After undergoing skin testing that confirms a dust mite allergy, patients and parents are often defensive about their housekeeping habits. I often hear, "I'm a good housekeeper and I dust everyday." 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 and symptoms from dust mites. But to defeat the dust mite, we must first understand how it lives and thinks.
The Diet of the Dust Mite:
Believe it or not, the dust mite loves to eat our skin, especially the skin cells we naturally shed from our body.
The Habitat of the Dust Mite:
Dust mites tend not to be airborne, primarily because they are too heavy, but also because there is no dead skin in the air (unless you have very bad dandruff or flaky body skin). Thus, we find high concentrations of dust mites in bedding, clothes, upholstered furniture, and, to a lesser extent, carpeting. Jumping up and down on the bed or extensive cleaning may temporarily alleviate the problem (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 doing some other anti-dust mite activity).
Dust mites like to live where there is abundant food, moisture, and warmth. This often means our beds. A bed is the ideal spot for dust mites in some of the same ways as it is for us: it's cozy and toasty. But besides that we tend to shed most of our skin cells in bed. And that's good news for our hungry dust mite companions.
