WARNING! YOUR HOME COULD BE MAKING YOU SICK—WITHOUT YOUR EVEN KNOWING IT!
It’s now estimated that 60% or more of the population is suffering severe negative health effects from ongoing exposure to polluted indoor living environments. Many chronically ill people are being tested, treated or counseled for health problems that can’t quite be explained or even identified. Unfortunately, maintaining an immaculate home has nothing to do with maintaining a healthy living environment. You may own the cleanest home in the neighborhood, yet still be living in a hazardous environment that is making you and your family sick. Parents with small children must pay particular attention to these issues because lifelong health patterns are established during a child’s formative years, when they’re most vulnerable to environmental pollutants. That’s why it’s so important that you take an active role in guaranteeing your family’s safety by becoming an educated consumer. The “Healthy Home Report” discusses 4 critical issues in detail and shows you how to make your home a safe and healthy living environment. When you subscribe, the first report will be sent to you immediately.
You’ll also want to tell all of your friends, family, loved ones and anyone else you care about how they can access this valuable resource.
- Why your indoor air is so much worse than you ever imagined
- The most dangerous place in your home
- The most devastating environmental risk you face
- Is your heating & cooling system slowly killing you?
- Why special precautions must be taken if you have house pets
Health Air Report
The Common Household Dust Mite
OH, see how they itch!
Allergies to Dust Mites
The droppings of dust mites (insects too small to be seen with the naked eye) are important allergens. These mites live in bedding, carpets, stuffed furniture, old clothing and stuffed toys. They feed on human skin scales. Dust mites are most common in humid climates. They don’t survive when the humidity is below 50%. If droppings of dust mites are inhaled or come in contact with the skin, they may cause allergy, asthma and/or eczema symptoms.
Dust Mites. The background
Mite allergy? What’s that got to do with me?
Asthma and all-year allergy in the nose are so common, that we accept them as ‘one of those things’, particularly when the doctor tells us just to keep taking the medicine and not to bother about finding out whether an allergy could be the cause. But what if you could find out the cause? Could you do something about it and reduce or end your dependence on medicines?
The answer is not an easy one, but we think it is important for you if your asthma or nose allergy is caused by allergy.
Infantile eczema or its equivalent in older children and adults may get better in some cases through avoiding mites and their dust. There is other evidence that mites may be involved in causing it. In some people, especially younger children, food allergy may wholly or partly cause eczema. But we don’t know as much about this area as we would like.
What are house dust mites?
Few people nowadays have not seen a television program about house dust mites. Newspapers are full of advertisements for things, which are supposed to help you get rid of them and the nasty dust; they leave all over your house.
House dust mites are tiny (up to 0.3 mm) animals related to ticks and spiders and live in house dust. There is not a house without them, but some houses contain huge numbers and other houses contain almost none. This does not only depend on cleanliness, but depends very much on the amount of moisture in the house; dry houses in very cold climates or on high mountains have few mites, but houses in temperate climates and normal altitudes have more.
House dust mites eat the dust, which comes from our skin all the time.
They leave droppings everywhere they go. Their droppings contain leftover enzymes, which the mites use to digest the skin dust. It is these enzymes, which are the most important part of mite dust in causing asthma and other allergic diseases.
In fact, house dust mites and their droppings are the most important cause of asthma worldwide.
There is ample proof that living in surroundings with little or no mite dust improves or cures asthma in those people whose asthma is caused by it.
In practice it is proving to be almost prohibitively difficult for most people to achieve this.
There are useful things you can do. It is also worth being aware of things people will try to sell you which may be a waste of money.
How can I know whether house dust mites are causing my child’s asthma or my own asthma?
The best way is to consult a doctor or specialist nurse who is expert at judging the story you have to tell and at allergy tests and how to interpret them.
Doctors who do not have special training in allergy are likely to have more difficulty. Their knowledge will not be so up to date or complete, so the chance of getting wrong advice is higher. But no doctor, however clever or specialized, is always right.
You can also tell to a fair extent for yourself, if there are enough clues in your case. Here are some things to look out for:
• True asthma in a child is almost always due to allergy, mostly from house dust mites or pets such as cats or dogs. Wheezing in young children is often not due to true asthma, particularly when it just seems related to occasional virus infections. Please be patient with your doctor; in the early stages it may not be possible to be quite sure.
• If you are adult, the younger you were when your asthma started, the more likely it is to be caused by allergy.
