Household dust is just a fact of life

There’s a passage in the Bible that says we’re all dust and to dust we will return. What you might not realize is that a little bit of us returns to dust every day.

When you find dust around your home, a lot of it came straight from you in the form of skin cells that are constantly flaking off and falling to the ground.

So as long as you and your family choose to live indoors, there’s going to be at least some dust to clean up.

Wright State University professor and researcher Larry Arlian is an internationally recognized expert on dust mites, the tiny, allergy-producing creatures that live and breed in household dust. And Arlian knows quite a bit about dust.

Arlian says dust is a complex mixture of a lot of different materials, and a lot of it is unavoidable.

The dust on mattresses, bedding and fabric furniture contains a large percentage of skin scales. Carpeted floors hold fewer skin scales, but they still hold a significant amount.

Another major dust component is fabric fibers from your clothes, carpets, upholstery and any other fabric that is regularly moved or touched.

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Typically, when we think of dust, we think of dirt, and household dust indeed contains hard particles of minute sand and soil.

Plant and insect parts come into the house with soil and sand.

Dust is full of finely ground leaf parts, seed pod remnants, mold spores and other plant material. Arlian said that when you examine household dust under a microscope, it is not at all unusual to spot ant heads or other insect body parts.

Pets can also add to dust. Like humans, pets shed skin scales, and they also shed fur, cast off feathers, track in dirt and release dander into the air. Pet dander and feathers are both major allergens, Arlian said.

One of the best ways to reduce household dust, according to Arlian, is to get rid of carpets. Carpets hold onto dust making it harder to get the dust out of your house. They also produce dust of their own in the form of carpet fibers.

Vinyl and leather furniture or wooden furniture produces and harbors less dust than upholstered furniture.

Making your house less dusty takes a two-pronged approach: You must get existing dust out of the environment and you must reduce the amount of dust coming in.

Using high-quality furnace filters and changing them regularly is one way of reducing the amount of dust that circulates in the air around your house. In cases where family members have serious allergies, it might pay to invest in air cleaning equipment attached to the heating and air conditioning system.

The benefits of having your heating system’s ductwork professionally cleaned are debatable. A spokesman for the National Air Duct Cleaning Association said recently that air-duct cleaning “could be extremely beneficial” for people with allergies. However, a spokesman for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America said, “There is not a lot of evidence that duct cleaning provides a measurable improvement in indoor air quality.”

Vacuuming regularly helps keep dust down, and many vacuum cleaners available today have high-efficiency filtering systems that keep dust from escaping into the air after it is picked up.

Arlian said dusting horizontal surfaces where dust accumulates is also important. “People used to dust with things like cloth diapers, and they just kind of moved dust around,” he said. “There are a lot of dusting products available now that do a very good job of trapping dust as they are used.”

Unseen in the dust where we rest are colonies of eight-legged relatives to spiders and lobsters, mating, defecating and gorging themselves on our cast-off skin.

Arlian, who has studied dust mites for more than 30 years, says that by the end of summer our beds and easy chairs are often teeming with microscopic dust mites. He said past studies in homes have found as many as 18,000 mites per gram of dust.

Dust mites are more than just creepy; they’re harmful. Researchers believe the critters and their waste can cause asthma, coughing, itchy eyes and running noses and may account for about 30 percent of all allergic discomfort.

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But Arlian said there are some fairly simple ways to drastically reduce the dust mite populations in the homes of people who are sensitive to their presence.

First, allergy sufferers should get rid of the carpets in their bedrooms. Next they should purchase dust mite barrier covers for their mattresses and pillows. To kill the mites that live in sheets and pillowcases, bedclothes should be washed weekly in hot water.

Arlian said the dust mite’s major weakness is that it requires humidity to survive and remain active.

He said mite populations crash during winter months when heating systems are active and indoor humidity is low. But their populations rebound in the humid summer.

The best way to keep dust mite populations down, Arlian said, is to use a dehumidifier during warm months to keep the humidity in your house below 50 percent.