The Last Word On Nothing

These thoughts on sneezing first ran back in October 2015, and I loved the responses. Feel free to share more examples of achoo styles from friends and family! It’s always a good time for a robust sneeze.

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When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, or even two or three. It was always 17. No lie. Each sneeze began with this strange little sucking in of air, a pause, and then from his bent body and contorted face flew ah-YESH-ah!

Seventeen times. He was very consistent. (He says he’s now down to seven.)

By sneeze number two, tissues were required—and employed, if time permitted, in between explosions.

My husband, meanwhile, sneezes so loudly and with such force that I can’t help but shriek. I beg for a warning but never get one. Even the second and third ones rattle me. They cause our old Jindo dog to drop belly-flat to the floor in fear. John is a big guy, with big lungs, who doesn’t hold back. So he sneezes larger than most.

Sneezes are like fingerprints—we each have our own. But the physiology of a sneeze is the same for all of us. The trigger is usually dust or some other irritant trapped in the mucous lining of the upper respiratory tract. Cranial nerve endings fire off a message to the brain stem telling the lungs to take a deep breath. Your eyes and vocal cords close, then air explodes forth from the mouth and nose at upwards of 90 miles per hour.

There’s no way to look cool while sneezing.

Scientists call sneezing sternutation. Some of us sternutate (no, I’m not sure you can use it as a verb) when we look at the sun—called photic sneezing (I do that). A sneeze may build as we tweeze a hair from the eyebrow or nose (been there). Others achoo during an orgasm, apparently (so far, nope). Those responses—and others—are a bit of a mystery, but faulty wiring in the brain is likely to blame.

Do sneezes match personalities? A lot of loud (may I say obnoxious?) people are, after all, giant sneezers, and we all have that friend who really holds back, letting squeak out just a tiny, high-pitched choo at the very end. My mother did that, at least for sneeze number one. Any follow-up sneezes had force, and the same phonetic as (though less drama than) my brother’s: ah-YESH-ah. They were much like her, a seemingly polite and gentle woman who might without warning start a whipped-cream fight at the dinner table or make a joke about “taking the bull by the balls.” In a church.

From a very unscientific poll (thanks, Facebook) I learned that allergy sneezes tend to be harder to control than other types, many people sneeze in twos, and sneezing politely into the arm is far from universal. (Australians and Indians, according to friends, aren’t germ-phobic like we Americans; they share sneeze product widely. Sometimes right in your face.) A pregnant friend has decided that letting it all out is better for the fetus than holding back. Who knows if that’s true.

My friends seem to like sneezing. Here’s how some of them do it:

Often its loud-knock-the-china-off-the-wall sneezes…and out of the blue. Scares the bejeezus out of the mister.

Mouth sneeze, not through the nose. One sneeze, rarely multiples. All out. [A useful tidbit: Ear doctor taught me to suppress post-surgical sneezing (so as to avoid jostling delicate ossicular chain reconstruction) by snorting forcefully out through my nose, alternating with panting hard out through my mouth. Works pretty well.]

Face in elbow and let ‘er fly. Sleeve stops the splash damage and muffles the sound.

Definitely through the mouth. No hand gyrations or exciting body movements. Volume is excessive.

Once sneezed very delicately and got such an amazed and positive response that I now actually out of habit sneeze that way. It is about the only time I ever get called, “cute”.

My sneeze? Like my mom, I might go minimal at first but then I transition to a fuller more satisfying outburst. Why hold back? There’s obviously something in there that wants out. If needed, though, I can sneeze almost imperceptibly, with no product whatsoever. I’m pretty proud of that.

Meanwhile, the appropriate response to a sneeze depends on where in the world that sneeze happens. According to a fine list on Wikipedia, in most countries, a witness offers up God’s blessings or wishes you good health or long life. (We were a “bless you” family, although the German “gesundheit” was also acceptable.) Mongolians ask God to forgive the sneezer, and the Igbo apologize to or for the person. In China and Japan, it is customary just to ignore the whole thing.

But my favorite reply wonderfully states the obvious. If you speak the Australian language Ritharrngu, you might say after someone’s wet blast, “klas bin gurruwan.” It means: “You have released nose water.”

They don’t say “You have released nose water in my face.”

I guess that would be rude.

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Possible future polls: Tissue or Kleenex? Whose dad still carries a handkerchief—and has he ever found a pocket booger? Does your sneeze match your love life? Stay tuned.

