Medical Trivia
 In 2003, 2,500,000,000 Paracetamol tablets
were sold over the counter in the UK.
 The left testicle hangs lower than the right in
85% of men.
 There have been more babies born in the 10
years after the world population conference in
1992, as there were people alive on the planet
2000 years ago.
 Hepatitis C is 4000 times more infectious than
HIV
 Around the world, about 1600 people are
infected with HIV-AIDS every day.
 Around the world, 50 people a day are blown
up by land mines.
 In the UK there was 100 times more research
money spent on AIDS than on Prostate cancer
last year, but 100 times more men died from
Prostate cancer than from AIDS.
 The mosquito is the most dangerous animal in
the world. 3000 people die each day from
Malaria. World wide, 515 million people are
infected.
 15% of the UK NHS budget is spent on treating
sufferers from Diabetes and its related
complications.
 Properly performed, CPR delivers less than
30% of the hearts normal flow of oxygenated
blood to the brain.
 Last year in the UK, 2500 people died in traffic
accidents, 3000 died from hypothermia and
cold related problems, mostly in their own
home.
 The average red blood cell lives for 120 days.
 A red blood cell can circumnavigate your whole
body in 20 seconds.
 There are 2.5 trillion red blood cells in your
body, which means about two and a half million
new ones need to be produced every second
by your bone marrow. That's the same as
reproducing the population of the city of
Toronto every second. That's 100 billion every
day.
 If you look at all the cells and tissues in your
body, about 25 million are reproduced every
second, which is like reproducing almost the
entire population of Canada every second!
 Nerve impulses travel at over 400 km/h. When
we touch something, we send a message to our
brain at 124 mph.
 In one square inch of our hand we have nine
feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000
nerve endings, 625 sweat glands, 36 heat
sensors and 75 pressure sensors.
 A sneeze explodes out of the body at 166 km/h.
 A cough travels at 100 km/h.
 The average heart beats at 100,000 times a
day.
 Your blood is on a 600,000 mile journey.
 Your eyes can distinguish up to one million
colour surfaces and take in more information
than the largest telescope known to man.
 Our lungs inhale over two million litres of air
every day, and if they were spread out, they are
large enough to cover a tennis court.
 We exercise 30 muscles when we smile.
 Our bodies are about 70% water.
 We make 1 litre of saliva every day.
 Our nose filters impurities, cools hot air and
warms cold air.
 We have copper, zinc, cobalt, calcium,
manganese, phosphates, nickel and silicon in
our bodies.
 The main purpose of eyebrows is to keep sweat
out of the eyes.
 Over your lifetime, the average person will
breathe in around 40 pounds of dust.
 There are more living organisms in one
average human body than there are humans in
the whole world!
 From 30 years old onwards we gradually
shrink.
 We have enough iron in our bodies to make an
iron stake big enough to hold our weight.
 We have enough carbon in our bodies to make
9,000 pencils.
 When we blush, our stomach lining goes red
too.
 If we put together all the time we spend
blinking, we would see blackness for 1.2 years.
 The first link between diabetes and sugar was
discovered by Michael Eugene Chevreul in
1815. He found that the urine of diabetics was
identical to the sugar found in grapes.
 * If you have to sneeze, but can't, look at a
source of light. 25% to 33% of all humans
sneeze when exposed to the sun or other light
source.
 * The heart of an adult weighs approximately 10
ounces.
 * Dimples appear when human skin is attached
to muscle.
 * No disease has ever been completely
eradicated, according to medical research
scientists.
 * Digitalis as a heart medicine was discovered
in an English garden in 1799. He dried the
leaves and used the plant to treat heart patients
1 The average red blood cell lives for 120 days.
2 There are 2.5 trillion (give or take) of red blood cells in your
body at any moment. To maintain this number, about two and
 a half million new ones need to be produced every second by
your bone marrow.That's like a new population of the city of
Toronto every second.
