Pillows Dangerous for Your Health

Roland Piquepaille writes "I guess we shouldn't be surprised by the fact that our pillows are miniature zoos containing millions of fungal spores, with some species able to cause diseases and even death. Researchers at the University of Manchester have studied the fungal contamination of our pillows for the first time in seventy years and discovered that these pillows were hot beds of fungal spores. After dissecting both feather and synthetic pillows in regular use between several months and 20 years, they've "identified several thousand spores of fungus per gram of used pillow -- more than a million spores per pillow."

Comments

Kindness, or maximizing shareholder value?

[Futurepower(R)]

Here is a list of contributors to the Fungal Research Trust: Fujisawa Corporation, Oxford Glycosciences, F2G Ltd, Chronic Granulomatous Disorder Research trust, Aventis, Janssen Research Foundation, Roche, Schering Plough Corporation, The Liposome Company, Merck Inc, Imedex Inc, Bristol Myers Squibb, Aronex Ltd, Vestar Inc, Eli Lilly, BioMerieux, Alza Corporation, Pfizer Inc, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, Phairson Ltd, GlaxoWellcome, The Gossett Trust, The Clear Group, British Medical Association, Basilea, Valeant, Orthobiotech.

Question: Are the pharmaceutical companies funding the Trust out of the kindness of their hearts, or is the Trust a way of maximizing shareholder value?

If a pharmaceutical company wants to do some research that is risky to people, the company can avoid liability by having the work done by a "charitable" trust.

The Trust can even collect money from the public, and use it to fund research that will eventually end in a profitable product.

Although I'm no allergologist...

[DrYak]

They are metabolically inactive and are incredibly tough to destroy.

On the other hand, I don't think the parent poster wanted to destroy the spores.
He said his wife was asthmatic and AFAIK (im not allergologist, only MD), Acari are much more common allargen causing asthma and therefor I think that's what they targeted in their cleaning method.

Like he said : people are living with all these bacterial spores for ages without much problems. There's no point at all in sleeping in a surgical-grade sterile bed. Only some people have asthma problems and must pay a little attention.

Reasons why sterile bed sheets are stupid :
- There's litteraly millions of bacterial spore around. A few more or less in the bed aren't making change at all.

- Out of the incredible amount of bacterial species, only a really tiny fraction are pathogens. The biggest fraction don't harm the human body at all. Mostly because they just don't reproduce well in "body environnement" (for exemple : most bacteria have an optimal temperature of 20C or less, whereas pathogenes are usually among the few that work better around 37C)

- TFA is about fungal spores (Aspergillus in this case). Normally, fungi *are completly harmless*, except in some very *special* occasion, like reduced immunological function (the article mentions leukemia, AIDS and drugs like steroids and drugs used for transplantations) and/or free sterile niche (we human aren't sterile at all. But most of the time we are covered with completly harmless bacteria, that just sit here and take the place, so there's no more free room for pathogens. - Example : when taking antibiotics that are to strong and not enough specific, too much of the normal harmless bacteria may die and thus leaving place for Candida to proliferate). Healthy people shouldn't care.

- Allergies (and asthma) don't develop just like this by themself. For an allargen to create a new allergy, there must be always some chemical that triggers the immune system, usually an irritating one (in case of Acari, it's the protease that they secrete in their feces. In case of animal fur, it's other enzymes that are present in the saliva and that the animal spreads on his/her fur when cleaning him/herself). But spores are, as you said, an inactiveted form of the bacteria, sleeping and waiting for better time. And thus, they don't secrete much, so they cannot produce irritating chemicals that could trigger an immune reaction. Therefor, they cannot create a new allergy on their one. There's only an allergic reaction if something else has previously created an allergy and if antibodies of this new allergy can also cross-react with the non-irritating stuff.

- Some evidence tend to show that sterile environnement *may* be bad for allergy. Because allergy is a form of immune system malfunction, and in non sterile environnement you keep one's immune system busy with other things, therefor preventing allergy to happen in those people who have such allergic immune system. ...

Once again, I'm not an allergologist, so maybe there's some revelent detail that I haven't studied.