What do you think are the most important things in the house? Surely the top 3 include the bed. We spend a significant portion of our lives in the bed: it’s a place to sleep, a place for lovemaking, a place to read at bedtime, sometimes even a place to eat breakfast. But it is not only us who like this piece of furniture – it is also a favorite place for harmful bacteria and fungi, and from a cozy “fortress” bed can easily turn into a blooming garden of infection. So said a microbiologist at New York University, Philip Tierno.
According to him, bed linen should be changed once a week. Otherwise, microscopic life begins to develop in the folds of sheets, pillowcases and duvet covers, which can even lead to disease. According to research on fungal contamination of bed linen, both down and synthetic pillows contain up to 16 types of fungi. However, not all of them are the product of our body excretions – although sweat, skin particles and other excretions certainly provide an excellent base for their development.
For example, the fungus multiplies especially actively in a warm and humid environment, and these are the conditions that we create in bed: only in it a person annually excretes about 118 liters of sweat. The bed also receives dust and dirt that we bring from the street. And those who have pets are also forced to sleep among particles of pet hair and saliva.
Dust gets in the bed not only from the human body: a huge role here is played by banal gravity, and even covers do not fully save the linen. Firstly dust tends to get in the smallest spaces between the bed and the bedcovers and secondly when we make the bed we raise a cloud of dust in one movement and let it settle on the bedcovers.
Of course, we can’t see all this stuff with the naked eye. But if we could, we would no longer want to sleep in such filth. And it’s not so much about aesthetics, but rather the fact that when we sleep, our mouth and nose are very close to the bedclothes, and therefore we actually breathe everything on them. For asthmatics and allergics, this can be doubly dangerous. But even for a healthy person, the constant inhalation of dust and dirt, accumulated after one or two weeks of use, can cause a scratchy throat and other unpleasant symptoms, and you don’t even want to think about what fungus can do.
Leave a Comment