I wish the article would have addressed how babies get these mites from their parents. Are they present in the womb? Or do they get transferred from all the hugs and kisses?
> Thoemmes also sampled ten 18-year-olds and found Demodex DNA on just 70 percent of them. This fits with what earlier studies had shown—the mites seem to become more common with age. They’re rare on babies, more common on teenagers, and universal in adults. No one really knows where we get them from. Dogs get their face-mites during nursing, and humans might do the same—after all, one study found a lot of Demodex living in nipple tissue. But the fact that some teens aren’t colonised suggests that we pick up these creatures throughout our lives.
There's no way they are in the womb (they wouldn't be able to get inside the uterus, and the immune system would attack them quite quickly if they did).
They are almost certainly transfered via close skin contact (breastfeeding, etc).
"There's no way they are in the womb (they wouldn't be able to get inside the uterus, and the immune system would attack them quite quickly if they did)." That is simply untrue [1,2,3,4, 5]. It has been recently discovered that many fetuses acquire their gut bacteria before parturition, it is logical to assume that the same can happened with these mites.
If it is the former then this is a beautiful example of something being a hilariously unfathomable idea* in the not too distant past ... and then turning out to be sort of true. I like these :)
On the contrary, it's better to look close. Death to the public squeamishness about human biology, I say! Know and understand how your body travels through life, don't fear it and put it out of your mind :)
If I remember correctly, our guts have more bacteria surface exposure than our own cells. The interactions betwen what we eat , these bacteria, and our own genome is a big black box at this stage.
I woke up with swollen eyelids one morning a few years back and was diagnosed with blepharitis later that day. I now use Sterilid 1-2 times a day since it contains tea tree oil which supposedly is effective in treatment against Demodex. I occasionally still get flareups/complications but they've definitely seemed rarer since using the product:
I've been trying to come up with a plan of how to teach them how to tapdance.
So, if you see someone out busking with a lab microscope and a boombox, shouting something about face spiders, then chuck us a quid. I promise to remember it when me and the crew are rich and famous.
I really hope this article doesn't make anyone actually try to get rid of these arachnids although I'm sure "hygiene" companies will be all over this in a few years.
> Spiders are living on your FACE! Please buy our stuff.
Already happening in Easter Europe and China. Go to the doctor and they show you under the microscope -- look you got spiders on your face. Buy this cream we made in the basement over at my cousins' it will help you.
That's interesting. I know that eyelash mites and insects are quickly killed by alcohol though. Perhaps they used a different type or concentration? I know it can't be pure alcohol won't work for example, it needs some water to absorb into the cell.
It would work at most until the next time you come in contact with a human or another mammal, which is probably not very far away. I guess even just shaking hands would be enough, since people often touch their face with their hands. The individual mites communities on each mammal are probably not very isolated but come often in contact with mites from other animals.
TFA annoyed me much less than those hand-wavy evo-psych essays do. Actually the evolutionary stuff made sense, if one assumes that mites inhabiting different animal species are themselves different species, which do not or cannot interbreed. Maybe other research has indicated that?