3 Considering all the tissues and cells in your body, 25 million
new cells are being produced each second. That's a little less
than the population of Canada - every second !
4 A red blood cell can circumnavigate your body in under 20
seconds.
5 Nerve Impulses travel at over 400 km/hr (25 mi/hr).
6 A sneeze generates a wind of 166 km/hr (100 mi/hr), and a
cough moves out at 100 km/hr (60 mi/hr).
7 Our heart beats around 100,00 times every day.
8 Our blood is on a 60,000-mile journey.
9 Our eyes can distinguish up to one million colour surfaces
and take in more information than the largest telescope
known to man.
10 Our lungs inhale over two million litres of air every day,
without even thinking. They are large enough to cover a
tennis court.
11 We give birth to 100 billion red cells every day.
12 When we touch something, we send a message to our brain
at 124 mph
13 We exercise at least 30 muscles when we smile.
14 We are about 70 percent water.
15 We make one litre of saliva a day.
16 Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms
cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities.
17 In one square inch of our hand we have nine feet of blood
vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat
sensors and 75 pressure sensors.
18 We have copper, zinc, cobalt, calcium, manganese,
phosphates, nickel and silicon in our bodies.
19 It is believed that the main purpose of eyebrows is to keep
sweat out of the eyes.
20 A person can expect to breathe in about 40 pounds of dust
over his/her lifetime.
21 There are more living organisms on the skin of a single
human being than there are human beings on the surface of
the earth.
22 From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in
size.
23 Your body contains enough iron to make a spike strong
enough to hold your weight.
24 The surface area of a human lung is equal to that of a
tennis court.
25 Most people have lost fifty per cent of their taste buds by
the time they reach the age of sixty.
26 The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill
about 9,000 'lead' pencils.
27 One square inch of human skin contains 625 sweat glands.
28 When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.
29 The human body has less muscles in it than a caterpillar.
30 If you could save all the times your eyes blink in one life
time and use them all at once you would see blackness for
1.2 years!
31 The life span of a taste bud is ten days.
32 It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
33 Give a tennis ball a good, hard squee ze. You're using
about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump
blood out to the body.
34 The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the
diameter of a garden hose.
35 Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten
of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
36 Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6
liters of blood circulates through the body three times every
minute.
37 The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an
average lifetime--that's enough to fill more than 3 super
tankers.
38 Babies start dreaming even before they're born.
39 The human body can function without a brain.
40 Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in
the palms of their hands.
41 10% of human dry weight comes from bacteria.
42 There is more bacteria in your mouth than the human
population of the United States and Canada combined .
43 Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32
million bacteria on it.
44 A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months
45 You sit on the biggest muscle in your body, the gluteus
maximus a.k.a. the butt. Each of the two cheeky muscles tips
the scales at about two pounds (not including the overlying
fat layer).
46 The tiniest muscle, the stapedius of the middle ear , is just
one-fifth of an inch long.
47 The average human head weighs about 10 pounds.
48 The average human brain weighs three pounds.
49 The DNA helix measures 80 billionths of an inch wide.
50 Your eyeballs are three and a half percent salt.
51 Head lice actually prefer to live on clean heads, not on dirty
ones.
52 If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-
33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall and have a
neck twice the length of a normal human's neck.
53 It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the
whole body.
54 An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in
a lifetime.
55 Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If
the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to
nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
56 Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour -
about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average
person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
57 It only takes 7lbs of pressure to rip your ear off.
58 When you sneeze, all your bodily functions stop - even your
heart.
59 Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.
60 You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching T.V.
61 Our eyes never grow, and our nose and ears never stop
growing.
62 The thumbnail grows the slowest; the middle nail grows the
fastest
63 Children grow faster in the springtime.
64 Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
65 You can only smell 1/20th as well as a dog.
66 People are the only animals in the world who cry tears.
67 Every month you grow a brand new outer layer of skin..."a
new you!".
