I like to keep my home as clean as possible. “Clean freak” is what some people call me.
I don’t like it when my kitchen is messy. I can’t go to sleep if the dishes aren’t done. I wash the clothes even if they don’t look dirty, and everyone who comes into the house has to take their shoes off.
I even clean almost everywhere every day.
But everyone in my family coughed and sneezed all the time. Even though I was in my 30s and washed my face and showered a couple of times a day, I was still getting pimples.
My son Peter came home from school one day and told us that he had been learning about “dust mites” in class.
“What exactly are those?” I asked.
“I think we have them,” he told her. “There are tiny bugs that you can’t see that live in beds, pillows, and even mats. They poop everywhere, and it could be making us sick!”
I didn’t believe it. You could eat off the floor of my house, it was so clean.
Peter said, “They eat the skin that falls off our bodies while we sleep.”
Then he took out his phone and showed me this YouTube movie. He showed a video of what a pillowcase looked like under a microscope. It was FULL of thousands of dust mites.
I went crazy!! Then I started to think about it, and I realized that if our house had dust mites too, that might be why we had all these allergic reactions, pimples, itching, and other problems.
It was hard to wrap my head around a problem I couldn’t see, but everything made sense in the end.
“Dust mites are not parasites. They don’t bite, sting, or dig into our bodies,” says the American Lung Association. The dangerous toxin they make comes from their feces and bits of their bodies.
Dust mite allergen can be found in at least one bed in about 80% of US homes.
I sleep with my face in a pillow full of their poop every night. And you might feel better knowing that, according to WebMD, “dust mites like to eat dead skin from pets and people. You probably lose enough skin every day to feed a million dust bugs.”
Beds are a prime home for dust mites. Up to 10 million mites may live in a normal mattress. (Dead mites and their waste can make up 10% of the weight of a pillow that is two years old.)
Mites like warm, damp places, like the inside of a cushion when someone is sleeping on it. Skin flakes from both people and animals are a popular food. Each week, people lose about 1/5 ounce of dead skin. About 80% of the things you can see floating in a sunbeam are skin flakes.
Also, dust mites are very common in sleeping carpets and furniture.
So, every house is full of dry, poisonous dust mite poop!!
Breathe Green Mite Fighter is made with the most effective dust mite killer found in nature. It gets rid of dust mites well and doesn’t use strong chemicals to keep allergies under control.
They come in small sachets that you can put in your bed, pillows, and other places to kill dust mites and keep them from coming back.
“It really works,” the teacher said. “I put them through a lot of tests myself.”
The professor came to my house with a special optical lens that can be seen on my iPhone.