Sneezes occupy the attention of flu mavens because the aerosol created is likely one of the chief ways the virus finds a new host. So it’s a selective advantage to a respiratory virus to make someone explosively expel air from the lungs through the nose. A sneeze even has a medical name: sternutation. The speed of the estimated 40,000 aerosol droplets has been variously given as 90 to 650 miles per hour.
But sneezing is a complex act and lots of things can make someone sneeze besides the flu or a head cold. Things that irritate the nose cause some people to sneeze. And there is an inherited (autosomal dominant) response called the photic sneeze reflex where stimulating the optic (2nd
3rd cranial) nerve with a bright light seems to make a reflex arc to the trigeminal (5th cranial) nerve, which controls sneezing. It’s not even particularly rare. One estimate says it affects a quarter of the population. A full stomach makes other people sneeze. I know someone who sneezes after meals.
And then there’s sneezing when thinking about sex:
Dr Mahmood Bhutta, an ear, nose and throat specialist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, launched the study after seeing a patient who suffered “uncontrollable” sneezing fits every time he had a sexual thought.
“We thought this unusual and performed a literature search of the topic,” he wrote in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Together with colleague Dr Harold Maxwell, Dr Bhutta found that typing the words “sex”, “sneeze” or “sneezing” into Google produced a surprising number of hits. “Although internet reports do not give us an accurate incidence, our findings do suggest that it is much more common than recognised,” wrote Dr Bhutta and Dr Maxwell.
Dr Bhutta said he believed sneezing when thinking about sex probably ran in families too. He added: “I think this reflex demonstrates evolutionary relics in the wiring of a part of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system… Sometimes the signals in this system get crossed, and I think this may be why some people sneeze when they think about sex.” (Nothing to do with Arbroath)
Deep thought: for some people is flu a venereal disease where you don’t even have to have sex with the person to catch it?