Ah, Spring! The time of year when children wear sandals and then admonish their siblings not to pick their toes on the way to pot-luck dinners.
Yesterday's toe picking prompted me to tweet a question that was mostly facetious:
If a child sequentially picks toes and nose, is there a risk of getting athlete's nostril?
But on Twitter, no silly question goes unanswered. So Bora replied:
I think so. The fungus just needs a decent amount transferred and sufficient time to set up shop elsewhere in the body.
Interesting. Also, potentially painful!
And of course, one of my Facebook friends took it a step further:
And doing the reverse is a leading cause of cold feet.
The power of social media.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
In which I discuss the manner in which and the degree to which Twitter is ruining the media.
------------
Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted saying that Twitter is ruining political journalism, calling out its role in solidifying media groupthink before events are even completed. That seemed like a…
Over the last month or so, it's been kind of hard to avoid this book, even before it hit stores. Big excerpts in the New York Times and The Guardian generated a good deal of buzz, and arguments on social media. Unsurprisingly, as one of the main elements of the book is a look at the phenomenon of…
Well, it's been about three weeks since I signed up for a personal account on twitter (you can follow me here if you're interested - my handle is @dnghub), and threw out my first "tweet."
Since then, I've found myself fully immersed in the web tool, and feel like I can say a few intelligent…
The AAAS annual meeting was last week, which apparently included some sessions on social media use. This, of course, led to the usual flurry of twittering about the awesomeness of Twitter, and how people who don't use Twitter are missing out. I was busy with other stuff, so I mostly let it pass,…
And then there's the old joke: If your feet smell and your nose runs, maybe you were built upside down.
Actually, I doubt that it would be too easy to get athlete's nose. Athlete's foot thrives on the feet because shoes provide the warm, dark, moist environment that the fungus prefers. Athlete's foot is a shod population's disease; it is pretty much unknown in populations that go barefoot all the time. I suspect that the nose, even if a bit warm and moist, gets ventilated way too well for the fungus to do its thing.
It will settle in the crotch, though!
Athlete's crotch is a clothed population's disease; it is pretty much unknown in populations that go naked all the time.
I am very susceptible to athelete's foot, but I have never gotten it in my nose. The first time I got it, it was between my fingers. As a child, I didn't know what it was and apparently I was putting my hand on my mouth a lot--I think I was biting on my finger because it itched so much--and it spread to my lip. I bet if I would have frequently held the infected area next to my inner nose, it would have spread there, too, but I don't see that being a common issue. . .