Cleaning might be the last thing on your mind at this time of year, but you might be inspired to given what is lurking in the microscopic shadows.
Photo: 123RF
The warm, humid conditions of a Kiwi summer is the best environment for dust mites to breed in.
These tiny, tiny creatures live and breed in our homes, and love to live in our beds, couches and pet beds.
While the dust mites themselves don’t pose a risk to us humans, the faecal material and saliva they produce does.
People with asthma and other respiratory diseases are prone to allergic reactions from the excretions dust mites produce, Rachael Pink the Global Head of Technology Development for Floorcare at Dyson tells Jesse Mulligan.
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She says that’s particularly concerning for New Zealand, where one in eight adults suffer from asthma. New Zealand also has one of the highest rates of child asthma in the developed world, she says.
Fuelling these tiny arachnids is the skin we and our pets shed.
“We can produce up to 28 grams of skin per week that we shed in our homes, it’s about the size of a bag of crisps, so it’s quite a lot,” Pink says.
“One of the key things that you can do is you can take this food source away from them, so by regularly vacuuming and cleaning your home, particularly the areas the dust mites like to live, you can starve them of that food source.”
The best way to do that, the vacuum spokesperson says, is, you guessed it - vacuum.
But that does not just mean the carpet and floors - couches and mattresses, where we spend up to a third of our lives living, also need a thorough clean, she says.
And Pink has a few tips on how to vacuum your bed.
“I suggest that you strip the sheet and vacuum the mattress, but you could vacuum through that.
“The really important thing when you are vacuuming that mattress is to try and vacuum it with a tool that’s dedicated for that mattress and make sure that you vacuum both sides. What you need is a machine that’s got really powerful suction so that you can really suck the dust mites and all of the skin cells out of the mattress, and make sure that you’ve got a machine that’s got really good filtration, because if you’re vacuuming all those dust mites and skin cells back up, not capturing it in that vacuum, you are just expelling it back into the air.”
What a dust mite looks like. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Pink suggests vacuuming two to three times a week, she herself does so three to four times, but she understands not everyone may be as determined to get the vacuum cleaner out as much as she does.
But she explains that summer time is precisely the right time to be doing it.
“That’s when dust mites breed exponentially and grow.
“A dust mite in dust mite breeding season live anywhere between 65-100 days and in that time, they can produce anywhere between 60-100 eggs, so they really are breeding exponentially, and each dust mite produces about 2000 faecal pellets, so producing lots of that really horrible allergen material and thriving at the moment in your summer.”