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Asked by queenofscience to Dalya, Derek, Sarah, Tim, Tom on 19 Jun 2011.
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Dalya Soond answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Sure you can die if you have water in your lungs….it’s called drowning. If your lungs are completely filled with water, you can’t get oxygen into them. Without oxygen, your cells can’t make ATP which is like ‘petrol’ fueling a cell. You can last for a short time without oxygen (up to 16 minutes, according to wikianswers), but eventually you will die. Your brain needs by far the most oxygen of any organ in your body. If it doesn’t get the oxygen it needs, it will start shutting off what it does such as making sure the heart beats at the right speed.
Interestingly, when people die of flu, it’s essentially because they are drowning. The flu virus causes -among other things -mucus to be made to trap the viruses from getting into other cells. Sometimes there is such a strong response and so much mucus is made, that the person suffocates.
It is highly unlikely that water in the lungs can cause lung cancer unless it is filled with toxic chemicals, then maybe it would.
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Tim Millar answered on 15 Jun 2011:
As Dalya said, its drowning.
What is interesting though is that other animals manage to extract enough oxygen out of water to survive, like fish and our lungs have to be a little wet as that helps with the oxygen transfer.
The amount of dissolved oxygen in water is much less than that available in air, and as we need lots to survive, we are adapted to take our air oxygen from the air.
The amount of oxygen dissolved in water is inversly proprtional to the temperature, so as temperature rises, there is less oxygen in the water. Some crabs who livein the warm sea around the caribbean often walk out of the sea when the water reaches around 25 degrees C. This is because at this temperature, there is more oxygen in air than dissolved in the water.
As for cancer, you would be very unlucky to go on and develop cancer from water entering the lungs. There is of course the damage that the water (or what other things are in the water), can do to the lungs, which may in time go onto other diseases of the lung like chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, but this would also be rare after drowning.
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Sarah Thomas answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Yes you can die from having water in your lungs.
Lung cancer is usually caused by persistant damage to your lung tissue, like by smoking or breathing in dangerous chemicals. I don’t think getting water in your lungs would cause cancer.
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Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 15 Jun 2011:
A tiny little bit of water won’t hurt. You may cough a bit, but that’s all. But as you get more and more water in your lungs, you cannot get the oxygen and, indeed, you will start to drown. Of course, you lungs are actually moist places though, so in some ways there is always a bit of water in your lungs.
You cannot get lung cancer from pure water. It would only be because of some other effect (that perhaps the water may or may not influence). But the water itself is only dangerous due to the prevention of the lungs drawing oxygen from the air.
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Tom Crick answered on 19 Jun 2011:
You have to be careful of aspirating things into the lungs, as it is possible to get infections from any foreign material. Obviously inhaling water into your lungs will eventually cause you to drown!
But this is not related to lung cancer, which is usually caused by long-term damage from smoking or inhaling chemicals (such as asbestos).
Comments
queenofscience commented on :
thx u 4 answering them 😀