The lungs: how they work, what the coronavirus does to them, and the effects of smoking and asthma
- Less balloons than buckets of blood strung with air bubbles, the lungs help pull in oxygen, dispel carbon dioxide and play a key role in speech
- A person can survive on a single lung, provided it is in top condition, but lungs are easily damaged by illnesses and smoking
Our lungs are a clever combination of effective filter and pair of bellows, huffing and puffing air in and out, pumping with muscle and the aid of the diaphragm and rib cage. Every cell in the body needs oxygen to work properly and the lungs are crucial to this: with every breath we take, oxygen enters our bloodstream and moves throughout the body.
The lungs are one of the biggest organs, a twosome of slightly odd shaped balloons between the liver and heart.
The two are not symmetrical; they’re shaped to neatly fit into our anatomy, the right being wider than the left, but shorter to make room for the liver beneath it. The left one is narrower to accommodate the heart. The ribs neatly encircle them in a protective embrace. The surface area of all the tiny alveoli – the little sacs where oxygen and blood meet and mix – would cover a tennis court.
We need oxygen to survive, but if we don’t rid the body of carbon dioxide, we’d die anyway. That’s where the lungs also play a big role: expelling it.
Exhaling toxic CO2 is just as important as inhaling life-sustaining oxygen – we use only about 5 per cent of the oxygen of every breath, the rest is exhaled and the cycle continues. And lungs also play a key role in speech – the larynx, or voice box, is directly above the windpipe, pushing air from the lungs through the voice box to produce sound.