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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."
As a challenge for my immune system. If I am weak, I shall die... but if I strong, I shall live and reproduce! My genetic information will spread!
Well as one who has struggled with asthma forever I find this interesting news and could offer potential explanations for the ratcheting up of symptoms when going to bed (always, weird). It would have been nice if the article offered up more ideas about approaches to attenuate the exposure and risk of the fungi. For those who scanned, the best and only tidbit I could find in the entire article was this indirect advice: " Fortunately, hospital pillows have plastic covers and so are unlikely to cause problems, ..."
And how many spores do I inhale just by walking outside my front door? How many live in the rugs at my place of work? How many may be found in the seats at the movie theater? Millions. Thats why he have an immune system IIRC.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
The real question is who uses a pillow for 20 years. That fungus could be older than your kids.
They should have studied my Calc 2 text book from college. I caught myself asleep and drooling on that poor book more times than I can remember.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Goodnight Timmy and don't let the fungal spores cause you respiratory distress.
adopt a dog from the SPCA. Great companions, and great pillows too!*
I used to have a german shep/rot mix. loyal as can be and a great companion to the end. He also made a great pillow too!
Grump
*until it farts or wants to get up and leave.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
A lot of this comes accross as scare tactics, imo. Fungal spores are very, very small things. So you have several thousand per gram, and a million of em on your pillow. How does this compare to other non-pillow personal objects? Is this unusual? It would have been nice if the reporter commented on data from the negative control such as a pillow nobody sleeps on. Furthermore, what percentage of these million fungi are actually pathogenic?
My son has dust allergies, and the Dr. recommended wrapping his pillow in polyethlyene and taping it. With a good thick pillow case over it, you barely notice it, yet retain the comfort of the pillow.
I would imagine that would go a long way towards reducing fungus and other pillow-dwellers.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Health experts are now warning of population explosions of foreign life forms able to subsist upon only sunlight and air. These dangerous beings, dubbed "plants" by leading scientists, pose a grave new threat to humanity.
An excerpt from the Journal of Science quotes Dr. Hys Tarea of the University of New Dehli: "With unlimited energy sources, these plants will cover every corner of arable land and consume large quantities of the earth's atmosphere if left unchecked, expelling only oxygen waste. These life forms have been living among us for millions of years and only now is the danger apparent. We must move quickly if we are to save lives."
The article fails to mention that there are bacteria, funguses, and viruses everywhere.
Probably the article is a public relations effort. Probably the Fungal Research Trust is a money-making scheme of one or more large pharmaceutical companies, a way to preserve deniability.
The web site says it is a "not-for-profit charity". However, there are many ways that those who control the "charity" can use general research for profit. If there's some social cost, however, a "charity" provides a barrier between the work and the pharmaceutical companies.
Maybe people will spend more money on fungus medicine because of the article.
The fact that the article has no balance or perspective indicates the real purpose is different than telling the truth, in my opinion.
First I thought this danger was related to pillow fights!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
My wife has bad asthma so we :
1.make sure to buy new pillows every year or so (the cheap synthetic kind)
2.wash them often in hot water
3.wash the pillow cases in bleach and hot water every week
4.use protective dust mite covers (not sure if these work for fungual spores?). The plastic ones should work too.
All in all it works pretty well. This article though seems to fall into the "let's play on people's fear of the invisible deadly germs" category. Everyone has been sleeping on old pillows made from animal feathers for centuries and millenia probably and we seem to have survived. So people who are healthy could just continue sleeping the way they did before. There are probably other problems in the world to worry about other than fungus in pillows.
I was hoping that perhaps the editors had finally broken their unspecified "arraignment" with Roland Piquepaille due to the enormous outcry, but alas, they waited until things cooled-down from his 50 submissions a week, and are now once again accepting anything he submits.
/. reader again.
This time, the only link to his "news" site is the link for his name, but I don't think that will last for long. By his 40th story this time next week we can be assured that a quick paraphrase....er..."overview" will quietly slip in again, and multiply from there.
To think, I almost became a regular
The really interesting thing is that if the editors came clean on a lot of things from the outset, it would allay a lot of concerns, instead they give us a wall of silence except when it comes time to ask for subscriptions.
I read this in school when i was a child.
;))
It's Horacio Quiroga's short story The Feather Pillow.
http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0568.pdf
So much for fungal spores...try this and you will throw your pillow out the window (or buy synthetics, like the one I have
... just drench your pillow in a cocktail of fungicide and DDT and a few other nerve agents. That should lower your risk substantially.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
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.
This appears to have been a decent, if pointless bit of research. They found fungus in pillows. Then some idiot came up with stuff like this:
"Aspergillus fumigatus, the species most commonly found in the pillows, is most likely to cause disease; and the resulting condition Aspergillosis has become the leading infectious cause of death in leukaemia and bone marrow transplant patients. Fungi also exacerbate asthma in adults."
The reason aspergillus is the leading cause of death in leukaemia patients is because their immune systems are comprimized. This is similar to Candida Albicans (see: yeast infections), which is THE leading cause of death in transplant patients, IIRC, due to its buildup on cathoders, and on implant devices. For normal people, Aspergillus has only minor effects.
This article continues to raise the areas of danger including this gem:
"Invasive Aspergillosis occurs mainly in the lungs and sinuses, although it can spread to other organs such as the brain, and is becoming increasingly common across other patient groups. It is very difficult to treat, and as many as 1 in 25 patients who die in modern European teaching hospitals have the disease. "
Wow. 4% of deaths can be attrubuted to aspergillis species. Pardon me, but this is not particularly impressive.
My best guess is that this press release is either because the researchers are working with a pillowcase disinfectant company, or because they're trying to play up the importance of their research to get more funding.
All in all, unimpressive, and I expect better of slashdot than to blindly believe headlines.
hmmmm?
Especially slashdotters who expect to get a girl into a bed full of filthy pillows that they're using to "boost their immune system"
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You know, we are evolved (or designed, heh) to live in a world with bacteria, viruses, and fungus. How did we get to the point where we fear our natural environment so much? I grew up with a mother who constantly disinfected everything including me. I had alergies and I had regular sickness. My immune system never got to develop immunity.
I'm still a clean person and people (women even!) tell me so. But I shower without soap and rarely use deodorant... I've found my skin works better. I don't disinfect everything around me. I don't get sick often anymore, and when I do it is mild and brief. I've been doing this more than five years now.
Anyways, I don't really care what's in my pillow. I'm sure it's full of fungus, dust mites, electrons and protons even. Who cares? There's also billions of bacteria multiplying in my colon. It's the way the world works.
I get the sense most people here know this already, but I just get surprised when I hear these kinds of stories -- like the one where they said there are more bacteria on a keyboard than on a toilet. And your mouth has more bacteria than your genitals. But it seems to work out okay.
Cheers.
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.
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1500 thread count is nothing. I recently upgraded to pure plastic sheets, which have practically infinite thread count - perfectly smooth, no detectable weave texture at all.
If chicks dig 1500 thread count sheets, just wait till they see the plastic sheets on my bed. They'll go nuts.
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