Did you know that your mattress is the perfect breeding ground for dust mites? Their colonies thrive on your bed because it has all the factors that make their breeding possible - warmth, moisture and food.
Yes, they have an inexhaustible supply of food thanks to the shedding of your skin cells! On an average bedroom mattress, there are hundreds of millions of these nasty and microscopic creatures that crawl all over your body and even enter your respiratory system.
Are you getting goosebumps yet? The thought of these little critters can be quite uncomfortable, but the truth is, they don't do our health any good.
One thing you probably didn't know is that dust mites do not have an internal digestive tract like we humans do - all the food processing happens on the outside.
Enzymes (their feces) excreted by these microscopic creatures are deposited on the dust particles and skin flakes we drop.
The enzymes then breaks down these particles and make it easy for the dust mites to eat.
We then breathe in these particles which are the main causes of allergies such as asthma as well as other breathing problems.
So how can you ensure you get rid of these nasty allergens? Well the truth is, it's not easy at all.
Dust mites are extremely resilient and vacuuming your mattress or changing your sheets won't help much.
They burrow themselves deep into your mattress linings, so it makes it impossible for any vacuum cleaner to reach them.
The mites reproduce at an alarming rate and if you don't kill them all, their numbers just keep growing.
There are thankfully several solutions though.
Firstly, you can place your mattress out in the sunlight every week or so as ultraviolet light actually destroys most allergens including the dust mites.
Second, all the allergens are destroyed at high temperatures so you could invest in a good upholstery steamer and run it over your mattress every week or so.
These steamers can be quite costly but there are also other alternatives you might like to try.
If you look through your telephone directory, you will come across many mattress cleaning services that will gladly come over to your home and sanitize your bedding as well as furniture.
Their industrial strength cleaners will ensure that your mattress is free of dust mites and they also apply a special protective coating to retard the growth of bacteria as well as fungus, which should last about a year.
This is something you will need to have done on a yearly basis if you want your room to remain allergen free.