Blocked Nose or Asthma at Night? How to Eradicate House Dust Mite

hi there my name is Vic Veer I'm an interior consultant working for the NHS in central London I often talk about blocked nose in this on my channel because a lot of my patients are on CPAP that mask that you wear if you've got obstructive sleep apnea and that causes a blocked nose but there are other reasons why people might have a blocked nose such as something known as house dust mite house dust mite is a is a little creature that lives in most of the houses in this country in the UK and it tends to cause an allergic response to nose that blocks up your nose so in this video I'm going to tell you all about these little creatures specifically I'll concentrate on how to get rid of them and if you watch to the end of this video I do have a free ebook that I'll make available to anyone who wants to know about this so anyway back to this video how star smites are about a quarter of a millimeter in size and they are not bed bugs a lot of people think they're bed bugs these bed bugs are discussing little creatures that bite you and go underneath your skin and grow there that's not what this is all about this is about house dust might say don't do that they are disgusting and however in lots of different fascinating exciting ways if I don't bite us they actually feed off our skin in the stuff that flakes off us every day so we lose about a gram and a half of skin every day and that gram and half can feed about a million house dust mites and a lot of these house dice might live in fabric back like a mattress um our carpets curtains upholstery on furniture things like that so for example in mattresses they're about up to about 10 million house dust mites in a mattress and because each of these house dust might make about a hundred babies and each house dust mate makes about 200 little poo samples in their lifetime which is about about 10 weeks long their lifespan you can imagine there's an awful lot of stuff going on in your bed though I had a really disgusting fact once that if you have a bed for about I think it was two to five years it's typically twice the weight it was when you first purchased it because of all the skin and little creatures crawling around in it and I guess the the animal poo in there but I guess that mattress must be quite nice for house dust mite because they're sort of lying in your bed and letting flakes of food come down on top of them and then they just sort of have babies in amongst their poo so it must be a wonderful life for them it's a bit like sort of being outside and donuts flying from the sky or something I don't know how you can live like that but anyway that's how it seems to be for house dust mine now the reason I'm telling about house dust mites is that this house dust smoke particularly their poo and different components parts of their body because there's so much of it in our houses these days that it ends up getting into the air and we when if it's in the air we breathe it in through our nose and our mouth and so a lot of people have a house dust my allergy and it gives them asthma or a blocked nose because it causes inflammation inside your nose now often when we doctors see this on a rast blood test or a skin prick test ah you're allergic to house dust mite please take this spray and hopefully that will be the end of it now that works very well because what it does is that that steroid spray suppresses your immune system stops it from reacting so much to the allergens that you're breathing in every day but some people rather sensibly think well maybe I should just get rid of the house dust mite and I won't have this problem so much so the first thing people do when they learn about how Stuff might think our house dust might write dust right all I need to do is get a vacuum cleaner and vacuum clean and get rid of all the dust from this house and it'll be great I'll spend the whole day and everything will be cured unfortunately it doesn't work very well um cleaning up with the vacuum cleaner does work to an extent it gets rid of a lot of the Poo but doesn't seem to get rid of the house dust mite and also you need to have a vacuum cleaner which has got a HEPA filter on it because what you're doing is with the Hoover is blasting the the Poo into the air and that's not great because it'll all settle again and then the whole thing will start all over again so you do need to get a vacuum cleaner that will flush out or filter out all this stuff from the air so if you're interested in what I bought for my family to try and reduce the amount of house dust mites in our house there's some links in the video description below about some Amazon links that things like this vacuum cleaner I was telling you about with the HEPA filter and there are other things you can think about as well for example the temperature is really important because house dust might like to live between about 20 to 25 degrees Celsius that's how they they grow the most I think 23 is meant to be the optimal sort of temperature that happens to be the same sort of temperature we have in our bedrooms as well although I think officially you should try and be a little bit low if you want to get better sleep but that's another video which I'll I think I'll pop up there for you there is an important fact that that house dust mites tend to die when the temperature rises about 55 to 60 degrees so if you have bed sheets and duvets pillows all those sorts of things you should try and wash them at about 60 degrees or higher um 60 degrees Celsius is 140 degrees Fahrenheit I don't really understand what Fahrenheit is but apparently a lot of Americans use Fahrenheit something to do with to stabilize pressure of ammonia and ice and water or something I don't understand it I use celsius because that's zero is freezing 100 is boiling but