For those who have serious dust or dust mite allergies, sleep itself can become a dangerous thing. Beds have become the natural habitat of these little creatures and dust from human skin cells and the environment naturally comes to fill their limits. However, some of these issues can be easily dealt with simply by purchasing an allergy mattress pad to form a barrier between the dust mites and the person lying in the bed.
The immune system is a marvel. No other animal posses a cellular defense grid which even approaches ours and the benefits display themselves every time we cut ourselves or recover from the flu. These macrophages, neutrophils, and mast cells keep us alive and healthy most of the time by attacking hostile foreign matter. Allergies occur when this system becomes mistargeted, coming to recognize harmless, common substances as threatening.
Dust mite dander is a common substance for this misdirection. For one thing we sleep in a huge amount of it all the time. Whenever human skin builds up (as it does continually in your bedding) these mites begin to grow and thrive, consuming it harmlessly unless someone’s immune system picks them up as foreign and hostile, which can occur naturally in any person (usually in childhood) through highly developed systems which we need to survive.
While buying certain types of mattresses and changing the sheets every night are effective strategies, an equally effective and far less difficult or expensive solution is simply dividing the human body from the source of the allergen via a hypoallergenic mattress pad, one designed to prevent colonization by dust mites and reduce the likelihood of developing a dust mite allergy, or the severity of reaction for those who are allergic already.