• If you or your child have had infantile eczema, hay fever or food allergy, asthma is much more likely to be allergic.
• To a smaller extent the same is true if your parents, brothers or sisters or children have had eczema, hay fever or food allergy.
• If the asthma comes on after aspirin, get medical advice; this is not a true allergy and it is important to get help, which will in some ways be quite different from the help for allergic asthma.
• If you are adult and the asthma seems related to your work (gets better on holidays or at weekends), get advice. Your asthma may well be completely curable, and others at work may be protected from getting asthma if your cause is discovered.
• If your asthma gets better or worse according to your surroundings, it is likely to be due to allergy, most often house dust mite allergy. Look out for:
• Asthma improving on holiday in hotels or drier climates.
• Asthma worsening in spare beds when staying at relatives or friends, or worse in a caravan on holiday.
• Asthma worse when dusting the house, emptying the vacuum cleaner, or making beds.
How can we get rid of mites?
It’s not so simple. It’s not enough to get rid of mites alone. To improve asthma or other mite allergies you must get rid of the mites but also of nearly all the dust, which they may have left, throughout your house over the years. This takes a huge effort. It is also very expensive for most people.
One reason for this is that mostly it is not enough to halve the amount of mite material in your house. Worthwhile results mean cutting the house dust mite pollution to BETWEEN ONE TENTH AND ONE HUNDREDTH of what it was before.
But it can be tremendously worthwhile.
A word of caution. We breathe mite dust in other places than at home. No matter what you do to your house, dust elsewhere may still cause trouble. So how successful you are may depend on how important mite dust from sources outside your home is in your case. This will vary a lot from person to person. This aspect is a focus for current research, and we may know more about it in a few years.
Another word of caution: do not make the treatment worse than the disease . A few people get an obsession about cleaning the house and cripple themselves socially in an attempt to avoid mites. This is a terrible result of well-meant advice. Do please rely on sound advice from a recognized expert. The object of mite control should be a more normal life for the member of your family with asthma or allergy and for the family.
But with a thorough deep hot-water truck mounted professional carpet cleaning and also with Dust Mite Anti-Allergen Treatment being applied, we can render the common household dust mite permanently harmless to people who display allergic symptoms to dust mite allergies.
OK, it sounds daunting, but if you’re right we’ll have a go. But where’s the proof it will help?
Firstly, it will only help if your child or you are in fact made ill by house dust mites.
You are much more likely to avoid mistakes if you consult a recognized allergy specialist.
Secondly, no one can guarantee results. Currently it is common for people with house dust mite allergy to notice no benefit, despite the efforts. This may well be because they cannot manage to do enough. Once again, discussing it with an expert may help you to judge your chances of success and avoid an expensive approach which has little chance of helping you because of your circumstances.
But there is proof that mite control works.
• Children sent to the Alps lose their house dust mite asthma while there. The effect is often dramatic. This has been known since the 1920s and is still practiced in the Netherlands, France, and other countries. There is ample evidence that the reason for the improvement is that there are far fewer mites in houses in the high alpine resorts.
• People with house dust mite asthma consistently improved over a few months while kept in a mite-free environment. This was done by Professor Tom Platts-Mills at Northwick Park Hospital, and the results were published in The Lancet.
• Mite control measures but not dummy measures improved features of asthma in children with house dust mite asthma. There have been a number of researchers who have shown this, though others failed. A consistent feature of the successful attempts has been the use of dust-proof bedding covers.
• There is clear evidence that higher amounts of mite dust in houses are associated with more asthma in children and adults. This was shown (for adults) by the Dutch research workers who discovered the role of the house dust mite and by others in many different parts of the world. In the UK it was demonstrated for children by Dr Sporik and others, with results published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Mites – Practical Action
Yes, but what should we actually do to get rid of mites and their dust?
You will get surprisingly different advice from different sources. Some of the differences are due to our uncertainties and a genuine difference of opinion between experts because we don’t always have real proof for everything. But other differences may be due to inexpert advice and the greed of people who want to sell you expensive things whether those things help or not.
Here is my current list of recommendations:
TOP TIPS:
• Use dust-proof bedding covers : it is essential to cover the mattress, pillows and comforter and to launder regularly all uncovered items, preferably at 60 degrees C and use Dust Mite Anti-Allergen Treatment in the final laundry rinse cycle. This will remain effective for up to four subsequent machine washings. Without this, it seems, you will not succeed. The ideal is to get a new bed or at least mattress, pillow and comforter and cover these with the special covers before they are ever used. Then they will not merely stop dust moving from mattress to lungs, but will prevent harmful dust buildup in the first place. The use of Anti-Allergen Dust Mite Spray is very helpful in reducing allergy symptoms.
