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Vultures have a number of traits that allow them to eat the grossest stuff.

Why Don't Vultures Get Food Poisoning?

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 How Far Do Germs Travel?
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 Posted: November 19, 2015


 How far do coughs, sneezes, and vomit travel? Way farther than you might think.


 I’m Anna Rothschild, and this is Gross Science.


 For decades, researchers have wondered exactly what happens to the liquids that fly out of our noses and mouths when we’re sick. But how do you track a tiny particle of phlegm or barf and the microbes they carry?


 Well, back in the 1930s, Harvard scientist William Firth Wells gave it a shot. Wells used “sneeze powder” to make whole rooms full of people sneeze at once. Then he sampled the air and found it full of bacteria, though less so if he let his subjects use handkerchiefs.


 These days, scientists can use high-speed cameras to see the juicy details of sneezes and coughs. That’s what researchers at MIT did in 2014. They found that the droplets in a cough or sneeze travel on an invisible gas cloud, which can carry germs much farther than people previously thought. Small droplets can fly all the way across a room, and can get sucked into ceiling air vents, which could spread them even further.


 And that’s not all. To study what happens when someone’s really sick, scientists in the United Kingdom built a robot called Vomiting Larry, who’s basically just a head and stomach. The researchers were studying norovirus, which is a nasty bug that causes nausea, diarrhea, and projectile vomiting. To simulate the act of puking, they filled Larry’s gut with fluorescently dyed water. Then they made him retch it up.


 The dye showed that Larry’s puke particles scattered farther than they would have been able to see with the naked eye. One projectile vomiting episode could actually contaminate close to eighty four square feet. That means viruses might linger in places we think are clean. And in the case of norovirus, those germs might stay active for days or weeks outside of a host.


 Recently, in a study with a different vomiting machine—and, yes, there’s more than one—researchers at North Carolina State University found that some viral particles can be suspended in air after puking, as well. The numbers were pretty small, but in the case of norovirus, which these scientists were modeling, as few as twenty particles can cause infection. And when those viruses get into their next victim, they start the cycle of splatter all over again.


 Ew.

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