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Man applied Vicks VapoRub on nostrils for more than 10 years On Dec. 28, 2019, Edriss, a Pulmonary and Critical Care Physician who works at Saint Joseph Hospital in the USA, took to Facebook to share about a middle-aged man whom she had treated. According to her, the man had been chronically applying Vick’s VapoRub gel on his nostrils for more than 10 years to provide relief for nasal congestion. In recent years, he had sought help from the health care system for respiratory distress and had been diagnosed with pneumonia on each occasion. Two CT chest images that were taken six months apart showed how he was wrongly diagnosed with infectious pneumonia and wrongly treated with antibiotics. Applying Vicks VapoRub on nostrils can cause lung opacities within 24 hours According to Edriss, the accurate diagnosis should have been exogenous lipoid pneumonia, an uncommon and under-diagnosed condition. Caused by inhalation or aspiration of animal fat or vegetal or mineral oil, exogenous lipoid pneumonia can manifest radiologically within 30 minutes of aspiration or inhalation, and lung opacities can appear in most patients within 24 hours. Because Vicks VapoRub contains a variety of oil-based materials such as petrolatum, eucalyptus oil, cedarleaf oil, nutmeg oil, thymol and turpentine oil, it should not be inhaled or applied on nostrils.