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I have had a very similar experience. Nearly every expert or authority I have contacted to try to get to a resolution has been dismissive saying that this problem cannot possibly be real. “Mites don’t behave this way.” “They can’t sustain life on human blood.” Which is confusing to me because mange mites and scabies exist, why is it such a far-fetched plausibility that other parasitic mites could exist?
Two pest control companies have tried and then given up. I had to collect my own samples on glue boards and find them with a microscope to get the consulting entomologists to identify them. Most of them agree they are a species of bird mite. Either Red Chicken mites or Northern Fowl mites, one said it is a mix of both. Even with that proof, both pest control companies have refused to take on the work to solve it and would not provide me documentation of the identification for me to take elsewhere. I had to catch more samples and send them off to the local state university extension office to get documented proof and suggestions of how to resolve the issue. I sent this documentation to the county health department and got some more suggestions in return but they are all of the same things people have been discussing here for years and are only marginally effective. I took the documentation from the health department to medical professionals to seek treatment for parasites and was refused care and had my concerned dismissed.
We are almost entirely on our own to fight this as there is very little incentive for anyone else to care or invest their time and I can’t entirely blame them because who would want to be anywhere near this if it meant the possibility of potentially ruining their own life in the process?
From my experience and reading on the subject it is really hard to tell how easily these things can spread to other people. I have avoided people as much as possible and kept people out of my house but I have still had to be around other people occasionally. As far as I know none of those people have contracted a mite infestation.
Even within my house there are 3 of us who have varying degrees of how negatively impacted we are by the mites. One person is hardly bothered by them but notices crawling sensations occasionally enough to be annoying. Another person has bites on their head and ears and has crawling sensations often, particularly in/around their ears. I am the most affected with very frequent, aggressive pin prick needle stabbing sensations and crawling sensations all over my body. At the peak of this infestation I would get bit thousands of times in a night and had wounds from the bites on the sensitive skin on the sides of my face and around my ears. I never showed any wounds on the rest of my body and after awhile I didn’t even get wounds on my head from the bites anymore despite still being bit. For a couple months I didn’t sleep for more than 20-30 minutes a night having to go take showers and get a fresh blanket moving around the house trying to escape these things. Thankfully, I have controlled the infestation down to where it isn’t nearly that bad anymore because that wasn’t survivable long term. I still get bit and have crawling frequently enough that I still worry about spreading this to others and potentially ruining their life. Knowing all the exhausting and expensive things I have had to do to just get this somewhat under control I don’t want anyone else to have to go through this I can help it.
In the book “Year of the Mite” there was mention of a similar experience where various members of the family had wildly different experiences and some passed it to other relatives and other people in the story such as coworkers seemed to be mostly unaffected.
It is interesting that nearly every bird in existence is presumed to be covered in these mites at all times and chicken farmers especially have serious problems keeping their numbers under control yet very few people seem to have the terrible experience of being the primary host that has brought most of us here. There must be something that causes these mites to jump to human hosts otherwise everyone who had ever been near a chicken or feeds the wild birds would have this problem.
I do wonder if I manage to kill all the mites in my house whether I am susceptible to being an attractive host for random bird mites out in the wild again in the future due to some unfortunate genetic makeup or pheromone. Hopefully, the specific mite variant I am fighting in my house and on my body have just made an adaptation to where if I kill all of them the trait for a proclivity to feed on humans will die with them.
I found the product details for the Dutchy’s® brand mites and it looks like they are the same species of Hypoaspis miles (AKA Stratiolaelaps scimitus) I bought from Natures Good Guys that unfortunately did not solve the problem.
The description for a bottle of 10k Dutchy predatory mites says “With this you can supply approximately 10 m² preventive or approx. 5 m² already infested dwellings”
So, it is entirely possible that the 81k total predator mites I distributed throughout the house was spread too thin to have been fully effective.As another data point, I recently have also had some very noticeable success with heat treatment.
Heat is by far the most effective thing I have tried in the last 1.5 years of fighting this. Unlike the OP I haven’t been able to find a pest control company to do the work to heat my entire house (including Orkin) despite having captured mite samples identified by multiple scientists and these companies having no other solutions to suggest.
I bought a 300 sqft 20,000 BTU single room heating unit and have been running it in cycles throughout different rooms my house. After a room heat cycle and a thorough shower I am able to finally sit in peace and sleep undisturbed. However, after a few days the mite activity picks back up again requiring another treatment. I’m looking into solutions that can treat larger areas and am also using a parcel bed bug heating unit to treat clothes and bedding. The hope is if I stay vigilant with the heat cycles to keep knocking down the numbers I can eventually get them to stop reproducing and eliminate them completely.
Thanks for the suggestion. I haven’t been able to get Androlis mites as they seem to be UK region specific but I was able to get some variants from Natures Good Guys. I’ll look more into the duchies.
For anyone interested here is breakdown of what I did try with the predator mites I was able to acquire.
I stopped using all pyrethrins, IGRs, glue boards, vacuuming, etc for a couple weeks to keep from killing the soldier mites and then I released a round of
25k Hypoaspis Miles
2k assortment of P.persimilis, N.californicus, A.cucumeris, A.swirskii.After 2 weeks I did another round of
50k Hypoaspis Miles
4k assortment of P.persimilis, N.californicus, A.cucumeris, A.swirskii.I distributed the predator mites with the sawdust organic material they were shipped in into little piles in all the rooms with the most mite activity and put some in the dirt of house plants in an attempt to give them a suitable habitat.
Ultimately, it was ineffective. Unfortunately, It negated most of the progress I had made prior with other countermeasures. After about 5 weeks I had to give up on the predator mites and go back to spraying and cleaning frequently to make existence more tolerable.
After this failed experiment of which there have been many in this war, I bought a 300 sqft 20,000 BTU whole room bedbug heater. It has been by far the most effective thing I have tried. I have been able to hold temperature around 135-145F in smaller rooms for a few hours in the house and afterward I am able to sit in peace and finally sleep undisturbed. I’m looking into larger solutions to heat treat an entire floor of the house or the whole dwelling at once as so far treating rooms individually is only temporarily effective.
I will most likely need a solution to do larger spaces to completely wipe them out. Annoyingly, finding a pest control company to perform the work has been a struggle. Even the large companies that specialise in this kind of work and have the equipment are refusing to take on the job at any price because their rigid price book and protocol doesn’t have a line item for rare instances of parasitic bird mites. I may just have to buy an indirect fired heating rig and do it myself to be able to finally end this and get my life back.
