New research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has used high-speed cameras to show that sneezing is truly super-gross. The research is providing new insights on what happens when a person sneezes, and it is even more disgusting than you might think.
MIT researchers photographed 100 healthy volunteers sneezing and found that the sneeze throws sticky fluid out of the mouth as a sheet, rather than a spray. Then it pops like a balloon, leaving snotty filaments that finally break up into the mist most people associate with an unprotected sneeze.
The findings are providing an important understanding of how airborne diseases are spread. Head of MIT’s Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory Lydia Bourouiba said in a statement that it is important to understand how the process of fluid fragmentation happens. “What is the physics of the breakup telling us in terms of droplet size distribution, and the resulting prediction of the downstream range of contamination?”
The mucus balloons from coughs and sneezes travel as much as 200 times farther than if they were straight droplets, according to Bourouiba’s previous research. She said they expected to see droplets coming out fully formed, but that’s “not the case at all.” The team found that sneezing varies from one person to the next, according to the elasticity and stickiness of each individual’s saliva.
The main message from the research? Cover your mouth when you sneeze.