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You're listening to Ted Health, I'm Elise Hugh.

One of the scariest things for me as a parent was the time my eight-month-old got pneumonia

because, ugh, gah, it's so hard to see a baby coughing and struggling to breathe.

I wish I would have understood pneumonia better back then.

In today's lesson from Ted Ed, educators Eve Gauss and Vanessa Ruiz shed light on this

rather common respiratory illness and ways we can protect ourselves from the infection

or fight it off.

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Every time you breathe in, air travels down the trachea through a series of channels called

bronchi and finally reaches little clusters of airsacks called alveoli.

There are some 600 million alveoli in the lungs, adding up to a surface area of roughly

75 square meters, the size of a tennis court.

These tiny sacks, only one cell thick, facilitate a crucial exchange allowing oxygen from the

air we breathe into the bloodstream and clearing out carbon dioxide.

Nomonia wreaks havoc on this exchange.

Nomonia is an infection of the alveoli that causes them to fill with fluid.

There are many different kinds of pathogens that can cause pneumonia.

The most common ones are viruses or bacteria.

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