Dog owners could be at risk of illness if they share their bed with their beloved pooches, an expert has warned.
Sharing your bed with your dog can increase the chance of them transferring microbes that sit on their skin and can come from licking, faeces or their fur.
And some bugs can cause conditions including mange or even Lyme disease.
Professor Alejandra Perotti, a mite expert at the school of biological sciences at the University of Reading, said that microscopic parasitic mites that live within the hair follicles of all dogs "can be detrimental to an immunocompromised owner".
This can cause infection to the skin or to the airways which can cause illness.
She told MailOnline: "If a dog owner is immunocompromised, or has a weak immune system, even temporarily, then they should not share their bed with a dog."
Despite there being "very few documented cases of dog mites moving to their owners", Prof Perotti acknowledged that is because "mites don't get identified properly".
The most common dog mite, the demodex canis, has been identified in humans "in a handful of cases", which can cause mange.
She added: "Ticks, especially here in the UK, are serious vectors of Lyme disease, caused by the bacteria borrelia. A dog owner might take their pet out for a nice walk in a park where deer abound, or the dog visits places with deer."
She explained that ticks can jump from dogs to humans.
Last year, we reported how dog owners are being urged against regularly sharing a bed with their pets following the spread of an "untreatable superbug ".
The mcr-1 gene, believed to be transmitted from animals to humans, has built up a resistance to certain life-saving drugs.
With drug-resistant infections killing an estimated 700,000 people a year worldwide, the UN warns this could rise to 10 million by 2050 if nothing is done.
Experts are now warning of an instance where humans can pick up the bug, which was first identified in China in 2015.
Dogs can harbour mcr-1 in their gut before it's transported via microscopic faecal particles.
study at the University of Lisbon found that in two of the households where dogs had tissue infections, the gene was present in the dog and the owner.
Faecal samples were taken from 126 healthy people that were living with 102 cats and dogs in 80 households over a period of two years up to February 2020.
It was found that eight of the dogs and four humans were hosting bacteria including mcr-1.
The results also showed that three of the dogs appeared to be healthy and the others had tissue or urinary tract infections.
