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You might think you sleep alone, or perhaps the only other thing in your bed is your partner.
But you're not sleeping alone, in fact, you're not even close to being alone. Little creatures
called dust mites are all over your bed and carpet, eating away at your dead skin cells
and going excreting all over your bed.
The average bed is home to 100,000 to 10,000,000 little dust mites, due to us shedding enough
skin cells to feed millions of these little creatures. Due to us spending more time in
your bed than any other place in your house, you really are getting very personal with
your beds dust mites.
Dust Mites are 0.25-0.3 millimetres in length, which means we can't see them without using
magnification. You can begin to see Dust mites at 10x magnification, but unless you look
under a microscope you're not going to be able to see the millions in your bed.
Dust Mites don't actually bite, but they're still not very nice to have in your bed. They
can cause asthma and it's thought that around 1 billion people in the world are allergic
to Dust mites. Dust Mites leave little droppings which contain their stomach enzymes which
are what we're allergic to and dust mites excrete around 2,000 times in a 10-week lifespan,
which means your bed is covered in Dust Mite poo.
Can you get rid of Dust Mites? Not easily. You can wash your sheets, but they will come
back to your bed pretty quickly and nearly 100,000 dust mites are in a single square
meter of carpet, so they are mostly everywhere.
All I can say is have a very good sleep tonight, that's if you can ever get in your bed again.