Why should you worry about tetanus when you hurt yourself with something rusty?
In: Biology
Tetanus is a soil bacteria, but significantly it’s anaerobic, and dies in the presence of oxygen. It can live in mud and shit, but it really needs to be isolated from the air.
The thing about rusting metal is that the metal eats any oxygen in the water in its immediate surroundings, so it provides a much more portable anaerobic environment for the bacteria to travel around on. Instead of needing to be buried half an inch deep in unaerated soil, it can live in a thin film of mud on the surface of a rusty nail or pitchfork.
The other thing you need to know is that the kinds of wounds that are prone to tetanus infection are dirty puncture wounds. A slash or cut gets lots of blood flow (with nicely oxygenated blood), and any soil/etc in the wound is easily washed out.
But get a muddy nail in the sole of your foot, or stab yourself with a garden implement or something…. and now it’s got a dark little hole to live in, with the dirt in the wound blocking the blood flow, hard to clean out, and likely to just get bandaged up – making itself a nice little pocket of dying cells giving up their nutrients and further cutting off oxygenation of the tissues as the bacterium releases its toxins to kill more cells…
Yeah.
Latest Answers