Clear Mucus This forms a gel that usually stays clear. Most of the time, you won't even notice mucus doing its behind-the-scenes job. However, if you start producing excess clear mucus, that may signify allergies due to your body trying to expel dust, pollen and other irritating particles.
Clear mucus is considered 'normal' or healthy. However, if you are experiencing a large amount of clear nasal discharge, it may be a sign of allergic rhinitis. This is the form of allergies that most people who suffer from them experience. You could be triggered by pollen, dust, animal fur, or other irritants.
Things like allergies, eating spicy food, and being outside in the cold can result in a more watery nasal leakage. Your body usually makes thicker mucus when you have a cold (caused by viruses) or sinus infection (caused by bacteria). Most mucus problems are temporary.
White snot means your mucus has a low water content, which means it will be flowing slower than healthy mucus. White mucus indicates you have some sort of infection brewing. Most commonly, white snot indicates you're coming down with the common cold, which may cause symptoms such as: Sore throat.
When you have a sinus infection, your snot typically becomes a thick, green color. This is because mucus acts as a trap for allergens, bacteria, and viruses that carries these foreign invaders outside of your body. These waste products, along with dead white blood cells, account for the greenish color of your snot.
Clear snot is in the normal range, while white mucus can mean you're congested and yellow or green mucus can sometimes mean that you have an infection.
Mucus Color
A sinus will often cause mucus to become thick and green or yellow in color. If you experience nasal discharge that is colored and have a difficult time blowing your nose, you may have a sinus infection.
When you suffer from chronic sinusitis, it can make your nasal mucus very thick and glue-like, green or yellow in color, and even give off an unpleasant odor. It's also common to experience other symptoms like congestion, difficulty breathing, pain and swelling around the sinuses, and a bad cough.
Clear snot usually signals allergies or some kind of environmental factor that is triggering your nose to start running, such as inhaling dust or allergens. Clear snot is nothing to worry about. If it's an inconvenience, an over-the-counter medicine can help relieve the runniness.
Blowing the nose can worsen the feeling of congestion due to pressure build-up within the nostrils, which may shoot up the mucus into the sinuses instead of ejection through the nose.
Green and cloudy: viral or bacterial infection
A lot of the symptoms of viral infections – fever, cough, headache, loss of smell – overlap for COVID-19 and other viral infections like the flu, respiratory syncytial virus and the common cold.
Saline Irrigation and Saline Spray
Irrigating your nasal passages and sinuses with saline can help clear your nasal passages of any lingering pollen or allergen residue. It can also wash out excess mucus buildup to maintain a clear nasal passageway.
Clear mucus is typically related to a cold, while yellow or green mucus is more indicative of a sinus infection. Finally, another important reason why your team at Nest Family Medicine will need to understand your symptoms in detail is that treatment for sinus infections and colds can vary.
When viruses that cause colds first infect the nose and sinuses, the nose makes clear mucus. This helps wash the viruses from the nose and sinuses. After 2 or 3 days, mucus may change to a white, yellow, or green color. This is normal and does not mean you need an antibiotic.
Allergies Are Likely If:
Clear, watery mucus: Mucus will begin clear and stay that way throughout your symptoms. This is in contrast to a cold, where mucus often becomes thick and discolored as the cold progresses.
Both viral and bacterial upper respiratory infections can cause similar changes to the type and coloration of nasal mucus. During a common cold, nasal mucus may start out watery and clear, then become progressively thicker and more opaque, taking on a yellow or green tinge.
An untreated sinus infection may cause ansomnia, a decrease, or a complete loss of smell. Inflammation and blockage of your sinus passageways or damage to your olfactory nerves cause ansomnia. In many cases, ansomnia is only temporary but can become permanent.
Viruses, like the ones that cause the common cold, cause most cases of sinusitis. Bacteria can cause sinusitis, or they can infect you after a case of viral sinusitis. If you have a runny nose, stuffy nose and facial pain that don't go away after ten days, you might have bacterial sinusitis.
Grey—If you are blowing grey chunks of debris from one side of your nose and have bad tasting nasal drainage, you could have a fungal sinus infection. These are different from viral or bacterial infections because the fungi feeds on your nasal tissue—and reproduces.
Overview. Allergic fungal sinusitis (AFS) is a common type of fungal infection in the sinuses. The infecting fungi are found in the environment and cause an allergic reaction which results in thick fungal debris, sticky mucus and blockage of the infected sinus.