What are House Dust Mites?

The dust mite is a microscopic creature, related to spiders and ticks that lives primarily in mattresses, pillows, duvets, carpets and soft furnishings. Mites do not live on people, but they live near them, feeding off shed skin scales.
As well as needing our skin to survive, mites also require humidity of at least 50%, warmth and darkness as they are sensitive to UV light.
The greatest source of mites in the house is the bedroom, particularly the mattress, which provides the best conditions of warmth, humidity, darkness and food for their growth. A mattress can contain over a million dust mites. Each lays, up to 60 eggs in her lifetime, with a new generation produced every three weeks. During the lifetime of a mite, about 80 days, it produces one thousand allergy causing waste particles. It is easy to see why mattresses contain large number of living and dead mites.
Live mites are too large to be inhaled, rather it is the smaller waste particles and fragments of dead mites. These smaller particles are easily disturbed and readily become airbourne and are inhaled, causing allergy symptoms. So walking on a carpet, making a bed or disturbing other soft materials where mites live can lead to allergy symptoms, such as a shortness of breath, runny nose, sore watery eyes or sneezing.
DID YOU KNOW that your clinician can use a skin prick test to ascertain if your are allergic to dust mites but you normally have to request this?

Here’s how dust mites give dermatitis sufferers the itch

Some eczema patients react to house dust mites digesting their skin

house dust mites, magnified

These house dust mites give eczema sufferers a nasty itch.

· One preventative measure is to avoid dust mite exposure by using barrier bed covers particularly for mattress and pillows where dust mites set up their colonies. Allerjeeze covers are clinically tested and proven to minimise dust mites and their detritus filtering through to your skin, thus helping avoid itchiness associated with their activities