays forever in your lungs, If you cannot replace your carpet with something you can wet-mop, then steam clean it as often as you can afford.

Wash all bedding (including pillows) in very hot water often. WARM WATER DOES NOT KILL DUST MITES.

Unfortunately your pets shed more skin cells than you do so if adorable Fido or Fifi shares your bed, you have created a five-star hotel for your dust-mite guests. Bathe your pet more often than you would like or let him/her sleep in the family room.

Sweet dreams!

Diane Neuman founded The Yoga Workshop in San Francisco where she taught for 11 years. Neuman wrote and illustrated HOW TO GET THE DRAGONS OUT OF YOUR TEMPLE (Celestial Arts). Currently Neuman writes and illustrates a health blog that draws on her 50 years of studying yoga, advanced breathing techniques, stress management and relaxation exercises. To find her blog and learn a new breathing lesson every week, check into Breathing Deep Exercises
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