WHERE IS ALL THIS DUST COMING FROM?!

Estimates are that the average household accumulates between 40 - 104 pounds of dust a year! WARNING: This description is not for the faint of heart!

For the record, household dust itself is composed primarily of human skin and hair, waxes, pollen, fungi, lichen, tiny particles of wood, paint, fibers from fabrics, foam rubber, wallboard, plant and vegetable matter, insect parts, food waste, paper fiber, and metal particles. This lovely mixture is also jazzed up with any number of ambient chemical pollutants that collect on the mass.

Our homes are filled with dust particles, created by smoking, cooking and heating appliances. The particles - which are just a few micrometres in diameter - are implicated in asthma and diseases of the heart and lungs.
But that's not all. In among this dust you have guests residing!

Say hello to Dermatophagoides farinae and Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus, more commonly known--respectively--as the North American and European House Dust Mite. Not insects, these creatures are part of the Arachnids, that class of arthropods also containing spiders, ticks, and scorpions. YIPES!

It was Anton van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope, who reported in 1694 that mites live in dust. These tiny monsters--too small to be seen with the naked eye--reside in the dust all right, and live on shed human skin, fingernails, hair, animal dander, bacteria, fungi, and pollen. While these are their most favored delicacies, crumbs of human and pet foods will also sustain them. Implicated in causing allergy misery (asthma, hay fever, and eczema, among others) in millions of people, it is not the mites themselves, but rather the proteins they produce that are allergenic. The worst of these is the so-called Der p1, helpfully identified in the scientific literature as "house dust mite allergen." Der p1 occurs in the mite's fecal pellets and disintegrating body parts.

While dust mites cannot survive on vinyl or hardwood floors, they surely thrive everywhere that dust accumulates, and do especially well in bedrooms. Mites just love pillows, mattresses, bed springs, blankets, and comforters. Ten percent of the weight of a two-year-old pillow can be composed of dead mites and their fecal pellets. Pleasant dreams!

Here are some numbers that might make you squirm: A typical used mattress can have 100,000 to 10 million mites inside, feeding on the 6 grams of dead skin you shed each week. Each mite produces 10-20 waste pellets per day, and each egg-laying female can produce 25-30 more mites every three weeks. Cold comfort that a mite only lives about three months, especially when its dead carcass is allergenic!

Although it is easy enough to determine if dust mites are at large in your home, via testing under a microscope, most often requests for detection occur after an affected individual is already determined to be suffering from an allergy to the mites. At this point, several remedial actions can be taken.

Fortunately, the little devils require about a 70 percent humidity, and temperatures between 75-80 degrees, so keeping your house below these levels is a good first step. All mattresses, carpets, sofas, and chairs should be vacuumed thoroughly.

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