Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: SEE, I TOLD YOU VUVUZELAS ARE BAD FOR YOU

by Hazed

Remember the vuvuleza? This loud buzzy horn was introduced to the world when the last football (soccer) world cup was held in South Africa, and it quickly became popular everywhere. It sounds like a swarm of angry wasps - you can remind yourself how they sound here.

Now it turns out that not only do they create noise pollution, they could also spread disease. That's because blowing into a vuvuleza creates a shower of spit, similar to a sneeze, travelling at four million droplets a second. So if the person blowing the horn has a cold or the flu - or something more serious like tuberculosis - the disease could be spread.

Dr Ruth McNerney's team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine investigated this health hazard using a laser device which measured how many droplets were produced by eight volunteers using vuvulezas. That must have been a very noisy experiment!

The result was that on average, 658,000 lung particles (or aerosols) per litre of air were expelled from the instruments, at the rate of four million droplets per second. That compares to just 3,700 particles per litre at a rate of 7,000 per second when the volunteers were asked to shout.

So if you attend a sporting event, make sure you're not standing too close to one of those horrible horns.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13509220

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