Doctors Caution About Feather Filled Duvets, Pillows And Beddings After Numerous Health Cases Emerged
Source: Thailand Medical News Nov 19, 2019 4 years, 5 months, 21 hours, 37 minutes ago
Doctors are cautioning individuals after numerous incidences of health related incidences have risen with regards to usage of
beddings,
duvets and
pillows that are filled with
feathers. Cases of
lung inflammations, allergies and other
respiratory problems have risen not only in UK but also in the US, China, Australia and also other Asian countries.
Despite being a premium commodity as they are supposed to be more softer and comfortable, many of these bed products are made from goose and duck
feathers that can have small organic particles seeping out from the products and getting into the airways of people using them while sleeping and this could cause a series of respiratory and health issues, which in some cases can even be fatal for those that are sensitive or allergic.
In a recent case, doctors in the UK were treating a middle aged man with severe
lung inflammation that developed soon after he bought
feather-filled bedding.
The patient, a 43 year old was referred to respiratory specialists after 3 months of malaise, fatigue and increasing breathlessness which affected the simplest of activities, such as going from room to room and walking up the stairs at home.
The patient’s symptoms worsened to the point where he could only stand or walk for a few minutes without feeling as if he were about to pass out. He was signed off work and managed to do little more than sleep all day. He was quizzed about possible triggers for his symptoms: there was a small amount of mould in the bathroom, and he owned a cat and a dog, but no birds, so the doctors concluded that these factors were unlikely to be responsible.
But they finally discovered that he had recently swapped a synthetic duvet and pillows for
feather filled bedding.
Blood tests revealed antibodies to bird
feather dust, and his chest X-ray was consistent with
hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a condition in which the air sacs and airways in the lungs become severely inflamed as a result of the body's exaggerated immune response to a particular trigger.
The patient was diagnosed with a variant of
hypersensitivity pneumonitis, feather duvet lung which is caused by breathing in organic dust from the duck or goose
feathers found in duvets and pillows.
He was given a course of steroids to quell the
inflammation and told to revert to synthetic bedding. After 12 months his symptoms had cleared up and his life had returned to normal.
This is just one case, and it's not known how common
feather duvet lung is, say the authors, precisely because it is often missed as doctors rarely ask patients about feather bedding.
But in the 2018 alone, roughly about 115 million feather duvets were sold worldwide!
Certain hotels and also service apartments also use such beddings which can be dangerous to unsuspecting sensitive travellers.
Doctors
in UK told
Thailand Medical News that that repeated exposure to the culprit trigger in
hypersensitivity pneumonitis can lead to irreversible scarring of the lung tissue, so it's important to identify this promptly and get the patients treated fast as well as getting the beddings all replaced with synthetic fillings.
Reference : BMJ Case Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1136/bcr-2019-231237 