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Photo: Shutterstock

I arrived under a cloud. The arrival was at Punta Tombo, a colony of Magellanic penguins on the coast of Argentina. It was the 2^nd of October. Hundreds of thousands of penguins, most of them males, had been coming ashore for about two weeks, marking the start of the breeding season. While they waited for the females, they had busied themselves claiming nests, braying incessantly, bill-dueling, and in general just sizing each other up in the way penguins do. Now the females were starting to arrive, either to return to their old mates or to choose new ones. Thus the frenetic air to the place.

The cloud was highly pathogenic avian flu, or HPAI, known more widely as bird flu. Since the fall of 2020, the H5N1 strain of bird flu had swept around the northern hemisphere, killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds. At first it had been largely confined to colonies in Europe and North America, but in the fall of 2022 it appeared in South America. It raced down the Pacific coast from Peru to southern Chile, leaving in its wake many more thousands of dead birds: pelicans, boobies, cormorants, penguins, others. The sheer scope of death was hard to comprehend. Whole colonies had been devastated in just weeks. Now it had made its way to the Atlantic coast. Thus the air of impending doom.

Continue reading →

It’s fall, otherwise known as the beginning of cold and flu season. So what better time to revisit the potential hazards of manual nasal aspiration? I first wrote this in 2018. These days I use an automatic aspirator. No mouth suction required!

Three weeks ago I came down with the flu. I was sicker than I have been in years. For a full five days, I could only manage to quiver on the couch and binge watch old seasons of Scandal. One episode would end and the next would automatically begin until Netflix asked incredulously, “Are you still watching Scandal?” I was.

Finally, still feverish, I hauled myself off the couch and into the clinic. The flu has been especially terrible this year, and I was convinced I might be one of the unlucky few destined to drop dead of the illness. The doctor, however, sent me home. “You should feel better in a few days,” she said. And I did.

As I slowly recovered, I pondered how I had contracted the virus. My daughter had been ill, but not nearly as sick as I was. Still, it seemed likely that I had picked up her illness. And then I remembered something that made it seem even likelier. For more than a week I had been sucking snot out of her nose . . . with my mouth. That may sound crazy, but it has become common practice among parents thanks to the Snotsucker — a device as beloved as it is disgusting. 

The Snotsucker, more commonly called the NoseFrida, is exactly what it sounds like, a device designed to suck snot. But this is not your run-of-the-mill bulb syringe, which relies on a squeezable rubber ball to create suction. The NoseFrida leverages the superior power of the human mouth. This adorable cartoon demonstrates how it works.

And the thing does work, disgustingly well. The NoseFrida currently has 4.5 stars on Amazon with 8,812 reviews. “Fastastic product!” reviewers rave. “This thing is amazing!” I took a quick poll of my mom’s group, and all of the moms who responded had used it at least once or twice. One called it a “lifesaver.”

But does NoseFrida’s efficacy come at a cost? After all, babies get congested when they are sick. Their sticky snot is filled with, according this 2010 study, “large amounts of respiratory viruses.” So is snot sucking a bad idea? Could I be huffing pathogens from my daughter’s nasal secretions into my lungs?

“Absolutely,” says Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. “If the baby has respiratory syncytial virus or flu or any other respiratory virus, the person doing the sucking would definitely have a chance of being infected.”

To prevent this from happening, the NoseFrida contains a “hygiene filter,” a piece of blue foam about double the length of a pencil eraser. It sits between the fat tube that goes against the baby’s nose and the slim straw that goes inside the unlucky sucker’s mouth. But Racaniello says it wouldn’t provide much protection. The lacy filter contains holes so large they are visible even from a distance. In the lab, Racaniello uses filters that have holes less than half the width of a red blood cell, and they still let viruses through.

The product’s website claims that the filter is “clinically proven to prevent bacterial germs from traveling anywhere.” That claim, however, is based on a single study of 12 sick babies at Malmö University Hospital in Sweden in the late 1990s. To look at transmission of bacteria from the suckee to the sucker, the researchers retrofitted the NoseFrida with a second, sterile filter that would trap any bacteria before they entered the mouthpiece. The team then used these devices to siphon snot from congested babies with respiratory infections. They cultured the snot that accumulated in the tube as well as the mouthpiece filters. Ten of 12 snot samples contained bacteria, but none of the filters were contaminated.

