Why it's good to regularly clean/replace pillows, mattresses

WHile we are on the subject of creepy crawlie things that are living much closer to us than we'd like....take a gander at this article in tne NYT.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/25/multimedia/bugs-halloween-kids-ar-ul.html

DON’T LOOK NOW, but there are mites living on your face. Eight-legged face mites eat, give birth to babies and die right there on your cheek. Almost everyone has them.

Take a deep breath: You’ve just brought hundreds or thousands of species of microbes into your lungs. Sit down: You can’t see it, but now you’re surrounded by “a floating, leaping, crawling circus” of microscopic life, writes the ecologist Rob Dunn in his book “Never Home Alone.” Dunn and his team at North Carolina State University study the bacteria, fungi and insects that hang out in your home, and there are lots of them: As many as 200,000 species are your roommates!

There’s a whole food web associated with you falling apart,” Dunn says. All of this keeps your dead skin from piling up. It’s kind of gross but, hey, so are humans.

Face Mite
These scaly microscopic mites live in the hair follicles and oil glands of your face. (Two face mite species are found just on humans. Lucky us). We don’t know what they’re eating exactly — it could be our oils, skin cells or microbes — but it’s enough to keep them content for their entire lives (a few weeks).

“I like to think of them as grazers,” Dunn says. Face mites mostly move around your face during the night because they don’t like bright light.

FACE MITE: