OK, as we were coming back from lunch, telling jokes and yukking it up, someone accidently swallowed an ice cube while laughing. Apart from being a little uncomfortable, obviously no harm will come from it.
But, one of the guys said, “Good thing you didn’t inhale that or you’d drown.” He further explained that you can drown in as little as a teaspoon of water. Well, of course, I’ve heard of people getting fluid in their lungs and that this is major problem for people, so I didn’t say anything at first.
But then, I thought, people accidently inhale small amounts of liquids all the time. If you could drown from it, everyone would be dead before their 20th birthday. Surely the lungs have a way to quickly remove small amounts of liquid. Besides, aren’t the insides of lungs a little bit moist anyway?
I mean, they sometimes pull drowned people from the rivers and manage to revive them by “pushing” the water from the lungs. So, wet lungs should work well enough to allow recovery.
Oh, and it seems to me that one ice cube isn’t going to incapacitate both lungs.
You’d suffocate to death before it’d melt enough to even theoretically drown you. However, it seems that a slick ice cube would be a comparatively easy thing to cough back up.
I’ve found a few online sites that verify, yes, some people think that you can drown in a teaspoon of water. They don’t specify how such a miniscule amount of water could be capable of such enormity, but they’ve vectored it and Google has linked to it and cached it.
I can’t imagine it being possible. A few inches of water, enough to cover the mouth and nose of a completely unconscious person, maybe, but not a teaspoon. Do any of these people know how small a teaspoon is? A few drops! You couldn’t even block a nasal passage with a teaspoon of mucus. Certainly a teaspoon of water couldn’t make the imbiber go down. You’d have better luck with the teaspoon itself.
As for an ice cube killing one: Maybe if the person was in deep hypothermia such that the ice wasn’t melting fast enough for the liquid to be cleared from the larynx. But anyone so far gone with hypothermia that he can’t keep his throat warm has worries at least as pressing as an ice cube being lodged in the wrong place.
I’ve always heard it as a baby could drown in as little as a teaspoon of water. Which makes more sense since a baby might not be capable of witdrawing from the water in the wrong situation.
But that would have to be an awfully young baby and it still doesn’t seem really plausible. But what do I know about the physiology of an infant?
There’s a surfactant in the lungs that aids oxygen absorption. Theoretically, you could wash it all off with a fairly small amount of water, but you’d have to get it there and then get it out. It isn’t going to happen by swallowing a small amount of water.
A very small amount of liquid can induce laryngospasm, which will cause suffocation, not drowning. Somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of “drowning” victims in one study were found to have no significant water in their lungs, which indicates they died not from inhaling vast quantities of water, but from their larynx closing off completely when hit by water.
This is generally not a problem for aspirations of small amounts of liquid
when one’s head is above water. In this instance the vocal cords tend to relax and open, and don’t spasm further if there’s air above them.