As revealed A study published in Nature, the transmission of infectious agents through the air depends more on how loudly we speak than on coughs or sneezes. The effect is independent of language.
The researchers analyzed the broadcast in four languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic.
Speech superspreaders
The hypotheses on the transmission of airborne infectious diseases have traditionally emphasized the role of coughs and sneezes, which are expiratory events that produce easily visible droplets and large quantities of particles too small to see with the naked eye.
However, it has long been known that normal speech also produces large quantities of particles that are too small to see with the naked eye, but large enough to carry a variety of transmissible respiratory pathogens.
The aforementioned study thus shows that the rate of particle emission during normal human speech is positively correlated with volume (amplitude) of vocalization, which varies from approximately 1 to 50 particles per second (0.06 to 3 particles per cm3) for low to high amplitudes, regardless of the language spoken (English, Spanish, Mandarin or Arabic). When you breathe, you are emitting particles from your saliva or respiratory fluid, from the trachea and from the lungs. If you talk, you emit 10 times more. If you scream or sing, 50 times more.
Furthermore, a small fraction of individuals behave as 'super-speech emitters', consistently releasing an order of magnitude more particles than their peers.
This can not only be explained by the phonic structures or the amplitude of speech, so the results also suggest that other unknown physiological factors, which vary dramatically between individuals, could affect the probability of transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and would also help explain the existence of superspreaders that are disproportionately responsible for outbreaks of airborne infectious diseases.
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The news
It doesn't matter what language you speak: if you speak louder, you are more likely to infect others than by coughing or sneezing
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.