68 In your very own lifetime, you'll produce enough spit to fill
two swimming pools.
69 You breathe in about 7 quarts of air every minute. Good !
Air is cost free.
70 Your dad sweats enough each day to fill up a 6 pack of
soda cans...and then some.
71 Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a
calorie.
72 If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would
have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of
coffee.
73 If you toot consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough
gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
74 The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps
blood, that it could squirt blood 30 feet.
75 Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an
hour.
76 On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
77 Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.
78 Did you know that you are more likely to be killed by a
champagne cork than by a poisonous spider?
79 Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer
than left-handed people do.
80 If you blink one eye you move over 200 muscles.
81 The length of your foot is the same as that of your forearm
between your wrist and the inside of your elbow.
82 In 24 hours, the blood in the body travels a total of 12,000
miles - that's four times the width of North America.
83 The human gut contains about 1kg (2.2 lbs) of bacteria. In
fact, there are more bacteria growing in and on the body than
there are human cells.
84 Humans have more facial muscles than any other animal on
earth - 22 on each side of the face.
85 Before their first birthday, average babies will have dribbled
255 pints of saliva. By the time they're two years old, they will
have crawled 93 miles.
86 The human hand contains three main nerves, two major
arteries and 27 different bones - more of the body is devoted
to controlling the hands than any other part of the body.
87 In the average lifetime, we spend five years eating and we
consume around 7,000 times our own weight in food.
88 When we go to sleep and enter REM (Rapid Eye
Movement),our bodies become completely paralysed as
areas of the brain that control movement are de-activated. It
is this that stops us falling out of bed.
89 By the time a woman has reached her 60s, she will have
released around 450 baby making eggs
90 When full, the human bladder can hold two pints of urine.
91 In a lifetime, a human being will grow six feet of nose hair
and shed 42 lbs of dead skin.
92 A human being can look forward to having sex an average
of 2,580 times with five different partners.
93 Skin can now be artificially grown.One amazing result of this
is that the skin from one hand could be grown into enough to
cover six football pitches.
94 There are 137 million light sensitive cells in the eye's retina
and the fluid that fills the eye is changed 15 times a day.
95 Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for
pleasure.
96 The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
97 During your lifetime, you'll eat about 60,000 pounds of food,
that's the weight of about 6 elephants!
98 In space, astronauts cannot cry, because there is no
gravity, so the tears can't flow!
99 Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, every time you
breathe!
100 Most dust particles in your house are made from dead
skin!
101 A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most
of the sweat evaporates before a person realises it's there.
102 At birth we have over 300 bones. As we grow up, some of
the bones begin to fuse together as a result an adult has only
206 bones.
103 The human hand has 27 bones.
104 The femur/thigh bone is the longest bone in our body, it is
about a quarter of ones height.
105 The human body has 230 movable and semi- movable
joints
106 Our Brain has over 100 billion nerve cells.
107 The human skull is made up of 29 different bones.
108 A newborn babys brain grows almost 3 times during the
first year of life.
109 The left side of human brain controls the right side of the
body and the right side of the brain controls the left side of
the body.
110 The length of human blood vessel is such that it circles the
globe 2 ½ times.
111 The human heart beats 30 million times a year.
112 80 hairs are likely to fall every day.
113 The muscles of the eye move more than 100,000 times a
day.
114 We breathe 13 pints of air every minute.
115 Human skin has a tendency to shed 40 pounds of skin in
lifetime.
116 Human kidneys have about 1 million nephrons that filters
out liquids and wastes.
117 Our heart beats around 100,00 times every day.
118 Human blood is on a 60,000mile journey.
119 Fingernailscontain keratin and they seem to be strongest
component in the human body.
120 The human skin contains 45 miles of nerves.
121 Most people blink about 25 times per minute.
122 For every 2 weeks, the human stomach produces new
layer of mucous lining, otherwise the stomach will digest
itself.
