Dust Mites, Beds & Allergies

Nasties Beneath the Sheets

It’s quite likely that there are more germs in your mattress than on your toilet seat. Although it’s more likely that no-one has actually counted them..

What we do know, however, is that there are literally millions of dust mites living quite happily inside mattresses.

Dust Mites

These tiny creatures, part of the arachnid (spider) family date back some 300 million years and have no known enemies and they love living just where you sleep every night. Before choosing the mattress as the ideal home, their natural habitat used to be birds’ nests. However the mattress gives them everything they need to live in comfort and breed at will.

Dust mites thrive in temperatures of more than 20°C (70°F) with a relative humidity of 60-80% and these conditions are found almost exclusively in the mattresses you and your family sleep on every night. Dust mites are also found in the carpet and soft furnishings, but the mattress is definitely their favourite habitat.

Bacteria-infested flakes of dry skin from you and your pets (it’s amazing how many of us allow our pets onto our beds!) offer dust mites a rich source of food, added to which their reproductive rate is very high. Up to 2,500 dust mites have been counted in one gram of dust. So this means that there are up to two million dust mites in one double-size mattress!

Each dust mite excretes approximately 20 pellets of excrement a day and these pellets contain allergens in the form of protease enzymes, which can attack the protective lining of the nose, throat and lungs. They can also irritate the skin, causing itchy flare-ups.

Moving around in bed makes the allergens airborne and easy to inhale. In turn, this stimulates the body’s immune system, triggering the symptoms of asthma, eczema and rhinitis. These allergens can also be found in the crumbling skeletons of dead dust mites, and there are plenty of these as they only have a 3-month life span.

Not great news.

SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome)

Medical evidence suggests that allergens may cross the placental barrier during pregnancy, affecting the unborn child. (This may explain, in part, the increasing number of children who seem to be suffering with a number of allergies.) And without wishing to scaremonger, possible links have also been suggested between bacteria in cot mattresses and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Asthma, Eczema and Rhinitis

It is well-documented that 85% of all asthma-sufferers are allergic to the allergens dust mites leave behind. Rhinitis-sufferers (hay fever/runny nose) are also affected. And many children (and adults) with eczema tend to be at their itchiest in the winter, when the dust mites, in mattresses and soft furnishings, flourish in the central heating.

Beating the Mites

The good news is: there’s a great deal we can do to limit the damage our tiny friends can wreak.

  • Keep as many surfaces as possible dust-free
  • Vacuum carpets regularly
  • When it’s cold outside – open those bedroom windows; the cold could help kill some mites
  • Have your mattress (and those of your children and babies) deeply and thoroughly cleaned by an expert every 6 months (hoovering only works at a superficial level!)
  • If you suffer badly from asthma, you need to create an allergen-free bedroom using allergen-free soft furnishings, mattress covers and bedding

The Mattress Doctor

If you’d like to know more about how you can reduce your exposure to dust mites and the possible problems they might cause:

Contact the Mattress Doctor on telephone number 0845 330 6607

The Mattress Doctor provides a free mattress hygiene test. You will be amazed when you see just what is lurking beneath your sheets!