IF DRIBBLE, bedbugs and stale sweat aren鈥檛 enough to give you sleepless nights, maybe this will: your pillow could be riddled with allergy-causing fungal spores.
Ashley Woodcock of the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues have found mini fungal 鈥渆cosystems鈥� inhabiting five feather and five synthetic pillows that had been lain on for between 18 months and 20 years. Each contained up to a million spores from around 16 different species of fungi. The most common 鈥� Aspergillus fumigatus 鈥� is also the most harmful, with the potential to aggravate asthma and cause fatal lung infection (to be published this week in Allergy).
The fungi are kept warm and watered by the 100 litres of sweat we typically leak into our beds each year, and find nourishment in human skin scales and the faeces of dust mites. The worst infestations were in modern synthetic pillows, possibly because synthetic covers are more porous than traditional cotton ones.
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The last investigation of fungi in pillows was in 1936, says Woodcock, who now wants to look at whether infested pillows cause disease. He believes the gradual switch to synthetic pillows could be implicated in the rising incidence of asthma, which has doubled every decade for the past 40 years.
