I’m currently sitting in my cube at work. Unfortunately, I have the flu, and don’t particularly want to be here. So I’ve taken to contemplating the contants of the many snotrags that I’ve filled today, instead of actually working. It seems that whenever I fall ill, the emissions from my nose and lungs change color from an (ostensibly) healthy clear-ish color, to dark yellow/green. When the stuff dries it even looks like a flourescent green sometimes!
It seems as though the texture changes too, from a thin watery consistency, to something you could use as airplane glue.
My question is, why the change in color and thickness? I drink plenty of water ( > 1 gallon/day) so I don’t understand the texture/thickness change. Is the green due to dead/live bacteria, some protective measure of my body, or what? It seems to be a wisespread happenstance, as my goobers/nose emmissions are identical in color to that which I cough up.
If it’s my own body doing it, it seems mighty inconvenient for it to do something that causes me such discomfort and irritation.
I’ve been wondering this since I was a kid. Can anyone enlighen me?
I’m not a doctor but the color, as what a friend in college explained, has to do with the level of infection, yellow being the worst if my memory serves me right. If you’ve had a sinus infection you’d vouch for his claims. As far as the consistancy the only thing I’d guess would be the excess mucus your body is putting out to fight off the evil doers in your body.
Colour = infection? Ohh spare me the Ancient Greek BS …mucus = mucus. It’s a reject from your body. Unless you’re also going to describe your shit and piss, you’d be better off asking a doctor about how the cough sounds.
Mucus isn’t just mucus. Sorry. That’s assuming we’re even talking about mucus, not phlegm. nasal discharge, etc.
This “color to seriousness” correspondence was taught in all US medical schools in the 60s, many/most in the 70s, and is still often used as a rough sign today (albeit one that is considered increasingly unreliable). There were several rationales for this.
One is that the concentration of certain immune cells in mucus and phlegm may correspond roughly in some cases with the color - but that’s not 100% and if you must rely on that, why not actually look at it under a microscope, esp. with some histological stains. You get more (and more accurate) info. Few docs do that anymore. I do, sometimes, when I feel it’s indicated -and it’s the bee’s knees!
Certain bacteria are traditionally associated with specific colors. The classic example is the “currant jelly phlegm” of Klebiella pneumonia. (“Food names for classic signs” is a medical tradition, e.g. “strawberry tongue”)
However, docs usually don’t make gross generalizations based on sputum or phlegm color anymore. They weigh all the facts, and the color of secretions is, at best, a suggestive sign. It isn’t BS, but when patients try to do it, it’s just a headache for everyone.
E.g. I see florid yellow and green ‘snot’ etc. in seasonal allergies or asthma more often than in pneumonia. It’s not that the old wisdom was wrong. It just reflects my patient demographic and changes in prevalence over time. (Viral or Mycobacter are the most common community-acquired pneumonias these days, not Hemophilus influenza or the classic “pneumococcus”: Strep. pneumoniae)