# Is excessive cat hair dangerous to the health? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 27, 2011, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-excessive-cat-hair-dangerous-to-the-health/597776 "2011-09-27T17:27:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Infovore](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/infovore/32/420_2.png) [@Infovore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Infovore)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2011, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-excessive-cat-hair-dangerous-to-the-health/597776/1 "2011-09-27T17:27:15Z")
It occurs to me that I have a _lot_ of cat hair in my house. We have several cats, and we’re…uh…not the world’s most diligent housekeepers. Every time we vacuum we get a significant amount of cat hair in the hopper, and I can see it on things like furniture and bedding and clothes. I’m not talking _drifts_ of it here (we’re not _that_ bad) but there’s definitely a fair bit of the stuff floating around our house. I’m not the least bit allergic. The spouse is but he’s been taking shots for years and since he sleeps with two or three cats every night without issue, I don’t think the allergies are a problem anymore. But is the respiratory system’s filtering good enough that when we die and they do autopsies on us, they won’t find our lungs looking like overstuffed dryer filters? 😛 I have this vision of the doctor pulling out this giant soggy hairball. Kind of like lung-bezoars. 🙂 I’m going to guess that since neither of us has respiratory problems and the cat hair has been around for quite awhile (we’ve owned various numbers of cats since 2000), it’s probably not a big deal. But I was just curious. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Dung\_Beetle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dung_beetle/32/7945_2.png) [@Dung\_Beetle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dung_Beetle)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2011, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-excessive-cat-hair-dangerous-to-the-health/597776/2 "2011-09-27T17:41:33Z")
Surely we’d be dead by now if it was. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2011, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-excessive-cat-hair-dangerous-to-the-health/597776/3 "2011-09-27T17:44:10Z")
HOOOOOORRRKK!!! No. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2011, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-excessive-cat-hair-dangerous-to-the-health/597776/4 "2011-09-27T21:03:40Z")
I’m picturing it now: Fluffy lung syndrome. In seriousness, though, the things that cause problems like that (black lung, white lung, etc.) all have fibers or particles that are much smaller than cat hairs. Hairs are the sort of thing that our respiratory system has evolved to keep out effectively-- After all, we’ve got the stuff, too, some of it even growing right inside portions of our respiratory system. ---
**Author:** ![voguevixen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b5ac83/32.png) [@voguevixen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/voguevixen)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2011, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-excessive-cat-hair-dangerous-to-the-health/597776/5 "2011-09-28T03:01:53Z")
Don’t know about health but a friend had a long-haired cat that used to lie on her desk a lot. One day her computer burst into flames because the fan was clogged with cat hair. (Might want to wave the vacuum over that every so often, haha.)