ronigamiHow bad would it be to inject seawater into your bloodstream?
Maybe you should buy one of those kids microscopes and see how much small stuff floats in a single drop of water. I didn't try seawater as a kid, but water from a pond has millions of moving, living things in it.
Yeah there is a lot of stuff in the water but there’s a lot of stuff in the air. Each day you come in contact with tens of billions of viruses, right?
And you have a lung as a barrier. That's supposed to exchange the oxygen and carbon dioxide, while keeping most of the rest out of the bloodstream. Nose, mucusa, bronchia also do their thing. I mean you also don't inject air into your blood vessels...
So basically the immune system just kind of sucks? I mean trees don’t have one and they’re fine so I guess it’s just supplementary and not that effective compared to other things?
Your body is one system. Your blood cells, lungs, bronchia all collaborate and work together to pull off the task. I'm not sure if "sucks" is the right word here. But you won't survive without a lung nor will you survive without blood cells and that part of the immune system
And concerning trees, they have an immune system as well: www.nature.com/articles/nature05286
Sort of, but not on the same scale as us. Generally, the default for anything not a vertebrate is to have innate immunity systems like inflammation, but no adaptive response. Although, there are parallels to white blood cells that have separately evolved in certain other branches of the animal kingdom.
The plant immune system - Nature
An understanding of the immune system of plants is important for progress in agriculture and pest control. Lacking the mobile defender cells and adaptive immune response found in mammals, plants rely on the innate immunity of each cell and on signals sent around the plant from infection sites. Jonathan Jones and Jeffery Dangl review current models of plant defences, and identify some of the remaining unknowns, including the mechanism used to arrest growth in pathogens.
Sure, I mean trees and humans are very different species and have different inner workings. Though I'm pretty sure it's worthy of the name immune system. Plants have specific proteins to handle things, and I believe they can even send chemicals through the organism to respond.
Trees do have an immune system
Bacteria… Does one really need to say ANYTHING else?
I mean, ocean life seems to deal with the massive amount of bacteria somehow?
Be a better troll elsewhere
It’s not a stupid question. A better one is why you think it is.
It is honestly funny how everyone here thinks I’m posting this thread in bad faith despite asking only legitimate questions.
lime!they generally deal with it by it not being in their blood
These animals are swallowing seawater and animals that live in the seawater, there’s no way it doesn’t end up in their blood.
And humans are obviously found IN water… Just like fish are found walking on land
We were fish much longer than we lived on land.
What the FUCK does that have anything to do with anything??
The fact that when you live in one place for a long time you get pretty fucking good at dealing with the pathogens there and when you evolve later you usually keep those defenses.
your mouth is typically not directly connected to your bloodstream
bro, blood is the reason your mouth is red. I get that we have epithelial tissue but it’s at least semi permeable like every other biological thing
you try blowing air through a fish and see where it ends up
last I checked they didn’t put synthetic air in fish veins at the fish hospital
and when was that?
Mostly harmless.
The salt is far more of a problem.
Then what is saline made up of??
Salt is fine, it is bacteria that will fuck you up.
Isn’t it just the concentration that’s off? 3.5% vs 0.9%?
It sounds like there’s special compositions sometimes, which are supposed to be more healing - I was given Ringer’s lactate a bit ago - but that the default is literally just salt and pure water at that magic 0.9%.
The bacteria in seawater are generally going to be the kind that like seawater, not people. Unless someone dumped sewage nearby…
The living nasties to be aware of are more parasitic worms like swimmer’s itch and toxic algaes, and unless you’re very unlucky with the algae concentration, neither are a pressing problem in the context that you have concentrated salt water spreading up a damn limb.
𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍I do wonder if the average amount of microplastics by volume in your body would increase or decrease
Like OP said, copying from me, it’s too salty to be fresh, but not nearly as salty as sea water. Brackish, in marine terms.
Tuukka RSo... Seawater heated to 99,9°C for 10 minutes (Or to 150 °C under a high pressure), then cooled to 37°C?
Would that work? Probably still too dirty in other ways. Or?
Not necessarily - there are parasites and nasties whose spores are fairly resistant. Depending on where you got your sea water it might not be enough.
So, we need to bring the pressure up enough for the water not to boil at +800 °C. Understood!
Regardless of sterility pumping essentially salty, muddy water into your bloodstream still won’t go well.
Well, it’s at about 3.5% salt, while saline solution for the body is at about 0.9%. Basically, it would burn everything it directly came into contact with. Depending on how much you shot up, maybe your kidneys would stop anything systemic from happening, but that’s getting into medical territory I’m cloudier on. They used to further punish people after a whipping by cleaning up with seawater. It sounds like that was actually the more painful part of the event, when it was done.
