Indeed, if your pillow is six years old – which is apparently about the average age for a pillow – it has been estimated that one tenth of its weight will be made up of ‘sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung’, to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Centre27. (But at least they are your mites. Think of what you snuggle up with each time you climb into a hotel bed.)fn3 These mites have been with us since time immemorial28, but they weren’t discovered until 1965.