• Vacuum or wipe the dust-proof bedding covers regularly, i.e. follow the manufacturer’s instructions. Wash according to manufacturer’s instructions and use Anti-Allergen Dust Mite Spray is very helpful in reducing allergy symptoms.
• Do not give furry toys to children to take to bed. An excellent substitute is a little cotton blanket, which can be washed regularly at 60 degrees centigrade or higher. Persevere to achieve this. Many people recommend putting furry toys into the freezer for 24 hours to kill the mites. There is no evidence that this works, and I would not expect it to. Freezing leaves the harmful dust unchanged, and new mites will walk into the furry toy as soon as it touches the bedclothes again. It might perhaps help if you also wash the furry toy in the washing machine to remove the dust, which the mites have made inside it. But we have no idea how effective such washing would be and how often you would have to do it. At the very best all this will be less effective than not having the furry toy in the bed.
• Mite dust takes about 2 hours to settle from the air onto surfaces in an undisturbed room. Airing a room by opening windows is probably faster. But draughts may raise dust from the floor into the air.
• Ventilate your house. Experts agree that inadequate air turnover in a house creates high humidity, which favors mites.
But there’s a catch. You have central heating, and you probably don’t want to have a cold house. So you are not going to want to open windows more than you have to. The obvious answer is to dress more warmly and to allow your house to be colder, but you and your family may not want to do that. There is however an advantage to this; at lower temperatures the mites are less active and breed less fast. Keeping your house cooler will reduce mites, especially if ventilation keeps the humidity down.
But what if you want to be warm and to ventilate your house at the same time without paying the earth in heating bills?
Heat exchangers are claimed to be a way of doing this.
• Dehumidifiers. In principle, we approve of them. In practice we have been disappointed by the small change in measurable humidity in house air on installing dehumidifiers. But a good one does remove impressive amounts of water from the air; a gallon a day is possible. This must surely be a good thing. Perhaps the important thing is the extent to which they affect the dampness of surfaces and furnishings. Our guess is that heat exchangers may prove to be a more efficient way of keeping the mites down by humidity control, and that getting rid of mite habitats such as carpets and uncovered bedding will make humidity control much more effective.
• It is likely that clothes, including sweaters and dressing gowns, are significant sources of mite dust. Wash or clean clothes more frequently than you otherwise would. In the final rinse cycle, use Dust Mite Anti-Allergen Treatment .
• University students with mite-allergic asthma should have special consideration regarding accommodation. For example, they should be permitted to live in main college accommodation rather than be forced to share low standard shared student housing. They could have new mattresses every year, these being covered with dust-proof mite control covers. They could have plastic-covered furniture or new. Mattresses and furniture could then be moved on to the rooms of non-asthmatic students and used for their normal life span. Smoking should be banned from such accommodation.
OTHER TIPS:
• Take dust-proof bedding covers with you when you travel. Spare beds in other people’s homes are likely to be a real problem. Hotel beds vary; likely to be better the more expensive the hotel in my experience, but this is not completely predictable. Wash the covers when you get home. Anti-Allergen Dust Mite Spray is a very useful way of controlling the symptoms at home or away.
Rarely used sleeping bags can be terrible too. Dry clean immediately on return from each journey, and then store in plastic bag without holes. For the cost of dry cleaning you could almost get a new cheap sleeping bag. But this does work.
• UPDATED 1 Feb 1998:
Using ‘non-allergenic’ pillows and comforters won’t do as a substitute for covering them with special dustproof covers. All ‘non-allergenic’ means is that the materials are synthetic. And that is nothing special these days. Although doctors have recommended replacing feather pillows with synthetic ones, one research group recently found that foam pillows were associated with more asthma than feather ones, and there is evidence that synthetic pillows end up having more house dust mite material in them than feather pillows. So claims about pillows being ‘non-allergenic’ are now thought to be misleading. Anti-Allergen Dust Mite Spray should be used to your pillows and comforters on a regular basis.
The evidence:
Kemp, TJ & others, “House dust mite allergen in pillows”. BMJ 1966;313:916. Crane J & others, “Increased house dust mite allergen in synthetic pillows may explain increased wheezing”. BMJ 1967;314:1763-4
Covering bedding with special-purpose dustproof covers is necessary whatever your pillows are made of.
