Dust : The Dirty truth
One of the biggest culprits in your home is often invisible: It’s dust. Studies have found that the average six-room home in the United States collects 40 pounds of dust each year. “Wait!” you wail. “I’m a great housekeeper. I dust every few days and wash the floors, scrub the bathrooms, and change the linens weekly. I even wipe the baseboards at least once a year. How could I have that much dust?”
Relax. The dust in your home is inevitable and would be there even if you scrubbed daily. It’s composed of lakes of dead skin, pet hair and dander (even if you don’t have pets, you may track hair and dander into the house), breakdown of fabrics, debris blown in from outside, and so on. As if that weren’t bad enough, that layer of dust coating your coffee table or television screen or lying behind the sofa may also contain cockroach droppings, another potent allergy trigger. There is a correlation between cleaning and dust levels, however, and as you’ve undoubtedly figured out by now, the more you clean, the less dust you’ll have.
The problem with dust stems not just from an aesthetic perspective but also from the fact that it provides a regular supply of food for dust mites. As we said in chapter3, these microscopic bugs are literally everywhere in your home, happily munching away on teeny flakes of your skin that have sloughed off in the course of normal living. They’re a major source of allergies, with about 10 percent of the population and 90 percent of people with allergic asthma having positive skin tests to dust mites. Those figures are even higher in childre, with recent studies suggesting that at least 45 percent of kids are allergic to dust mites.
Dust Mites Unveiled
There may as many as 19,000 dust mites in 1 gram of dust, about the weight of a paper clip. And each female can add another 25 to 30 mites to the population before she dies. It’s enough to send you running for a supersize can of Lemon Pledge.
Mites aren’t ubiquitous, however, and if you live in the desert, you may be in luck. That’s because these tiny creatures thrive in warm, humid conditions, when the relative humidity is 75 to 80 percent and the temperature at least 700F. Reduce the humidity and you reduce the mites, since they can’t survive in humidity of less than 40 to 50 percent.
If your have mites, they’re most prevalent in the room where you spend the most time. No, not the bathroom the bedroom, where we inhabit the bed for about one third of our lives. To a dust mite, your bed is an all you can eat buffet and a five star hotel rolled into one.
Forget insecticides; they generally don’t work, and those touted for mites, called acaricides, can cause skin or lung irritation. Still, there are ways to reduce your exposure to mites in your home, and it’s a goal that’s definitely worth pursuing. One study found that reducing levels of dust mites in children’s beds by one third cut the number of days they wheezed and missed school by nearly a quarter (22 percent)
As part of the Breathe Easy Plan, we’re going to give you a step-by-step, room-by-room guide to making your home as allergy-free as possible. In the meantime, however, here are some ways to reduce the levels of dust mites (and dust throughout your house.
One of the biggest culprits in your home is often invisible: It’s dust. Studies have found that the average six-room home in the United States collects 40 pounds of dust each year. “Wait!” you wail. “I’m a great housekeeper. I dust every few days and wash the floors, scrub the bathrooms, and change the linens weekly. I even wipe the baseboards at least once a year. How could I have that much dust?”
Relax. The dust in your home is inevitable and would be there even if you scrubbed daily. It’s composed of lakes of dead skin, pet hair and dander (even if you don’t have pets, you may track hair and dander into the house), breakdown of fabrics, debris blown in from outside, and so on. As if that weren’t bad enough, that layer of dust coating your coffee table or television screen or lying behind the sofa may also contain cockroach droppings, another potent allergy trigger. There is a correlation between cleaning and dust levels, however, and as you’ve undoubtedly figured out by now, the more you clean, the less dust you’ll have.
The problem with dust stems not just from an aesthetic perspective but also from the fact that it provides a regular supply of food for dust mites. As we said in chapter3, these microscopic bugs are literally everywhere in your home, happily munching away on teeny flakes of your skin that have sloughed off in the course of normal living. They’re a major source of allergies, with about 10 percent of the population and 90 percent of people with allergic asthma having positive skin tests to dust mites. Those figures are even higher in childre, with recent studies suggesting that at least 45 percent of kids are allergic to dust mites.
Dust Mites Unveiled
There may as many as 19,000 dust mites in 1 gram of dust, about the weight of a paper clip. And each female can add another 25 to 30 mites to the population before she dies. It’s enough to send you running for a supersize can of Lemon Pledge.
Mites aren’t ubiquitous, however, and if you live in the desert, you may be in luck. That’s because these tiny creatures thrive in warm, humid conditions, when the relative humidity is 75 to 80 percent and the temperature at least 700F. Reduce the humidity and you reduce the mites, since they can’t survive in humidity of less than 40 to 50 percent.
If your have mites, they’re most prevalent in the room where you spend the most time. No, not the bathroom the bedroom, where we inhabit the bed for about one third of our lives. To a dust mite, your bed is an all you can eat buffet and a five star hotel rolled into one.
Forget insecticides; they generally don’t work, and those touted for mites, called acaricides, can cause skin or lung irritation. Still, there are ways to reduce your exposure to mites in your home, and it’s a goal that’s definitely worth pursuing. One study found that reducing levels of dust mites in children’s beds by one third cut the number of days they wheezed and missed school by nearly a quarter (22 percent)
As part of the Breathe Easy Plan, we’re going to give you a step-by-step, room-by-room guide to making your home as allergy-free as possible. In the meantime, however, here are some ways to reduce the levels of dust mites (and dust throughout your house.