Sneezing is a natural part of everyday life. We’ve all experienced a sickness when it seems like we sneeze and wipe our noses with a tissue so much that our nose goes raw. Not only this, but when faced with pepper, sunlight, and other weird things such as allergies it’s like we can’t control ourselves and get that undeniable urge. But I feel like a not so frequent question that is asked is why we get the urge to sneeze and its significance as well as how uncleanly being exposed to someone else’s snot is. Sneezing is known to generally occur when the respiratory epithelium in our nose is irritated. This irritation then stimulates the endings of a nerve that sends a message to our brain telling it to offset the sneezing reflex. But is that the only reason that we sneeze?
It turns out that our noses require a “reboot” every once in a while when it’s overwhelmed and this reboot is triggered by the force of a sneeze. This new discovery was only recently found out. The purpose of an effective sneeze is to reset the environment in the nasal passage to get all of the bad particles that we breathe in through our nose out by trapping them. The actual sneeze itself happens when biochemical signals that regulate the beating of the hairs on the cells in our nose are sent. This type of new knowledge on how sneezing works to help get bad particles out of our systems also has tremendously helped doctors acknowledge ways to treat people were various nasal problems. Take for example patients with sinusitis. They do not clear mucus from their nose and sinuses as easily as the rest of the general public, however, through developing new strategies to compensate for their inability to clear mucus doctors and scientists will be able to coexist and improve their quality of life.
To make the discovery, a couple of researchers used cells from the noses of mice which were grown in incubators. They then measure how these cells were able to clear mucus. They used simulated what a sneeze would be like using a puff of air to help them examine how these cells that they produced would respond. Some of these same experiments were also done in human sinus and nasal tissues, however because it would be a uncomfortable to do the experiment within a person that has sinusitis they removed the tissue from patients that both had sinusitis and those who also did not. The results that they found showed that the cells from patients with the sinusitis did not respond to the sneezes in the same way as the ells from the patients who did not have it. From there, the researchers were only able to conclude that people with sinusitis sneeze more often because they’re not able to “reset” their nasal passageways properly. I think it’s interesting to notice that they were perfectly fine with testing these cells on mice but not the humans. This might suggest that mice are not able to have the nasal problems that a human might, or perhaps they don’t think it would affect their overall health as drastically.
It seems as though sneezing is a pretty important way of ridding our bodies of some of the not so pleasant things. But there seems to be many other actors that contribute to why we sneeze. Take for example, why do we sneeze repeatedly sometimes four or five if not more times? What is the purpose of such a thing? Well according to Marjorie L. Slankard, the reason that we sneeze multiple times in one given instance is to get rid of what is irritating it. Our bodies are pretty efficient of getting rid of anything that doesn’t belong and therefore when your nasal passage is trying to get rid of this irritation it may sometimes take two or three tries. The color and consistency can actually say a lot about what’s going on inside your body as well. Naturally, when you sneeze the mucus that comes out should be clear, but sometimes it comes out differently. It range from the color green to brown. This is an indication from your body that there is an infection which results you going to the doctor and getting treatment. According to an article I read, the color comes from white cells in the mucus that produce antibodies to fight either the cold or infection. This, overall lets us know when we need to look out for our bodies and can turn out to be extremely helpful. Sneezes are powerful things and leave our bodies at speeds that reach 93 mph which transitions nicely into the next thin that we need to be aware about when we sneeze or are exposed to others that sneeze: they travel pretty far.
Recently there was a study that was published by MIT researchers that sneezes and coughs are not just spewed and then gone, but rather they have an associated with gas clouds that might give them the ability to leave infectious droplets floating around to further distances. The professor of applied mathematics stated, “When you cough or sneeze, you see the droplets, or feel them if someone sneezes on you, but you don’t see the cloud, the invisible gas phase. The influence of this gas cloud is to extend the range of the individual droplets, particularly the small ones.” Although it was previously though that the greater the droplets the further they can travel, the study found the contrary. Supposedly, the smaller droplets are able to travel 5-200 times further than they would if they were unconnected particles. The main concern with the discovery that these droplets may stay airborne is that it has great potential to make its way into ventilation systems and spread infections and illnesses to other people. They suggest the re-examination of the design of workplaces and hospitals to reduce the chance of these airborne particles. To grasp an idea of how far a sneeze really goes the researchers used high-speed imaging as well as laboratory simulations and mathematical modeling to get their information.
So while sneezing can help our own personal bodies by expelling the unnecessary irritations and gems that are covering our nasal cavities, it can also cause a bit of hazard. Although the discovery of the MIT researchers seems to be a credible and well-known study, it also could just be another theory. In that case it could either be true that our sneezes and coughs do travel around in a sort of gas bubble for a longer period of time than predicted or rather it’s a false positive. Only in due time will we know more about the positives and negatives of sneezing, but for now when everyone continues to get over their colds and coughs, be sure to cover up.
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This is a really neat experiment you found, because sneezing is one of the most odd things our body does in my opinion. I think chance can easily be ruled out in this experiment, because people who have a nasal disorder do indeed sneeze more, and that makes legitimate sense. Something else they could’ve looked at during this experiment could be do anti-sneezing methods work for anyone? Or what effects do sneezing have on the rest of your body? These are questions that interest me.