This is hardly definitive proof that bacteria cannot be transmitted, however. And, more importantly, the researchers didn’t look at transmission of viruses, which cause the bulk of respiratory infections. Getting respiratory viruses in your mouth isn’t a terribly effective way to contract a respiratory illness, Racaniello says. But he points out that sucking deeply would bring aerosolized virus into the lungs, and “that is a more efficient way to get infected.”

There is no way to prove that I contracted influenza by sucking snot out of my daughter’s nose. There are other, simpler ways to transmit the virus. Sneezing works. So does coughing. And a study published earlier this year found that people infected with the flu emit virus even when they breathe. Still, I haven’t touched the NoseFrida since I recovered. Racaniello thinks that’s a good call. Before we spoke he watched a video of a woman using the device so he could get a sense of how it works. “I was just shocked,” he says. “The young lady seems to be blissfully ignorant of what could be happening.”

Is this weird? The other day I was walking in my driveway at my little cabin in central Virginia and came across a pile of animal scat I didn’t immediately recognize, so I poked it with a stick to get more information. The outside of each piece was cylindrical and very dark black, the inside like Thanksgiving yams. Most important, though, there was both hair and seeds in it, marking its maker as an omnivore/opportunist. The seeds were big and flat, like pumpkin seeds except dark brown. I got all excited: It had to be from a small black bear, right? What else eats everything and wanders through my woods?

A nature-smart friend who saw my photo of the poop on Facebook (yes, I posted it) said nah, just a raccoon that ate persimmon fruit, and she’s probably right. That’s fine. I like raccoons, too.

But the point is, at least out in nature, I stop for poop. (Note to self: New bumper sticker idea.) Whether deer kibble or fox dukie, I always take a peek at it, enjoying that these critters are all around me just doing their natural thing. We get plenty of the ubiquitous foxes and deer, but also coyotes and owls, various rodents and raccoons, plenty of dogs (less exciting), and yes, occasionally bear. There’s so much information in their feces: What’s being eaten tells us about the food web and the season, and the color, texture, and consistency of scat is data about the health of the animal, if you know what to look for. It’s really not gross at all. (And I’ve noticed most wild animal poop doesn’t even stink. We’re the gross ones in that respect.)

Being disgusted by poo is certainly normal and probably smart; our cringe reaction to it is instinctive and protective against whatever microbial or parasitic funk might be tucked inside. (Did you know the “disgust” face is common across mammals? Dogs do it. Lions do it. We do it. Whether or not ants do it, I don’t know. But even insects know when to back away.) We’re meant to keep our distance, holding our noses. Some of us are just odd. (Me.)

Recently, while researching a book on dog intelligence, I spent time with a scientist, Deborah Giles, who studies orcas around the San Juan Islands. She has trained her little dog Eba to sniff out whale poop floating on the surface of the sea. Eba’s body language while on the boat, scampering from one side to the other with her nose in the air, leads the researcher to steer toward the mass so she can sample it before it sinks. From those samples, which she sends to a lab for various tests, she can deduce whether a whale is properly nourished, its reproductive status, its stress level, and even where it’s been feeding (different waterways have unique chemical signatures that show up in the whales’ prey). That’s all really helpful information when you’re monitoring the status of a population of animals.

To give the dogs their due, they are trained to sniff out all kinds of animal poop on land, as part of various conservation efforts, but doing it on the water is extra special. Dog Smart, that book I mentioned, which is coming out in the spring, includes discussion of this cool olfactory service some dogs provide.

Human poop also tells tales, though we tend to flush away their messages. The Bristol Stool Chart was a “form scale” developed in 1997 to help docs assess gastrointestinal health, and I’ve been tempted to frame a copy and hang it in my bathroom, to help normalize poop examination. (You’re welcome to do the same.) It’s actually really important to consider what your gut is putting out. An unpleasant task, maybe, but a good habit nonetheless.

There’s so much extra one can say about poop, but my gut tells me I’ve said enough to get you through your day. I’m sure more will come out in the future.

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By the way, here are some horrendous puns I thought about using in this post but didn’t. (You’re welcome.)

I don’t want to make a big stink about it…

It works in a pinch…

It doesn’t pass the smell test…

Flushing out the information…

The data is a little mushy…

To squeeze a little more out of that idea… (bear down on also works)

I’ll let you digest that fact...

We don’t know squat…

It’s a little hard to swallow…

There are piles of data…

It’s a really crappy job…

It’s my duty to tell you…

What a waste…

And SO many more. I didn’t even get into all the possibilities with “shit!” But let’s leave it there. You know, like a little pile of poo.