• Vacuuming the mattress is not nearly as helpful as people used to think. It removes very few of the mites, which can hang on perfectly well to avoid being sucked into the vacuum cleaner. The best method is to have your mattress professional cleaned and treated with Dust Mite Anti-Allergen.
However, vacuuming will remove some of the skin dust on which the mites feed, and a little of their droppings, and may still be worthwhile as part of a proper plan.
The allergic person should not do the vacuuming, and should not be around while the vacuuming is being done. Nearly all vacuum cleaners, even those with good filters, take dust from surfaces and disperse a surprising amount of mite dust into the air.
• Special vacuum cleaners:
Machines do differ a lot in how much dust they allow to get into the air.
If your vacuum cleaner is old and leaks and is not likely to be cured thoroughly by a good repair, replace it; see below.
If you have a good vacuum cleaner and the asthma sufferer is out of the house when it is used, it may well not be worth prioritizing the purchase of a special machine. If the housewife is the asthma sufferer, the first priority is to shift the task of vacuuming to someone without this problem, but if that is not possible, a special vacuum cleaner should be a high priority.
Brands are constantly changing. General advice in the USA: avoid water-filled cleaners, which spread aerosols of dust. Do not spend more than $700 on any machine , however convincingly sold. There is a good range of reasonable machines at around $350, though this is much more than many people spend on a normal cleaner. Some machines in the $400 to $700 range may have some advantages. Seek expert advice if you can get it. Buy any reputable machine with an excellent filter.
The main cyclone-based bag less vacuum cleaner currently on the US market is good in some ways, but the bag less design means there is a problem about emptying it without spreading a lot of dust. Even if you do this outdoors, a cloud of dust is liable to cover your clothes. Any mites in this dust will be spread to anything, which comes into contact with the clothes you were wearing.
Central vacuum cleaners are an excellent idea. The dust is piped to a container in your garage or a similar space, outside your living space. With a good system emptying will be infrequent, reducing an important form of dust exposure and surely eliminating the need for the allergic person ever to do the emptying. I do not know how well these systems replace the sweeping and sucking action of upright vacuum cleaners.
Installation into a house whilst it is being built is easier than in an existing home, but both are possible. I have no direct knowledge of any of these systems.
If you must do the vacuuming and bed making and you yourself are the sufferer, wearing a good filter-breathing mask will help, though it is inconvenient and uncomfortable. Get them from any pharmacy.
• Liquid nitrogen treatment of carpets and bedding kills mites. Used alone it is probably ineffective. It needs to be done by specialists to be safe.
• Airing beds thoroughly is something I personally recommend, but I don’t know of proof that it makes a difference. Mites love moisture, and hate light. So giving bedding a chance to dry thoroughly seems a good idea.
• Heat exchangers ventilate your house and use warmth in the stale air they pump out to warm up the outside air as it comes in. So you can get fresh air for stale, and still keep about 70% of the heat you paid for.
The suppliers claim that the saving in heating bills will pay for the running costs. Of course that must be on the basis that you would ventilate your house if you didn’t have a heat exchanger. But it is healthy to ventilate, and you should be doing so.
You can get heat exchangers for a single room, which look a bit like a large airbrick from the inside. Or you can get versions for just the upper floor of a house, or for the whole house, which have the pump and heat exchange box in the attic, with ducts going to the rooms below.
Heat exchangers lower the humidity in your house, which is one way of reducing mites. They do not lower the temperature, which is another way. But you may be a lot happier with a warm house.
Although house dust mites feed on skin dust, an expert quoted by the manufacturer claims that they also need a microscopic fungus, which grows in house dust. The fungus is called by the Latin name Aspergillus’s reopens and can also not grow without enough moisture in the air. The arguments for a house, which is dry to a healthy level, seem to be adding up.
Another advantage of heat exchangers is that by fighting condensation they should reduce any chance of other moulds (fungi) growing in your house, not just the fungus which the mite needs. Some people with asthma can be very sensitive to spores from moulds reaching their lungs. You can kill mold quite easily with disinfectants, but if a wall or window frame regularly gets damp from condensation, the mould will keep coming back. Drying the house to healthy levels by eliminating condensation will work much better. Getting rid of moulds by keeping the house dry is definitely good if you have asthma.