123 An average of 17 muscles contracts for a smile.
124 Every person has a unique tongue print.
125 A sneeze moves out of our mouth at a speed of 100
meters per hour.
126 An average human eye blinks about 6,205, 000 times.
127 The tooth is the only part of the human body that cannot
heal and repair by its own.
128 In one square inch of skin there are 4 yards of nerve
fibers.
129 The human eye has the ability to distinguish about 1
million color surfaces.
130 A square inch of skin has 100 sweat glands.
131 The human ear can distinguish between hundreds of
thousands of different sounds.
132 On an average the human scalp has about 100,000 hairs.
133 Nails of toes or fingers take about 6 months to grow from
base to tip.
134 A square inch of skin consists of 1300 nerve cells.
135 On an average an individual produces human being
consumes about 500 kg of food per year.
136 The adult human brain is about 2 % of total body weight.
137 On an average 1.7 liters of saliva produces each day.
138 In one square inch of skin, there are 3 million cells.
139 The human body consists of over 600 muscles.
140 As we get older, the brain loses almost one gram per year.
141 Oesophagus/or food pipe, which is the passage for the
food we eat to the stomach, is approximately 25 cm long.
142 A square inch of skin consists of three yards of blood
vessel.
143 There are about 13, 500,00 neurons in the human spinal
cord.
144 The human tongue has 10,000 taste buds.
145 The cells of taste buds are constantly being renewed,
roughly on every ten hours.
146 An average human head weighs about 8 pounds.
147 Our eyes are always the same size from birth, unlike our
nose and ears.
148 The human body is composed of 80 percent of water.
149 The human eyeball is 24.5 mm long.
150 The total weight of skin in an average human adult is 61
pounds.
151 Taste buds are present inside the mouth and also at the
roof of the mouth.
152 The human spinal cord is 45 cm long in men and 43 cm
long in women.
153 The weight of human cerebellum is 150g.
154 The strongest muscles of the human body are masseters,
which are present on either side of the mouth.
155 The human liver performs 500 different functions.
156 The heart muscles will stop working only when we die.
157 Children have more sensitive ears than adults.
158 Shivering is a way of trying to keep our body warm.
159 Humans have the ability to distinguish 4,000 to 10, 000
smells.
160 Every hour, the human eye can process 36,000 bits of
information.
161 Nails and corneas are the only two tissues in the body
that do not receive oxygen from blood.
162 The length of the finger indicates how fast the nail grows.
The nail of the middle finger grows faster than others.
163 The human ears can hear in the frequency of 1,000 to 50,
000 hertz.
164 The total surface area of the human brain is about 25, 000
square cms.
165 When the sounds are above 130 decibels, it causes pain
to the ears.
166 There are around 100 receptors in each of our fingertips.
167 The weight of skin in a human adult is 4 to 5 kg.
168 The middle part of the back is the least sensitive part of
our body.
169 Children have better sense of smell than adults.
170 The eyelashes shed by a human in his entire life is of 30 m
of length.
171 After death, the body starts to dry out creating an illusion
that the nails and hairs are growing even after death.
172 The surface of human skin is 6.5 square feet.
173 Every second, 15 million blood cells are destroyed in the
human body.
174 An average human being will breathe about 23,040 times
per hour.
175 The base of the spinal cord has a cluster of nerves, which
are most sensitive.
176 The surface area of the human lung is equal to that of a
tennis court.
177 When we reach 60 years of life, we lose 50 % of our taste
buds.
178 Blinking of one eye causes movement of 200 muscles.
179 Platelets, which are one of the constituents of the blood is
produced at the rate of 200 billion per day.
180 The sense of taste is the weakest of the five senses.
181 Humans have the ability to differentiate about 10, 000
odour.
182 It takes time for the newborn baby to learn to turn the
pictures right side up, as it sees the world upside down in the
beginning.
183 If human sense of smell is affected, sense of taste is also
affected as the brain interprets signals from the nose and
tongue.
