Chris: I’ve kept my eyes open in the name of objective research, whilst sneezing, to see what would happen. I can categorically say I still have my eyes, I can still see so I don’t believe the idea that they pop out.

Helen: I don’t know. I’ve tried and failed to keep my eyes open. I just can’t do it. How do you do manage?

Chris: I just forced myself. I was driving and I didn’t want to shut my eyes so I couldn’t see.  I forced them to stay open and I still have my eyes.  I don’t know where this myth comes from but the fact is that the only connection between the nose cavity and they eye is in your tear duct which runs from the edge of your nose up to the middle part inner surface of your eyelids.  If you look at your lower eyelid, right where it meets the edge of your nose you’ll see a little black dot.  That’s the plughole through which tears drain.

I think the reason we close our eyes when we sneeze is probably because you do get quite a big build-up of pressure in the nose.  It will cause a sort of reflux of fluid back up the tear duct and it will squirt your tears back into your eyes.  If you screw your eye up you squeeze that duct closed and it does stop some of the tear from squirting back into your eyes.  That’s why people say blow your nose if you have something in your eye because it forces some of the tears back up into your eye.  It means that there are more tears in the eye for a short while.  This helps to wash out everything.  I don’t believe sneezing makes your eyes pop out.

There’s no connection between the bit of the respiratory tree that the sneeze has to rush out at 100kph at your brain.  I think if you don’t let the sneeze out there’s a possibility you could end up with the mucus it’s trying to dislodge being rammed further into the passages inside the nose, the sinuses for example.  You could actually encourage the build-up of mucus which could be laden with infection.  You could encourage infection so it’s probably better to let it out. 

There’s nothing better than a sneeze, is there?

We put this question to Marcello Riggio:

Bacteria can easily be transmitted through bites.  Bacteria in the oral cavity are designed to stay there, actually.  They can get to other parts of the body and cause more serious diseases.  If one were able to transmit some of these more opportunistic oral bacteria to other body sites then yes, they can cause serious infections.

We put this question to Marcello Riggio:

Yes, oral bacteria can be transported around the body and the blood.  If they can get into the blood stream they can be transported to various body sites and cause far more serious systemic infections.  You’re quite right. You mentioned two infections: endocarditis, which is an infection of the heart valves in the inner lining of the heart and hip joint infections.  There are a number of bacteria that do cause endocarditis, for example. These tend to be Staphylococci and Streptococci.  There are a number of other oral bacteria which have also been implicated in that.  We’ve carried out a study looking at prosthetic hip joint infections, looking at the types of bacteria which are involved in these particular infections.  We’ve identified a number of bacteria including bacteria which are known to reside in the mouth.

We put this question to Marcello Riggio:

Absolutely, the bacteria that cause bad breath are actually towards the back of the tongue and they are buried deep within the tongue.  The only way to remove them or reduce their numbers there is to actually use some form of scraping device.  It’s not a very pleasant thing to do if you’re trying to scrape bacteria from the back of the tongue.  One may occasionally gag as well but if you can do that regularly it will help to keep bad breath at bay.  Yes, one would definitely advocate the use of any scraping device, particularly those which are incorporated into tooth brushes.  It has been shown if you can reduce the number of bacteria at the rear of the tongue then there will be less chance of you having bad breath.

We put this question to Marcello Riggio:

Marcello: Unfortunately at the moment there is no cure or effective treatment so one should actually continue to use these scrapers where at all possible. Unfortunately there’s a perception that people with bad breath have got poor oral hygiene. That is not the case. You can keep your teeth scrupulously clean and floss consistently and you will still have bad breath unfortunately. You can use zinc containing chewing gum, for example, which will help to a certain extent. There is no good solution or cure at the moment.

Chris: I did hear that swilling your mouth with hydrogen peroxide in low concentrations is also quite good at killing the bacteria.

Marcello: Yeah. There are a number of solutions such as hydrogen peroxide which will kill bacteria but one has to be careful that you’re killing off the good bacteria as well as the bad bacteria. That’s certainly something we don’t want to do. These agents are non-selective.

We put this question to Gareth Morgan:

Gareth: We get some of our vitamins from our diet or the body makes them themselves. That dietary source is obviously very important. Bacteria are very important in digestion and dealing with food properly. It’s entirely possible that bacteria may have an important influence on how well we extract vitamins from our foods.

Chris: Does that include any specific types of vitamins?

Gareth: It could be any of them but B or K vitamins would be the type of things that would be influenced.

We put this question to Marcello Riggio:

Marcello - Yeah! It’s very important to have good hand hygiene but most of the bacteria on the surface of the skin are fairly harmless unless they get into the bloodstream where they can cause nasty infections. The most well-known is MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. We don’t need to worry about bacteria on the skin. They don’t cause any harm so long as they stay on the surface of the skin. Skin is a very good barrier and they don’t get into the bloodstream.

Chris - If you strip away the good ones is there not a danger the bad ones might take over?

Marcello - There certainly is, actually but if you’ve got bad bacteria on the skin then as long as they don’t get into the bloodstream they’re not going to cause any major problems.