Does dry air contribute to more respiratory infections? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Dry air just isn’t good for your respiratory health, new research by David Edwards, a respiratory health expert at Johns Hopkins, has shown. Dry air makes mucus thicker and harder to expel, and traps both toxins and pathogens in our lungs, making us more likely to become infected, and also making us more likely to infect others, Edwards explains.

Edwards: When you inhale you generate respiratory droplets in your upper airways that travel deep in your lungs and then you breathe them out into the outside environment. So when you’re exposed to pathogens, as we all are every day, they typically fall out in the upper airways and you want them to clear. And when they get back in the air then they can get deep in the lungs and then go out and infect other people and so you don't want to have many respiratory droplets generated, and you get more of them when your airways are dry. :24

Edwards says climate change is making the planet hotter, which increases the rate of evaporation of water from surfaces, including our respiratory system, and begins this cascade of reactions, followed by increased inflammation that impacts the entire body. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.