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Allergies Living with Allergies

Tips For Avoiding Dust Mites

Dust mite allergy is one of the most common diagnoses I make in my practice as an allergist. Dust mites are extremely small members of the Arachnid class and Acari subclass, similar to spiders and "cousins" to lice and ticks. People with dust mite allergy are allergic to both the organism and its feces. The symptoms include itchy and runny eyes, itchy nose, sneezing, coughing, wheezing, and dry, itchy skin.

Do You Have Dust Mite Allergy?
If you have allergy symptoms around house dust, other possible sources of allergy can include cockroaches, domestic animals, mouse and rat dropping, and molds. One can even probably find significant levels of pollen in house dust during allergy season. This is why it is important for you to have skin testing done by an allergist to help pinpoint the source of your allergies. This way, when you go to the inconvenience and expense of environmental avoidance, you can avoid the specific things to which you have allergies. I have seen patients who gave away the family cat and then found out it was a dust mite allergy that was making their child sick, or others who have gone through rigorous dust mite avoidance measures only to find out they weren't allergic to dust mites at all.

After undergoing skin testing, patients diagnosed with a dust mite allergy are often defensive about their housekeeping habits. I often hear, " I'm a good housekeeper and I dust every day." Although this may be true, dust mites can live and thrive in places that dusting can't reach.

Dust Mites: Up Close and Personal
With a little effort, you can significantly decrease your exposure to dust mites and as a result decrease the allergy symptoms resulting from dust mite exposure. But to defeat the dust mite, we must first understand how it lives and thinks.

Dust mites like our skin: Believe it or not, the dust mite loves to eat our skin, especially the skin cells which we naturally shed and which fall off our body.

Dust mites tend not to be airborne: This is primarily because they are too heavy but also because there is no food (i.e. dead skin) in the air (unless you have very bad dandruff or flaky body skin. So, we find high concentrations of dust mites in bedding, in clothes, in upholstered furniture, and, to a lesser extent, in carpeting. Jumping up and down on the bed or extensive cleaning may for a short time send the dust mite adrift in the house (giving those with a dust mite allergy a good excuse to go to the beach while someone without dust mite allergy is vacuuming and/or some other anti-dust mite activity).

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