I was not all that happy to learn that my mattress and pillows may have doubled in bulk over the last decade due to a buildup of dust mites and their feces, and even if that hasn’t happened, I should quickly replace the bedding with impervious fabrics the little buggers can’t gnaw through.

I had no idea. I thought “nighty-night, don’t let the bedbugs bite” was just a rhyme to cajole children into sleep – though for the life of me, I don’t understand what’s soothing about a tale of insects that might feed on you during the night.

But this disturbing news about dust mites and their fecal matter was on a reputable, hard-hitting television news program, that vanguard of broadcast journalism excellence, “The Today Show,” and it was Katie Couric, who thinks she might like to sit in Dan Rather’s old chair, delivering this domestic terror alert. Can it reasonably be doubted?

Amazingly, though they can be found in numbers surpassing 1.5 million in the average bed – and this includes beds in tony ZIP codes as well as tenements – the dust mites themselves aren’t the problem. It’s the skin they shed and, of course, their business and the bacterial breeding ground it creates. All this surreptitious activity going on during our sleep is unnerving enough for people who are healthy and breathe easily, but it’s a living nightmare for allergy sufferers whose symptoms may range from itchy noses and eyes to full-blown asthma attacks.

I don’t have allergies, so maybe I should just let – pardon the pun here – sleeping bugs lie. I don’t know, though. Assuming this nagging national problem is my problem, too, I can’t get my mind past the notion that sleeping in a bedbug-riddled bed is a little like sleeping in the cat’s litter box.

Pragmatically, none of us can assume we’ve escaped invasion. Statistically, there’s as good a chance that we have as that we haven’t. The National Institutes of Health – more credible even than Katie Couric – estimates about half of American homes are infested with dust mites and, obviously, what they leave behind. It makes that national obsession with a possible bird flu pandemic seem a little silly, doesn’t it?

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Scientists have known about dust mites for eons, at least in the 300 years since Anton van Leeuwenhoek, considered the father of microscopy, saw them in magnified form and picked up immediately on how scary they are. They’ve been lurking in bedding for three centuries that we know of eating our dead skin, eliminating it, eating more dead skin, eliminating more, and so on and so forth to the point that we now have on our hands a Hurricane Katrina-sized public health catastrophe.

I need an eradication plan. “If you can,” an article at www.healthlink.com advised, “remove carpet from your bedroom.” Too extreme. Chemicals? Experts don’t say “chlordane,” but I’m sure that’s what they mean. Again, too extreme. Some folks out of Kingston University are saying a tidy bed is an unhealthy bed and the best way to control dust-mite infestation is to leave the bedding in a ball. Their breakthrough study found the mites can’t survive in the warm, arid conditions of an unmade bed.

It’s reassuring to know that so many smart people are on the dust-mite watch. Except they’re not really mites. No one seems to want to talk about this, except the venerable Clemson University Cooperative Extension Service in South Carolina, which says dust mites are more closely related to spiders and ticks. Katie Couric didn’t tell anyone that, now did she? She probably didn’t want to start a panic.