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July 18, 2008

Strange But True!

Q. It's a problem faced by baseball catchers, welders, surgeons: How do you sneeze with a mask covering your face?

A. Catchers and welders only have to deal with the unpleasant bounce-back, but surgeons have to worry about spraying multitudinous microbes directly into the gaping hole they've carved in a patient, says Steve Mirsky in Scientific American magazine. “So how do you avoid an uh-oh following an achoo?” As reported in the British Medical Journal, the accepted wisdom has been to sneeze while facing the sensitive area so the mask will redirect the ejecta backward and out the sides, i.e., away from the open wound. But when two plastic surgeons from a British hospital scoured the literature, they could find no actual evidence for this advice so they set out to test it, using high-speed photography and some finely ground pepper sniffed by masked volunteers.


 
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