For low humidity to have a serious impact on mite numbers, experience from other countries suggests that the relative humidity has to drop to 40% or below for weeks or months. It seems to us that you are unlikely to achieve this in Britain by using a heat exchanger. In summer outdoor and indoor temperatures are similar in a climate like that of the United States, and outdoor humidity’s are almost always too high to cause mites any harm. They may still be lower than indoor humidity’s much of the time because of indoor water vapor production. In our opinion there is not enough information to comment accurately on the effect of heat exchangers on health in these conditions, though on the basis of expert opinion that more ventilation is a good idea, they ought still to deserve recommendation.
Also, be sure to change your air filter every month and treat the new filter with Anti-Allergen Filter Enhancer.
Our current view is that drier is better within the humidity range you are likely to achieve, but that it is unclear whether the heat exchangers will achieve enough in a temperate climate to make a noticeable difference to health on their own. Heat exchangers sound like a good idea, but more research is necessary. THINGS TO AVOID: • The value of air filters in a room is doubtful. Air filters in a ducted air central heating system are probably a good idea if you have that type of heating. People are often disappointed to be told room air filters are not such a good idea for house dust mite allergy; they like the idea that paying for an appliance will solve the problem, and suppliers keep presenting the idea as an attractive one despite the lack of evidence. Remember, they not only make money from selling the machine, but from replacement filters and maintenance. You will also have to pay the electricity costs, put up with the noise they make, and give up some floorspace in a room. Research data known to us suggest that room air filters may be some use against cat dust in houses (which does not prove that they are effective enough to make a difference to asthma caused by cats), but are much less effective against mite dust. To understand why, you have to understand something about the things which add dust into the air and things which remove dust from the air. The concentration of the dust you breathe will depend on the balance between the two. The effect of filters depends on their overall contribution amongst the other things which happen. Mite dust particles are larger than cat dust particles, and fall out of the air more quickly. So mite dust concentrations in a room are much more dependent on human activity in the room, stirring up new dust into the air. An air filter appliance will itself stir up the air in a room and thus delay the settling of mite dust. Free-standing filter appliances are by their nature somewhat inefficient because progressively they start to filter air which they have already filtered before. These facts mean that such a filter often makes little difference to the disappearance of mite dust from the air in an undisturbed and unventilated room and cannot keep up with the raising of mite dust in a disturbed room. In contrast, cat dust is much finer, and stays in the air much longer. This means that an air filtering appliance can make a difference to airborne cat dust in an undisturbed room, though probably not much difference in a room where new cat dust is being raised by humans or cats. However, installing an air filter is not a reasonable substitute for getting rid of the cats. So far, this ignores the effect of ventilation of the room. Exchanging the room air with outdoor air (e.g. by opening windows) could easily outstrip the effect of a room air filter, at the price of making the indoor temperature more like the outdoor temperature. If temperature or noise are not a problem, ventilation is likely to be a much more effective answer than filtration. If temperature is an issue, then a heat exchanging ventilator may still be a much better answer than a free-standing air filter, with the potential for a bigger effect for smaller running costs and noise levels. All the experts on mite dust control recommend ventilation of the house. In the presence of reasonable ventilation, a free-standing air filter will not make a worthwhile difference and will surely not justify its cost. • Mite-killing sprays. The use of Dust Mite Anti-Allergen Treatment has been shown the allergens are physically changed, rendering them permanently harmless to people who display allergic symptoms to dust mite allergens.. • Ionisers. All attempts to show their value have failed as far as I know. Mite-killing housepaint: forget it! MORE ABOUT DUST-PROOF BEDDING COVERS: They are essential for mite control. There are quite a number of kinds. Good ones are expensive. To be effective and good value they must be: • Dustproof. It is not enough if mites can’t crawl through. They must keep mite dust in the bedding away from the air we breate at night. They must enclose the matress, pillow(s) and duvet (comforter) completely. I wish manufacturers would fit them with filtered vents. • Permeable to water vapor. Otherwise sweat will accumulate next to the skin. • Comfortable to sleep on. Soft enough and not noisy when you turn over in bed. • Tough. Cheap non-woven fabric may tear soon and prove poor value. • Affordable. This is a problem area, at least in the United States, where people are less willing to spend on health. • Safe for infants and children. There should be no risk of play or other