Stop Smoking to Keep From Getting Sick

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell, and on behalf of Expert Village, today I'm going to talk to you about ways to alleviate some of the symptoms of colds and flus. Now, in this clip, we are going to talk about some very important ways that you could stop first of all putting yourself at risk for colds and flu, and that is to stop smoking. Now, smoking causes a lot of other problems in the body such as cancer and emphozema, but also smoking will increase your chances of getting colds and flu. This is the reason why: smoking causes the effect called it stops the mobility of cilia. Now, let me show you a diagram that I've drawn on the board. This is a pictorial diagram of the lung. This is the bronchi and here it splits and divides up into your lungs. This would be one area of your lungs, because you have two lungs. So this is the lungs. And air is inhaled in and it goes into these bronchi and goes into airoles and sacks. What happens is that these branches are lined with these hairlike projections called cilia. They are very important because actually the cilia move and it helps to get rid of any debris that is in the lungs itself. So for example, phlegm and coughing and debris, it moves it all the way up and then you hack it out. So, what happens is when you smoke, the smoke that has the carcinogen in it causes the cilia to stop; it becomes immobile. So basically, the cilia doesn't work any more and it affects the whole of the lungs. Then what happens is, that's how you get bronchitis and pneumonia because the phlegm just collects and collects and it starts clogging up the bronchi and the aviolas. Then you are going to get infection and disease because you can't get rid of all of this phlegm and toxic waste from the lung area itself. So that's why it is so important that you don't smoke; that you stop smoking, because smoking increases your chance of getting colds and flus and pneumonia and bronchitis. "