Is it true that home dust is 70% of human skin?

In the collections of entertaining facts, you can find information that home dust consists mainly of human skin. We decided to check if such a statement is true.

Information that dead skin - basic Dust component, you can Meet In many Collections Entertaining facts, c Media And even on resources With medical information. The numbers differ: in some sources, they report that the skin It is 70% of home dust, in others - already up to 90%.

Our body is constantly Updated. Every second, about 3.8 million cells die and appears in it, about 330 billion per day. Each type of cell has its own “life”. So, intestinal cells Live About 10.7 years, epithelial cells are only five days, and the retinal cells are all human life.

Leather, the largest organ of a person, consists of an epidermis (surface layer) and dermis (inner layer). For a complete renewal of the epidermis Required from 40 to 56 days. Per hour dies And an average of 200 million skin cells exfoliate. Just a day dies from 0.72 to 0.18 g of skin. Some of the dead cells, as you might guess, are delayed for a while by clothing, while another part falls into the environment, including dust. In addition to the skin, homemade dust includes microparticles of paint, tissue fibers, mold, various building materials, plant pollen, bacteria, viruses, dead cells of other organisms (pets and insects), ashes, soil, soil particles and various minerals. All these elements in the composition of dust discovered Canadian scientists, collecting samples in 1025 houses of urban residents of the country.

American scientists InstalledThat about 60% dust consists of particles brought from the outside of the room, that is, from the street, and 40% of the components of dust are produced inside the house. This is already less than the declared 70%, but human skin is not the only “internal” dust source. 

Scientists from the University of Technological University in the Netherlands calculated that the most skin cells are in the dust that accumulates in mattresses. Depending on the type of filler, in dust from the mattress can contain up to 53% of dead epidermis cells. The percentage of the content of dead cells in the dust of armchairs and sofas is also high. Moreover, about Half Dust particles less than 100 micrometers are dead skin, but among particles from 100 to 300 micrometers, the skin is only 20%.

Researchers of the non -profit project Caba, promoting intellectual construction technology, Analyzed 5197 dust samples collected in 48 states of the United States from 2007 to 2017. Human skin cells made only a small share in the studied samples (marked by light blue in the diagram).

In general, it is almost impossible to derive a universal value, how much percent of dust is human skin. The presence of carpet coatings Increases The total amount of dust contained in the house. Pets also make a significant contribution to the formation of dust. The amount of dust will also vary depending on the climatic zone, time of year, weather outside and how often the residents go outside and return to the room. 

Thus, popular figures are 70%, 80% and 90% highly overstated. Matracies and sleeping places contain the most skin cells in the composition of dust, however, in them the content of the dead epidermis reaches only 53%, in the rest of the skin of the skin in the composition of dust, much less.

Not true

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