I read a paper recently that suggested that it’s because vertebrates originally evolved in brackish river estuaries. That makes me curious how salty bugs are. Snails, at least, can definitely adapt to living in very concentrated brine, given a bit of time to evolve for it.
IIRC you can safely drink water that’s a bit more salty than you, given that you’re in good health. Seawater is too much for humans, though; it famously will only make you more thirsty. Sea birds have a special gland in their face that amounts to an extra kidney specifically for removing salt. Whales just get enough water from the fish they eat. I’m not sure about fish themselves now.
Thank you for the detailed answer!!
No problem!
dandelionBut come on, it wouldn’t be that dangerous, right?
🤦♀️ this is some serious /r/WhyWomenLiveLonger/ content
I mean so far the answer seems to be “as long as you dilute it a bit first you’d be fine”
that does not seem to be a reasonable takeaway, bacterial and fungal infections from injecting non-sterile solutions into your body can definitely kill you
hyperfocusing on how dilute the salt would need to be for it not to be dangerous misses a lot of context
Most of this is fairly handwavey without numbers to be fair. But like, this is the reason we have an immune system, right?
does the immune system nullify risk of contracting an illness in other contexts? Certainly not perfectly - and injecting dirty sea water directly puts the bacteria, fungi, and parasites into your bloodstream, bypassing the protective measures your body normally has for keeping that stuff on the outside (like mucus, hair, the acidic environment of the stomach, etc.).
Yeah, you might be able to make ghetto saline with distilled water and the ocean and not become emergently ill, but you shouldn’t actually do it. Even if you collect from an immaculate site and dodge any human (or mammal? This is the kind of weird situation where zoonosis could happen) pathogens, foreign bodies in the bloodstream won’t make you healthier.
I haven’t seen much evidence OP thinks this is a good idea and not just a thought experiment, though. That would be weird.
I wouldn’t want to do that without some significant heat and pressure for an extended period of time, and maybe add some some preservatives for good measure, and honestly I wouldn’t be past using a syringe filter to further purify it - anything that gets injected into my body better be safe, those are crazy risks
The immune system is not omnipotent. It protects you from stuff 24/7 365 for life. However, its going to have trouble when you bypass checks such as lung mucosa and skin and put in a bunch of invaders “behind the line” as it were. Even fish have gills and a separation of their blood from the environment.
The whole reason you have skin is to protect you from nature.
Your body is a tube; anything you swallow is subjected to all sorts of processes designed to break that thing down into tiny pieces that get checked over and over by the guardians in your body.
Anytime the doctor injects you they sterilize your skin and make sure that the vial the product comes has been sterilized.
tl, dr - it's a really dumb idea
I asked AI
No! Bad!
Though it happens to be right in this case. It would be incredibly dangerous. There’s all sorts of nasty shit in seawater that you really don’t want in your bloodstream
Lemmy complains about stupid questions out of one side of it’s mouth and about OP asking a machine out of the other.
BoozillaDid RFK Jr find us already?
lmao
Since I never mentioned it, the reason I ask is I got dehydrated last night and I guess my brain conflated the want for saline IV with ocean water.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 Embolism. Which could happen with regular water or even just air being injected into a vein.
Infection. It’s not saline; there’s more than just saltwater in the sea and all those microbes are gonna wreck havok on your body having bypassed most of the things that normally keep them out of your body.
Not sure if this is your subject matter expertise or not but what if you sterilized the seawater, so we don’t need to worry about infection, purged the air from the line, so no embolism, and only injected 300mL which is a comparable amount to saline you might receive in a hospital.
Seawater is 3.5% salt vs saline which is 0.9% would that much salt just be diluted by the body or could it cause local damage?
I just watch a lot of chubbyemu vids and may be a slight bit of a hypochondriac.
I can’t imagine the salt being good for you. It could kill internal flora, it might cause pain, and it definitely is going to not be fun for your kidneys.
Bottom line: You should not inject anything into yourself, except as prescribed by a doctor. I wouldn’t even inject recreational drugs, personally. And I have no qualms about doing drugs.
No. The first part is completely wrong.
Embolism describes a blockade of a vessel from blood flow. That’s not what will happen with seawater nor normal water.
Seawater is hyperosmolar and therefore would draw water into the vessels from the intracellular region and cause hypertonia (high blood pressure), but it takes a fuckton of it to make the blood so hyperosmolar that the erythrocytes are disfigured. (To give you a comparison: Sea water has around 3% saline content. We used to give hyperosmolar solutions that had 7.2% and starch in it - so with a much stronger effect). In the end the kidneys would very likely fail and kill the person in combination with the hypertension.
Normal water has the opposite effect - it’s hypoosmolar and therefore goes the other way. (And causes edema but not embolism)
Air is a totally different story and air embolisms are a real threat - but even air needs much more than one would think. (A few ml won’t hurt an average.)
Infection? Fuck yes.
x4740NNot a scientist BUT PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS