When a sunbeam hits just right, you see them: tiny particles of dust suspended in the air. They look innocuous until you stop to think about their tendency to collect on surfaces throughout your house. If you take a close look at those specks, you may spot skin, hair , and dander. says Gabriel Filippelli, PHD, executive director of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute in Bloomington. Look closer still with an electron microscope or a chemical analysis and more unsettling things reveal themselves: lead paint and other heavy metal fragment, microbes, fungi, mold, mites, microplastics, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and even toxins in some pesticides, says Filippelli, who helps run a project analyzing the dust captured by peoples vacuums. Because these substances are in the dust all around us, they end up in us, too. the chemicals in the dust on our hands can get into our food and be absorbed into our bodies through our skin. Kids ingest dust as they move around close to the ground. We all inhale it, says Elizabeth Matsui, PHD, who researches indoor air pollution at Texas at Austin's Dell Medical School. All this exposure has consequences. in the short term. dust can cause lung irritation, allergies, and asthma. Longer term, some chemicals in it are kinked to diabetes, various cancers, reproductive problems, and other serious health

problems.

While humans have been exposed to dust for as long as we have exist, many of the harmful chemicals found in today's household dust are by products of our very modern world and that helps explain why an age old problem cleaning dusty surfaces is worth taking a new urgency.

Thankfully, unlike some environmental health problems that seem beyond our control, actually clean up the dust in your home. You just need the right tools.

By Kelvin Loria, Joanne Chen, Tanya Christian, Mary Farrell, Deb Silber and Dan Wroclawski