Still coughing — are you still infectious?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Yuck. I wish she'd muted your mic before you did that. Are you feeling a little under the weather, Norman?
No, I just, you know, it's a bit like the yawning episode. Why do when you start yawning do other people yawn? Why do when you start coughing do other people cough? But that's actually not what we're going to be talking about today.
The reason you start coughing when other people cough is because they've coughed their germs on you and you catch the virus they have. And I'm really glad that I'm a thousand kilometres away from you as we have this chat.
I'm still coughing. Am I infectious? Is the topic of this week's What's That Rash?
It's the show where we answer the health questions everyone is asking. And today's question comes from Jive. Jive says, "'Coughs lasting weeks after a respiratory virus have always been annoying, but since COVID, going to work with a residual cough feels inappropriate, but also unreasonable to expect people to stay home for a month plus.'" Jive's asking, "'How can we know for sure whether our residual cough is not infectious to others, and when is it okay to go to work?' So let's talk about coughing. What is coughing?
So a cough is... I'm going to explain the bleeding obvious here. It's a forcible expulsion of air. And the main purpose is thought to be to enhance the body's own mechanisms for getting rid of irritants and mucus out of your airways. So you have... In your respiratory tract, you have little cilia and mucus production, which then waft upwards to your throat and brings all the crap that you're breathing in and slowly brings it to your throat and then you swallow it. In other words, you get rid of the stuff in your lungs. It's a cleaning mechanism.
Sorry, it wafts it up out of your airways and then you yuck. Yuck. Human bodies are disgusting.
I'm getting a bit of a flame in my throat. It is just like yawning, actually. Anyway, so anything that irritates the lining of the respiratory tract can cause a cough. So that can be an allergy. It can be hay fever. It can be asthma. It can be that you've got a chronic lung disease, for example, cystic fibrosis or bronchiectasis, where you've got inflammation in the lungs and hollowed out areas.
What does a cough mean in terms of infectiousness?
You can have acid reflux, where the acid goes into the lungs and irritates the lungs. You can have a post-nasal drip from the back of your throat. And you can also be drug-induced. So a common anti-blood pressure drug or family of drugs are called ACE inhibitors. And about 40% of people on ACE inhibitors develop a cough, which is presumably a central effect on your brain, producing a cough in your respiratory tract.
Yeah, it makes sense that you're trying to cough something up and we can wallow in the disgustingness of that as much as we like.
Wallow is the word because sometimes you wallow because it's really fruity and sometimes it's dry.
But this is it.
We should have put a health warning on this.
We really should have.
Content warning. Stop eating, yeah.
It's so disgusting. But again, bodies, man. But I'm thinking about Jive's question and how long a cough sometimes hangs around for me after I've been sick or if I'm a bit run down and my throat's a bit scratchy because I've been, I don't know, yelling too much or something because I've been out having too much fun. I often find that I have a cough that isn't bringing anything up. It's almost like it's just that skin. Is it skin when it's on the inside of your throat? It's irritated and it's sort of just this reflexive action that my body wants to do.
Yeah. Can I just say, we'll just double back a little bit, but I'd just say that there is another kind of cough which parents of children know only too well, which is a barking cough, which was called inspiratory stridor. So in other words, the child has a very barky cough, and then instead of asthma, which is a wheeze, It's a on the way in.
On the inhale.
On the inhale. And it can be quite scary for parents. And that's croup. And then there's whooping cough, which you have a spasmodic cough.
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