The most intriguing health trivia By Willie T. Ong, MD (The Philippine Star)

The human body is like a machine that is full of wonder. Here is a collection of unusual health trivia — ranging from anatomy facts to medical anecdotes gathered from various sources.

• The human brain cell can hold five times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

• The average number of nerve cells (neurons) in the brain is 100 billion.

• The brain is soft and gelatinous — its consistency is something between jelly and cooked pasta.

• Though it makes up only two percent of our total body weight, the brain demands 20 percent of the body’s oxygen and calories.

• The time until unconsciousness after loss of blood supply to the brain is about eight to 10 seconds. (So don’t let anybody squeeze your neck.)

• Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour.

• The hearing range for a young adult human is 20 to 20,000 Hz. For an elderly person, hearing is less at 50 to 8,000 Hz. In contrast, a cat can hear better at 100 to 60,000 Hz, and a dolphin has the widest hearing range at 200 to 150,000 Hz.

• The auditory pain threshold is 130 Db. The threshold for hearing damage is 90 Db for an extended period of time. A rocket launching pad is equivalent to 180 Db, a jet plane to 140 Db, an automobile horn to 120 Db, a nagging wife up to 75 Db, and a soft whisper, 30 Db. Interestingly, the sound of a snore (up to 69 decibels) can be almost as loud as the noise of a drill.

• There are 9,000 taste buds on the tongue. We lose a lot of these taste buds as we get older.

• If you go blind in one eye, you’ll only lose about one-fifth of your vision, but all your depth perception.

Lungs & Heart

• A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.

• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.

• According to a German study, the risk of a heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week. Probably because Mondays are stressful days.

• An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

• Every day, the average heart beats 100,000 times and pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood.

• By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (computing on an average of 70 beats per minute). Therefore, an average person has three billion heartbeats to spare. That is why some doctors believe that drugs (called beta-blockers) that slow down the heart rate may help prolong life. Generally, unhealthy people have faster heart rates while athletic individuals have slower heart rates.

• Even properly performed, CPR delivers less than 30 percent of the heart’s normal flow of oxygenated blood to the brain.

• Fewer than five percent of cardiac arrest sufferers survive to hospital discharge. If a victim of cardiac arrest is given good CPR, gets shocked by a defibrillator within four minutes, and drugs are given within 60 minutes, the chance of survival can go up to 60 percent.

Skin & Body

• A pair of human feet contains 250,000 sweat glands. Each foot can sweat the equivalent of half a glass of water per day.

• There are about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet. That’s why feet are so smelly.

• Your teeth start growing six months before you are born.

• What’s the hardest substance in your body? It’s the enamel in your teeth.

• You use 200 muscles to take one step.

• Your big toes have two bones each while the rest have three bones.

• Every 12 years, we humans have an entirely new skeleton due to the body’s continual replacement of its bone cells.

• Your heels bear 60 percent of your body’s weight.

• There are more than a hundred different types of arthritis. You have a one in five chance of experiencing some form of rheumatic disease, such as arthritis, during your lifetime.

• 75 percent of adults do not know that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses.

• On the average, the chance of contracting an infection during a hospital stay is one in 15.

• Most deaths in a hospital happen between 4 p.m. and 6 pm. This is said to be the time when the human body is at its weakest.

• Tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including at least 50 that cause, initiate or promote cancer in humans, such as tar, ammonia, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and benzopyrene.

• Tobacco kills more people each year than all of the illegal drugs in the last century.

• There are 18 doctors in the US called Dr. Doctor, and one called Dr. Surgeon. There is also one dermatologist named Dr. Rash, a psychiatrist called Dr. Couch, and an anesthesiologist named Dr. Gass.

• What are the 10 human body parts that are only three letters long?

Answers: eye, ear, leg, arm, jaw, gum, toe, lip, hip, and rib.

•PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICO VOLCANOKONIOSIS (45 letters), a lung disease caused by breathing in certain particles, is the longest word in the English language dictionary.

• Your thumb is the same length as your nose. Try it and find out if it’s true. (Just make sure no one is watching or they might think you’re crazy.)