Asthma sufferer Des Whitrow has turned her house into a minimalist’s ideal home

Asthma sufferer Des Whitrow has turned her house into a minimalist’s ideal home. She has taken up almost all her carpets, removed soft furnishings, and covered all beds in plastic. For the past five years, Mrs Whitrow, 44, a biology lecturer, has been waging a one-woman war against an invisible irritant – the house dust mite. She now claims her rather over-zealous spring-cleaning has made her asthma better, and she is telling fellow sufferers their conditions could improve if they do the same. Her methods are precisely detailed in her book, House Dust Mites, published earlier this year after a five-year struggle trying to persuade uninterested publishers of its worth.
Mrs Whitrow, who lives in Nottingham with her husband and two children, reminds us that we produce a pint of water each night in sweat and a gram of skin every month for the house mite to feed on. She advises ripping out carpets, ditching dust mite-friendly furniture, and replacing old mattresses.She is by no means alone in her extreme methods.

The National Asthma Campaign also advocates carpetless floors for dust mite sufferers, while the National Eczema Society, as part of an extensive package of counter- mite measures, recommends leaving children’s soft toys in the freezer to kill off the mites.But although recent scientific evidence shows the house dust mite’s droppings can cause asthma and eczema allergies, experts caution against over-reaction.The wave of dust mite hysteria which swept the continent a decade ago, recently ended with European governments and their medical advisers having to make embarrassing climbdowns. In 1983, following rash advice from their government, Swedes began ripping up their carpets in a bid to eradicate dust mite asthma. The Swedish carpet industry was decimated.More recently, an experiment was carried out in Norway, where carpets were removed from all state schools The French banned carpets in their post offices. Nevertheless, European asthma rates have continued to rise, and in the past year, all three countries have reinstated the continental carpet.Dr David Hide, consultant of clinical allergy and director of the Clinical Allergy Research Clinic at St Mary’s Hospital, Isle of Wight, urges sufferers not to rush into the enormous expense of new mattresses, super-hoovers and house mite sprays without first making an appointment with an allergy clinic to determine whether they are allergic to dust mites. Mr Iguchi is in custody on fraud charges, but Daiwa also acknowledged for the first time that several other employees in New York had been involved. Yesterday, the ministry of finance announced its ongoing investigation had uncovered an earlier, unreported bond loss of $97m incurred between 1984 and 1994 at the New York branch of Daiwa Trust Co., the bank’s investment trust arm.Perhaps the most serious of yesterday’s revelations concerned the time lag between Daiwa’s notification of its loss to the finance ministry and the report to the Federal Reserve. “The bank intends to make a fresh start by improving the management and supervisory systems,” said the departing president, Akira Fujita.

The chairman, Sumio Abekawa, will also step down in the spring.But the awkward questions raised by the debacle multiply. On Friday, Daiwa officials admitted that in a 1992 inspection they concealed their failure to separate the bank’s bond trading and record-keeping operations – the failing that allowed an executive vice-president, Toshihide Iguchi, to accumulate immense losses over 11 years. The exceptional summermay have played a role in the unexpected rise.. RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

Tokyo
The escalating Daiwa Bank scandal threatened to draw in the Japanese government yesterday, after an admission by the finance ministry that it knew of the bank’s $1.1bn (pounds 670m) in bond losses 41 days before they were reported to the US authorities.The two top executives of Daiwa announced their resignations yesterday as a gesture of responsibility for the losses run up by a rogue trader at the bank’s New York branch. The monthly increase in input prices was raised from 0.5 to 0.8 per cent for June and from 0.1 per cent to 0.5 per cent in August, taking the annual rate in August up to 9.2 per cent rather than the 8.9 per cent previously registered.The increase in prices was not across the board but concentrated in home-produced manufacturing inputs, particularly animals for slaughter, and crude oil.

Back revisions to the data made the release still more disappointing. The longer it persists the higher the risk of some ultimate impact on retail prices.”The monthly increase in input prices in September was a seasonally adjusted 0.9 per cent, much higher than the 0.2 per cent expected by the City. The key question is how far this pressure will be passed down the chain. “They were poor, particularly on the input side, where they were considerably worse than expected. As recently as Thursday, the markets were anticipating a cut in rates to 6.54 per cent. The December gilt future also lost more than half a point.”There was no scope in these figures for an early cut in interest rates,” said John Shepperd, chief economist at Yamaichi International.