You might think that the discovery of bed bugs in your home is thoroughly disgusting and you cannot think of much else being worse than that. However, humans share their beds with thousands of dust mites every year. These microscopic parasites feed on your dead skin cells, while the bed bugs draw your blood for their meals. Having both in your bed makes you a giant buffet to these nasty creatures. If you want to kill both the bed bugs and the mites, there are some common steps that bed bug exterminators use.
Bed Bug Poisons Can Kill Dust Mites
A few of the poisons exterminators use for bed bugs can and do easily kill dust mites. Try products with borate, pyrethrins, permethrin and/or piperonyl butoxide in them. Unfortunately, dust mites can find safe hiding spots anywhere on your body. When you go to bed, the mites just hop off and go back to eating, defecating and procreating. Therefore, while you might eliminate all of the dust mites on your mattress along with the bed bugs using a bed bug/home environment pesticide, any mites that escaped can inhabit your mattress again. Use a pesticide in conjunction with other pest control methods.
Vacuuming and Professional Mattress Cleaning
If you have not tried already, vacuum in and around your entire bed. Schedule a professional mattress cleaning, which not only removes the dust mites, their eggs and their young, but it will also draw bed bugs out of the mattress with the boiling hot water used to clean mattresses and carpets. Any dead bed bug carcasses and bed bug feces are removed during a professional steam cleaning and vacuuming too. Then you can start with a relatively clean surface when the bed bug exterminators apply the pesticides.
Protective Encasements
Plastic mattress and pillow covers may feel weird to sleep on at first, but if any of the mites and bed bugs have survived the poisons, vacuuming and professional mattress cleaning, they cannot survive this final method. They cannot get to you and have nothing to eat, so they die. Just be sure to wash and dry all of your bedding on the hottest settings and place your box spring as well as your mattress and pillows in cases that zip up all the way around. Additionally, you will want to encase your mattress and box spring after applying a pesticide in order to avoid direct contact with the chemicals found in bed bug and dust mite pesticides.
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