184 There are around 1,200,000 optic fibers in the human eye.
185 The lens of the human eye is composed of 65 % of water
and 3 % of protein.
186 We shut our eyes for 0.3 seconds, when we blink.
187 Color blind people find it hard to distinguish colors like
green and red.
188 A blink of an eye lasts for 1/10th of a second.
189 Eyes are the only part of the human body that functions at
100 percent ability at any movement.
190 The human skin contains 280,000 heat receptors.
191 A drop of blood contains 250 million cells.
192 The liver is the largest and heaviest internal organ of the
body and weighs about 1.6 kilos.
193 In the womb, the baby's body is covered by a thin layer of
hair but as soon as the baby is born it disappears.
194 At birth every one is color blind.
195 Babies crawl to an average of 200 m a day.
196 The only joint less bone in the human body is the hyoid
bone, which is present in the throat area.
197 A baby gender is determined after the first 6-8 weeks of
pregnancy.
198 Eating Break fast helps to burn 5 to 20 percent of calories
throughout the day.
199 The surface of human tongue is covered with 100 of tiny
structures called papillae.
200 On an average, a persons left hand does 56 % of typing.
201 On an average the cough that comes out of our mouth is
60 m per hour.
202 A person can live without food for about a month, but only
a week without water.
203 Threshold pain of women is 9 times stronger than men.
204 The palms of the hands and soles of the feet contain more
sweat glands than other parts of the body.
205 10 % of men and 8 % of women are left-handed.
206 On an average the human body contains enough water to
fill 1 gallon of a tank.
207 An average human body contains enough amount of fat to
make seven bars of soap.
208 The human body releases growth hormones during sleep.
209 Red blood cells are about seven micrometer in diameter.
210 The thighbone is so strong that it withstands the axial load
of about 1600-1800 kilos.
211 An average adult male brain weighs about 1375 grams.
212 On an average the weight of an adult female brain is about
1275 grams.
213 Only four percent of the brains cells work and the
remaining cells are kept in reserve.
214 On an average thousands of neurons dies every day.
215 The human eye has 110-130 million receptors to perceive
light.
216 The human eye contains five to seven million receptors for
color perception.
217 The human eye cannot perceive a motionless image.
218 The average life span of a sperm is about 36 hours.
219 The life span of an ovule is about 12 - 24 hours.
220 Only one person in two billion will live for more than 115
years of life.
221 On an average, we speak about 5,000 words per day.
222 Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
223 Liver is the only organ of the body, which regenerates itself
completely even after being removed completely.
224 The human heart pumps 6,000 liters of blood daily through
a man lifetime.
225 The human brain is capable of creating more ideas
equivalent to that of the atoms of the universe.
226 Hair is the fastest growing tissue in the body, the next
being bone marrow.
227 On an average, in an adult scalp 35m of hair fiber is
produced every day.
228 An average scalp has 100,000 hairs.
229 The maximum length of hair can be 70 to 90 cms.
230 The life span of hair is two to seven years.
231 Frequent washing of hair does not cause hair loss.
232 Brain uses 20 % of our body energy and makes up only 2
% of our body weight.
233 Any damage to brain cells cannot be repaired completely.
234 Human brain stops growing at the age of 18.
235 Male hairs are denser and grow faster than females.
236 Depending on the area of the human body, the thickness
of the skin varies from ½ to 6 mm.
237 Tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body.
238 A Pair of feet contains about 250,000 sweat glands.
239 The human skin sheds and re-grows after every 27 days.
240 A Blind person looses only about 1/5th of vision.
241 One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.
242 Pregnancy in women lasts on average of about 270 days
from the time of conception till birth.
243 Sneezing too hard can cause rib fracture and suppressing
the sneeze can cause damage to the blood vessels of head
or neck.
244 On freeze drying, 10 % of body weight is contributed by
the micro organisms of our body.
245 About 80 % of ultra- violet rays from the sun can get
through the cloud and can cause sunburn or tan even on a
cloudy day.
