Your bed sheets could be making you sick
After a long hard day there’s nothing better than to fall into a comfy bed for a restful night’s sleep, right? Maybe not, according to home hygiene expert Dr Lisa Ackerley, millions of tiny organisms, such as dust mites and dead, castaway skin cells live in our bed sheets.
Our mattresses, doonas, and pillows are reservoirs of human skin cells, which encourages dust mites and increases our risk of suffering a cold as well allergies.
But that’s not all – our bed linen can harbour bacteria that causes nasty illnesses like the flu and food poisoning. Dr Ackerley calls this "sick bed syndrome" and said most people don't realise it's happening to them.
She told the DailyMail: “Humans shed half an ounce of skin week and a lot of that will be in the bed.
“Dust mites like warm moist environments, the bed’s the perfect environment. They reproduce so there will be about 10 million per bed.
“Often people are away in the day, so they shut the windows and the moisture stays in the house.
“If you make the bed when you go out that traps the duvet and the moisture, and the dust mites have a great time.”
She added, in two years around 10 per cent of the weight of a pillow will be made up of dust mites and their droppings.
While dust mites themselves won’t cause you to get sick, their faeces and body fragments can irritate allergies, eczema, hay fever and asthma.
"If people have a cold, it can survive on the bed linen and it can survive a wash. Someone with food poisoning could be excreting salmonella into the bed," Dr Ackerley added.
So how exactly do you get rid of these dust mites and bacteria? Dr Ackerley recommends washing bed linens at a low temperature, using an antibacterial detergent. She also suggests keeping your widows open when possible to let some of the humidity and moisture out to reduce the likelihood of dust mites breeding in your sheets.
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