subject: A Sneeze Can Also Pollute Surroundings For A Long Period [print this page] To sneeze is what one usually does in daily life, but have you ever imagined that a trivial behavior tiny as tiny as to sneeze can has a bad effect on the environment around you for a long period. Recent study shows that a single sneeze may contaminate a room with deadly bugs and such contamination may even last for several hours. Researchers indicated that microscopic droplets sneezed or coughed out float around the air in large enough concentrations to spread disease.
A typical sneeze holds as many as 40,000 droplets, some of which leave the body at more than 160 kmph. Whats worse breathing in airborne specks of virus found in the following places such as the office, plane or train could infect a person after just one hour, reports the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
It also emphasizes the reasons why so many holidaymakers pick up coughs, colds and sniffles at the start of their trip, following a flight, according to the Daily Mail. Flu can pass on from person to another through direct physical contact, or when someone sneezes or coughs. US researchers adopted samples of air from the waiting room of a healthcare clinic, three rooms in a nursery and three cross-country flights for research and found that almost 50 percent of these samples contained small droplets containing the flu virus.
Scientists revealed that a typical cubic metre of air contained an average of 16,000 particles of flu virus. Most were less than 2.5 thousandths of a millimetre across, which remain suspended in the air for hours on end. They maintained that on view of these concentrations anyone who inhales over one hour the amount of viruses would be vulnerable to infection.
Such being the case, it seems that most of us have neglected the effects that this tiny behavior may have on our health. So scientists maintain that people should pay close attention to the virus they carry with them not only because they should be responsible to their own health but also because they should be responsible to the health of the people around them.