246 The human stomach contains about 35 million small
digestive glands.
247 The ovaries of a female contain about 600, 000 immature
eggs at birth.
248 The ovaries of a female contain about 600, 000 immature
eggs at birth.
249 The human body has 4 million pain sensitive structures.
250 Each lung contains 300-350 million respiratory units called
alveoli.
251 Human blood contains 22,000 million cells.
252 Human skin is re-newed itself every 5 weeks.
253 A New stomach lining is formed every five days.
254 A human ear contains about 24,000 fibers in it.
255 The largest cell in the woman is the egg or ovum present
that is released from the ovaries.
256 Women burn fat more slowly than men.
257 The leg bone is the fastest growing bone in the human
body.
258 There are 22 bones in the human skull.
259 A muscle called the diaphragm controls the human
breathing process.
260 The human brain is made up of more than 10 billion nerve
cells and over 50 billion other cells and weighs about less
than three pounds.
261 2/3 of the human body is made up of water.
262 Vitamin C and E fights against Dementia - a disease of
forgetfulness in the elderly person.
263 Half a liter of water per day is lost through breathing.
264 Drinking coffee prevents Parkinsons disease.
265 Cold weather improves human memory and concentration.
266 Most of the bones in the human body constitutes about 3/4
of water.
267 An adult human body contains five to six quarts of blood
and an infant has about one quart of blood.
268 Blind people understand spoken words quicker than
sighted people.
269 A human lung contains about 700 million alveoli.
270 Vitamin E protects the brain cells from damage caused by
alcohol consumption.
271 The human body contains more bacteria than the number
of cells present in it.
272 The longest muscle in the human body is sartorius, which
is present in the hip region and it is commonly called as
tailors muscle.
273 Melanin, a pigment present in the skin is responsible for
the color of the skin in a person.
274 Except the heart and lungs, all other parts of the body
receive their blood supply from the largest artery of the body,
the aorta.
275 The Pulmonary vein is the only vein in the human body
that carries oxygenated blood while all the other veins of the
body carry de-oxygenated blood.
276 The human blood is colorless. It is the hemoglobin; a
pigment present in the red blood cells is responsible for the
red color of the blood.
277 The smallest muscle in the human body is the stapedius,
which is present deep inside the ear.
278 The human brain is very soft like that of butter.
279 A heartbeat is nothing but the sound produced by the
closure of valves of the heart when the blood is pushed
through its chamber.
280 Hold out your hand and make a fist. If you are a kid, the
size of your heart is same as the size of your fist and if you
are an adult it is about the same size as twice as your fist.
281 About 500 million sperm mature every day in a normal
male adult.
282 Sixty percent of the human body nerve ends in the
forehead and the hands.
283 A human body contains about 200,000 temperature
detectors.
284 A human body has 500,000 touch detectors.
285 If all the alveoli from both lungs were spread flat they
would cover an area nearly the size of a tennis court.
286 Each human eye contains 130 million light receptors.
287 The human scalp contains about 100,000 hair follicles,
from which the hair grows.
288 The human skeleton renews once in every three months.
289 The human skin cells multiply every second to replace the
worn ones.
290 The cells of the heart and brain do not multiply through out
their lifetime.
291 The whole leg constitutes of 31 bones.
292 The human skull and upper jaw consist of 21 bones.
293 When we see an image, the human eye captures the
inverted image of it. It is the brains interpretation that makes
us to see the upside down captured image in to a normal
erect image.
294 An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
295 A womens heart beats faster than a mens.
296 The average person is about a quarter of an inch taller at
night.
297 The food will get in to the stomach even if one stands on
their head.
298 The eyes have the fastest reacting muscle in the whole
body. It contracts in 1/100th of a second.
299 Almost every seven years, the human body replaces the
equivalent of an entirely new skeleton.
300 Laughing and coughing creates more pressure on the
spine than walking or standing.