Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Meet a Woman with a 100 Mile-Per-Hour Sneeze

supersneezewoman

Meet Sharyn Alfonsi, a reporter from ABC News New York. She says that she was to sneeze the air from her nose would rush out at 100 miles per hour and her bacteria could travel anywhere from 3 feet to 150 feet away.

How did she get this amazing sneezing power? Just by being human. This is true for all of us. Actually, the speed may be even faster according to wikipedia:
While generally harmless in healthy individuals, sneezes are capable of spreading disease through the potentially infectious aerosol droplets that they can expel, which commonly range from 0.5 to 5 µm in diameter. About 40,000 such droplets can be produced by a single sneeze.[2]

The speed of human sternal release has been the source of much speculation, with the most conservative estimates placing it around 150 kilometers/hour (42 meters/second) or roughly 95 mph (135 feet/second), and the highest estimates -such as the Health World Museum in Barrington, Illinois- which propose a speed as fast as 85% of the speed of sound, corresponding to approximately 1045 kilometers per hour (290 meters/second) or roughly 650 mph (950 feet/second).

Do masks help? Some, but you have to replace them every few hours.

1 comment:

Phil said...

Our East coast CNN reported was saying a sneeze traveled at 100,000 miles per hour. Turned my head! I learned years ago it was close to 100 Mph.
Idiot reported!