activity causing suffocation. • Recent research showed that versions which did not cover the bottom of the mattress completely worked about as well as those that did. • The use of Anti-Allergen Dust Mite Spray has been shown the allergens are physically changed, rendering them permanently harmless to people who display allergic symptoms to dust mite allergens THE BOTTOM LINE: Taking mite control seriously is a major step in your life. It involves a major re-think of your lifestyle and a financial commitment perhaps comparable to building a new extension to a house. Planning ahead makes it less wasteful financially; you may not be able to do much now, but planning changes when you move house can save you from expensive changes later. Many experts are passionately convinced about the value of mite control, but real proof that it works for most people in practice is scantier than it should be. Our verdict? If you have bad asthma, nose trouble or eczema, AND IF YOU HAVE BEEN PROVED TO BE ALLERGIC TO HOUSE DUST MITES, go for it. If you have bad asthma, nose trouble or eczema and have not had positive test results against house dust mites, consider it if there is a balance of probability that the mites are responsible, but be aware that you may be wasting your money and effort. For some people this can be a good bet, but you have to be prepared to find you have wasted your time. The fundamental principles of mite control are: • Mite control will not work for you if you are not allergic to mites. Get the diagnosis made properly before you spend a lot of money and effort. If your asthma does not seem to be due to allergy, or is caused by allergy to something else than mites, act accordingly. • If you mean business, be thorough. Dealing with one or two sources of mites is not likely to help all that much. This may be OK if you just have mild nose allergy to mites, but not if asthma is the problem. • Don’t expect miracles. You will still be breathing mite dust from other sources. Furthermore, the longer you have had asthma, the less good the result of mite control is likely to be. • Deny the mites living space. Deny them access to the big open spaces of your bed, and clean them off the surfaces. Remove the huge mass of carpet and cloth-covered furniture in which you cannot attack them effectively. • Make your house climate unfriendly to mites. Don’t allow humidity to build up, but ventilate. Don’t heat more or for longer than necessary. • Keep the mite dust out of your lungs. Avoid things which raise dust from reservoirs such as furniture and the floor, where it is harmless, to the air you breathe. Cover bedding with dust-proof material, avoid unnecessary dust-raising activity, avoid breathing dust raised by vacuuming and cleaning, and avoid having the reservoirs such as carpets and cloth-covered furniture from which airborne dust is raised. Wash or clean clothing which is likely to be a reservor. Avoid using vacuum cleaners where damp dusting is possible. Use a good filtering vacuum cleaner where vacuum cleaning is necessary. Have your carpets, upholstery, and mattresses professional cleaned and treated with Dust Mite Anti-Allergen. Beware of Dust Bunnies! Quietly lurking under our beds, inside sofas and carpet are creatures too small to see without a microscope or strong magnifying glass. Dust mites are in the arachnid family which includes spiders, scorpions and ticks. Dust mites feed on dead skin that sloughs from our bodies (and prob
ably potato chips & cookie crumbs). They live their whole lives in dark corner dust bunnies: hatching, growing, eating, defecating, mating, laying eggs.
It’s their bathroom habits that make us itch and wheeze. Many people develop severe allergies to dust mite droppings. Lie on a rug where they live and you might get itchy red bumps on your skin. Breath in dust and you may have more serious symptoms like difficulty breathing or even a severe asthma attack.
The tendency to develop allergies may be inherited. If you have allergic tendencies and are exposed to certain things in your environment (allergens), you may develop allergies to some of those things. Examples of allergy symptoms include itchy eyes, runny nose, asthma symptoms, eczema and rash. The timing of the allergic response may be immediate or delayed. Allergy testing may be recommended to help identify your allergies. Environmental Control
Once an allergy has been identified, the next step is to decrease or eliminate exposure to the allergen. This is called environmental control. Evidence shows that allergy and asthma symptoms may improve over time, if the recommended environmental control changes are made. Many of the changes are for the entire home. The bedroom is the most important, because the bedroom is where people usually spend 1/3 to 1/2 of their time.
Integrated Dust Mite Management
Integrated pest management (IPM) means that several tactics should be used at the same time to alleviate a pest problem. Complete elimination of house dust mites is not a realistic goal, but integrated mite management should revolve around reducing human exposure to allergens as well as making the environment inhospitable to house dust mites. Sleeping areas deserve the most attention.
MOLD
What is mold? What do I do if I have mold? How does mold effect the quality of the air in my home? These questions and more can be answered for you at the Environmental Protection Agency’s web-site. To learn more about mold and its effect on your health visit www.epa.go
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