anyway whatever you like to use it's about 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees Celsius so that works really well and also you can use the tumble dry which tends to be a little bit hotter as well and that gets rid of a lot of things in your bed sheets and things like that but you still got like soft toys that you can't wash at sort of 60 to 70 degrees so what some people do is get their soft toys from their children put them in a seal bag put them in the freezer overnight and then wash them at the normal temperature that seems to reduce house dust mites a little bit as well but on saying that it's really hard to put your your mattress into the into the washing machine it just you can't do that all your carpets that just it's just not going to work so what I would use for the carpets is a sort of a steam vacuum cleaner that will sort of steam the carpets and try and kill off as many of the house dust mites you can in that in the in the carpet but also instead of just the temperature you should also think about the humidity in your bedrooms only in your house because house dust might really need a lot of fluid or water in the air to help them grow they particularly like a humidity of about sort of 70 or 60 to 70 percent humidity in the air and you can buy these little monitors that tells you how much humidity is in the air I think what I'm trying to do is reduce the humidity down to about 30 40 percent because that will severely impact the growth cycle and the the life cycle of these house dust mites and make it easier for you to clean the area up and stop them from growing so quickly back now if you remember I started talking about the vacuum clean and pumping this stuff out into the air and you changing the bed sheets and doing all that sort of thing will release a lot of house dust mites into the air what I have done is bought an air purifier with again a filter in it so you can leave that on all the time it clears out the air all the time so you don't get this uh air filled up with house dust mites and and house dust might poo and that will also reduce the the amount of steroids you need to give your child another thing you can do because as I said you can get house dust mite in the in the arms and the upholstery of your furniture which is you can't wash or do anything you can get these chemicals that can kill off house dust mite and you can spray that onto your furniture looking at the research that there are variable results of this and sometimes you can get resistance forming with these sprays some of these chemicals I would say that you should spray it and then leave the room use your air purifier to clean out the air as well I'd leave room for at least 20 minutes because although they say they're safe it just sort of slightly worries me and some of these these chemicals can be harmful to your pets so do look at them from a medication point of view without using steroids I would use something like a hypotonic sterimar sort of spray or a saline spray and you just spray the stuff up your nose and that washes out all the allergens so you don't get so affected by them particularly with a blocked nose and if you notice that you're getting very itchy and sort of red eyes and watery eyes then things like antihistamines again I'll put a link in the video description if I can find one these can help reduce the itchiness in your throat and the you know people sort of uh with their tongue in the roof of their mouth and they get very itchy eyes and get red eyes people are in those have those sorts of symptoms rather than the block nose then you can use um antihistamine that helps that just be wary that although the new antihistamines say that they're non-drowsy which is true they are less drowsy than the others they still cause drowsiness and don't um think that they're non-drowser they are still drowsy but what I really want to make clear is that all of this is is more of a campaign rather than like a single battle you need to do this week it's a real hassle but if you want to try and protect your family that's what you need to do just keep at it keep keeping the house clear of house dust mites you don't have to use so much steroid and fingers crossed that's all you need and you find that actually I don't need so much of suppressing of my own immune system just to live in my own house and hopefully it'll help you now if your doctor does say look really ought to use a steroid spray which is a good idea whilst you're sorting out the house clearing out the house dust mite you need to make sure that you're using your steroid spray correctly a lot of people sort of spray and sniff it up which is one of the worst things you can do with these sprays so if you want to know more about how to use a steroid spray correctly so you don't get all the side effects and get the maximum benefit from these sprays look at this video here a lot of people seem to like it so hopefully you'll find that useful but before I forget I did set this after this video that there is a free ebook available so all you need to do is look at the video description and there's a link there that goes to this ebook and this ebook has a lot of the details I couldn't put into this video because this video would be really even more boring that it already is now and so if you want to learn more about these little spiders the arachnid creatures that sort of end up filling the air full of poo then that's the kind of book you can read and hopefully you'll find out of some benefit as well if you don't want to be a part of my newsletter please just unsubscribe again and and that's fine I'm not going to be upset if you do that anyway thank you very much do take care bye-bye

Channel: Vik Veer - ENT Surgeon

Views: 33,344

Keywords: house dust mite

Id: 4USV9tq932s

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2023