The bagpipe is a windblown device that can produce a wide range of musical tunes. Many foreign militaries patterned after the British Army as well as police and fire services have adopted the tradition. Images are known to have been found of ancient Greeks playing piped instruments. It's also important to regularly clean the instrument case and to store the instrument in a dry environment, she added.A sculpture of bagpipers has reportedly been found on a Hittite slab from 1,000 B.C. While the medical literature doesn't describe any "gold standard" for cleaning musical instruments, one study suggested taking the instrument apart, cleaning each piece with a solution of disinfectant and water, and letting the pieces drip dry, King said. A person can get sick even if he or she doesn't inhale while using the instrument, because the fungal spores circulate throughout the instrument, she said.īut there's no need for musicians to pack up their instruments - regularly cleaning them is the best way to prevent "bagpipe lung," King said. įor example, other case reports have highlighted the condition in a saxophone player (in that case, it was deemed "saxophone lung") and a trombone player.Īny instrument that has a mouthpiece could harbor fungi and lead to hypersensitivity pneumonitis, King said. A warning to musicians: Keep your instruments cleanīagpipes are not the only culprit in cases of hypersensitivity pneumonitis indeed, other instruments have been implicated as well. However, the man's experience playing the bagpipes, coupled with finding fungi in the instrument, make the fungi from the bagpipes the likely cause of the man's infection, according to the report.
The doctors noted that they weren't able to definitively confirm that the fungi in the bagpipes caused the infection before the man died. Unfortunately, the man died about a month after he was admitted to the hospital, due to his worsening symptoms, the doctors wrote. He was hospitalized because his symptoms were getting worse, according to the report.ĭuring this time, the doctors took samples from the man's bagpipes and found that at least seven different types of fungi were growing in the moist environment within the pipes, according to the report. In addition, the man said he used to be able to walk more than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), but could currently walk only about 20 meters (66 feet) before he felt he had to stop. When the man came to the clinic in 2014, he told the doctors that he had had a dry cough for the past seven years and was increasingly out of breath, according to the report. If hypersensitivity pneumonitis isn't treated, the air sacs of the lungs can become scarred, and then oxygen can no longer pass through these sacs to get into the bloodstream, King said. However, after the man returned from his trip, he resumed playing the bagpipes, and his symptoms returned, according to the report. This appears to be what happened when the man went to Australia, according to the report. Hypersensitivity pneumonitis can be easy to treat if it's caught early and the patient avoids the trigger, King told Live Science.
Indeed, a major clue was that the man, who told the doctors he played the bagpipes daily, said that several years earlier his symptoms had briefly disappeared, when he went to Australia for three months and did not bring his bagpipes, King said.
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