Article: For Many Allergy Sufferers, The Dust Mite Is a Devil Indeed.(Brief Article)

Tonight, as you prepare to lay your head on your freshly fluffed feather pillow, consider one fact: It contains tens of thousands of tiny spiderlike creatures. "There are approximately a thousand dust mites in a gram of dust," says Thomas Platts-Mills, an allergy and mite expert at the University of Virginia Medical School.

Before you hurl your pillow across the room, however, consider the fact that these tiny creatures have been around for a long time--300 million or so years--and that they surely will always be with us. Mites were first identified in the outdoors. They were observed by Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the microscope in 1674. But dust mites were so ...

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