Re: Morgab tears /salt

ROBERT SAUNDERS (rdcsaunders@its.dundee.ac.uk)
Thu, 16 Nov 1995 14:53:43 GMT

In article <48fino$gv8@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> Alex Duncan <aduncan@mail.utexas.edu> writes:
>From: Alex Duncan <aduncan@mail.utexas.edu>
>Subject: Re: Morgab tears /salt
>Date: 16 Nov 1995 14:44:08 GMT

snip

>Well -- hold on: we're looking for an explanation not just for tearing,
>but for tears which might contain a high proportion of infection-fighting
>enzymes. A capacity to produce large quantities of tears might be
>selected for in a dusty environment, but would they necessarily be tears
>w/ lots of lysozyme (or whatever it was)? Does dust necessarily carry a
>lot of pathogens?

Dust is quite abrasive. One might therefore expect that an eyeful of dust
would make infections more likely, even though there was not a vast increase
in numbers of bacteria.

Robert