If you breathe in a bug, and it gets to your lungs, how can your lungs “get rid of” the bug carcass? Is it just trapped in there? Can lungs “digest” things? (Assuming you’re not coughing it back out)
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Imagine your lungs as a cozy room where you breathe in air to stay healthy. Sometimes, tiny things like bugs can accidentally get inside when you breathe. If a bug goes into your lungs, your body’s system will try to take care of it.
Your lungs are smart. They have tiny hair-like things called cilia. Think of cilia like brooms that sweep and clean your lungs. When a bug gets inside, these cilia start moving in a wave-like motion. They try to push the bug and any gunk out of your lungs.
Sometimes, your body might also send some special cells to help. These cells are like superhero cleaners. They can surround the bug, break it down, and carry the parts away. So, even if you’re not coughing, your body has ways to get rid of the bug and keep your lungs clean and healthy.
Our lungs can’t really “digest” things like our stomach can, but they can remove things that shouldn’t be there.
Your lungs will cover it in mucous and the push it back up. At a certain point you will cough and it will come up
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Your windpipe is extremely sensitive. Unlikely you could inhale a bug without coughing it up. When anesthesiologists put breathing tubes in patient’s tracheas, it requires significantly deeper sedation than making a large surgical incision does
To add to the mechanical side – your lungs have resident immune cells whose job it is to ‘eat’ bacteria and destroy it. These are called macrophages. Think of them like pac-man – they wonder around the alveoli (air sacks) and gobble up the bugs they find, destroy them and then basically recycle the parts.
It’s way more complicated then this of course – as your lungs actually have their own microbiome. Meaning there are communities of bacteria that live in your lungs and do you no harm. In fact they might also help protect you from the bad bugs. We don’t know yet why some bacteria can live in there happily but others cause you to get infections etc. These bugs change according to different lung diseases – to the point where we can look at the bugs in your lungs and predict what lung condition you have (cystic fibrosis, COPD, asthma etc). Lots of unknowns but cool science to do to find out
It depends on how big the bug is. If it’s broken down into small enough pieces, cilia (little hair like protrusion on the cells lining your airways) push it out or macrophages digest it.
If the body can’t do either of those things, a granuloma forms. It’s a collection of immune cells that encircle the bug to wall it off from healthy tissue. The granuloma eventually calcifies.
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https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/197623#1
This gentleman would like a word with his cilia.
I saw a really great picture once of a white blood cell wrapping around a microscopic iron shaving in a sample of lung tissue and dragging it away so I assume like that
I recently inhaled a part of a [pappadam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papadam) and I was thinking the same lol.
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