CASE STUDY House Dust Mites in urine. Spurious finding in two cases

INTRODUCTION Mites belong to the order Acarina and only a few species are known to affect humans. Mites in sputum specimens were first reported in 1944 by Carter et al. in Ceylon (1). The acaroid mite is a kind of arthropod and its geographic distribution appears to be global and mites can survive in many environments including the storehouse, farmhouse, stored food stuff, various drugs, packing material, household objects, and human and animal bodies. Its infection in human cause acariasis in some organs including the lung, intestines, and the urinary tract by inhalation, ingestion, and transmission through the skin (2-4). House dust mites can also cause asthma and extensive dermatitis to atopic eczema through the allergens that they produce (5). Most adult mites possess the usual arachnoid appendages, jaws, palps at the front end, and four pairs of legs. This report describes the spurious cytologic findings of adult dust mites in urine samples from two patients. With referral from a parasitology laboratory, and experts on house dust mite identification, we concluded that the microscopic objects were most likely dust mites, the first case as being Euroglyphus maynei and the second case as being of the Dermatophagoides species (6,7).