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Allergies Allergy Basics

How to Avoid Dust Mites: Some Helpful Tips

You might be surprised to learn that microscopic "spiders" are the true cause of your allergy symptoms. But in fact, dust mites are the unseen trigger for millions of people. They are extremely small members of the arachnid class, of the species Dermatophagoides, making them similar to spiders and "cousins" to lice and ticks. People with dust mite allergy are sensitive to both the organism and its feces. Dust mites are found in beds, couches, and rugs, and cause eyes to itch, noses to run, and skin to crawl.

Do You Have Dust Mite Allergy?
Dust mite symptoms include itchy and runny eyes, itchy nose, sneezing, coughing, wheezing and dry, itchy skin. If these symptoms sound familiar to you, it is important to have a skin test done by an allergist in order to pinpoint your exact allergy. If you're going to go through the inconvenience and expense of environmental avoidance, you should first make sure you know what's triggering the allergy. I have seen parents who gave away the family cat only to find out later that their child had a dust mite allergy.

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.

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