Dust Mites Dust mites are members of the Phylum Arthropoda, Group Arachnida and Order Acarina. Mites are not spiders or insects but a group of their own closely related to ticks. They are so small they cannot be seen with the naked eye. The average dust mite is .3mm. About 3 mites could fit inside the dot at the end of this sentence. They are oval shaped, cream colored, eight legged creatures with sticky pads on the ends of their feet making it easy for them to burrow deep in carpet fibers and furniture. Only the dead mite particles can be vacuumed effectively. They survive from eating human shed skin, fingernails, hair, pollen, fungi, bacteria and animal dander. They absorb moisture from the air and their environment. They only live for about 2-4 months, but during its life the dust mite produces about 200 times its weight in waste product and can lay up to 300 eggs!
Dust mites live in the fine layer of minute dust particles that seems to appear in your home from nowhere. About 80 percent of what you see floating in a ray of sunshine entering your home is dead skin, and we can see only 10 percent of the airborne pollutants. Due to their light weight dust mites also become airborne. Routine activities such as making the bed or children jumping and playing can send them floating in the air where they are then distributed throughout the house and are inevitably inhaled as we breathe. Other floating particles include dead dust mites and their waste products.
People continuously shed skin, as many as 50 million flakes of dead skin a day, the house dust mite has an abundance of food. The mites thrive in warm, humid conditions where their populations can explode! Unfortunately for humans, the beds in which we sleep are some of the warmer and more humid places year round. Dust mites live in mattresses, pillows, carpets, fabric furniture and stuffed toys. They like to burrow into the fabric. Depending on the age of a mattress, it may contain between 100,000 and 10,000,000 (10 million) dust mites. 20%-50% of the weight of the average pillow is made up of dust mites. We are exposed to the allergenic by-products of dust mites while we sleep. While new homes and furniture are dust free, within a month both are populated with dust mites.
Research states that 44 million homes in the U.S. (that's 45% of all homes) have a very serious dust mite problem.
