Quote:
Originally Posted by manaboutown
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Judging from the number of people who cover their mouths with masks but not their noses, there must be a lot of “mouth-breathers”. [from the Urban Dictionary: “ TOP DEFINITION Mouthbreather
1. Someone who is really dumb
2. A person who doesn't/can't breathe through their nose.]
Perhaps they think that when they breathe, they don’t use their noses, so they can’t catch anything through their noses or can’t give anything to others through their noses. They DO meet the first slang definition above.
I don’t think wearing masks contributes to tooth decay or gum problems. Remember, your mouth is the dirtiest part of your body in any case (for some people, in two ways). Also, it is already bathed in saliva. Normally, the germs in your mouth are swallowed and quickly sterilized by stomach acid.
However, some of you may have noticed that if you wear the same disposable mask (or unwashed cloth mask) day after day for a half hour while you are in a store or somewhere else where you need a mask, it smells nasty when you breathe in (assuming you aren’t a mouth-breather, so you can smell through your nose). That’s the smell of various sorts of germs from your mouth, your nose, and your lungs that you have breathed onto your mask. (Okay, well, sometimes also the fragrance of what you ate for dinner.) These germs were trapped by your mask as they are supposed to be and are now multiplying rapidly in the residual moisture in your mask. They smell much worse than your breath normally smells because they are essence of germs. Also, everyone has some really nasty smells deep down in their lungs, and a deep sneeze or cough will dredge them up and distribute them onto your mask. If you leave your mask open on your dashboard in the sun, probably most of these germs are killed, and the smell is not so bad. Of course, when your car’s windshield is in the sun is probably when you are somewhere where you should be wearing a mask.
I see disposable masks for sale in a lot of stores these days, from Sam’s Club to WalMart to Lowe’s. They seem to cost about fifty cents each. I don’t think they are up to the quality of the average operating room mask I wore for years, but they filter and slow down projected particles. If you use disposable masks, replace them daily or after several hours of use. If you use cloth masks, have a bunch of them and wash them well in detergent and hot water and ideally dry them in the sun. Don’t reuse them without washing them. (Fabric softener and softener sheets in the dryer may sort of glue together cloth fibers and keep them from working as well, though they will feel softer.) Remember, there are incoming germs on your mask as well as outgoing germs. Sometimes, these germs are trapped in your mask because they are mixed with moisture. If that moisture dries, however, without the germs all dying, they can sometimes now be breathed through or blown through the mask, in or out, because they may be released from the moisture and so smaller and lighter.
Here’s another trick you probably don’t want to know about. When I was an operating room technician back in the early seventies (I started at 17), our OR kept a bottle of oil of cloves in a cupboard. If we had a surgical case with a lot of pus involved (a horrible smell), we would each put a drop of oil of cloves on our mask. This didn’t kill the infection, but the smell of the cloves covered the smell of the infection so we didn’t throw up from the smell. Maybe your breath isn’t that bad, but still, it works. Better to just put on a new or clean mask, though.