If you're anything like me, you spent hours playing beer pong in college. Chasing pingpong balls into the corners of rooms that haven't been cleaned since the Truman administration was a regular weekend occurrence.
I vividly remember pulling up a pingpong ball once that was covered in about 15 strands of hair. All of different length and colors. It almost made me throw up. But I survived and kept playing.
And now I credit my strong immune system to the fact that I was exposed to every pathogen known to man during these games. From the red party cup sharing, to the hands holding the balls (yeah, I know), to the nasty ball-washing cup, to the girls who seem to think the pingpong ball is going to dry faster if they blow on it -- beer pong and all it's accessories are basically one large Petri dish for germs. Usually, however, you're too drunk to notice.
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| The next time you play beer pong, consider what you could get: E. coli bacteria. (Provided to SportsLine) |
By the way, the Wikipedia page on beer pong is almost funny enough to make me reconsider my war against Jimmy Wales regarding the deletion of the 'Bama Bangs entry. Almost. And if anyone knows the Indian guy refereeing the game of beer pong, congratulate him for me, as his picture is the funniest I've ever seen on Wikipedia.
But, inevitably during those beer pong games, there was always someone who brought up the germ factor. Usually, this person wouldn't play the game. Often, in my experience, this was the same person who wouldn't drink from the ice luge or take the shots offered by the girls with the whistles and the plastic tubes of glowing liquids. Despite this constant germaphobe asking questions, no one in the field of science had ever really examined the germs associated with beer pong.
Thankfully, just before Christmas this gap of scientific knowledge was bridged by two gentlemen, Ben Morrissey and Aaron Heffner, who are currently enrolled at my illustrious alma mater of George Washington University. From one night of beer pong playing, these guys uncovered salmonella, E. coli and pneumonia germs under the microscope. Since the ClayNation column is eternally committed to the furtherance of science, I absolutely had to interview the foremost experts on beer pong bacteria in the world, Aaron Heffner and Ben Morrissey. And the result is another hard-hitting ClayNation interview.
ClayNation: I understand you conducted your test by gathering eight friends, a 30-pack of beer, and playing for three hours. Before we go any further, based on my calculations this is just a little more than one beer per person per hour. Would you like to call anyone out for not stepping up to the table and drinking their fair share?
Morrissey: I think the only person who can really be called out is myself. The only proper response that I have for it is that I either overestimated the time or number of people present. This was either to ease concerns about the rate of drinking where I live or to make myself seem more popular. But to be fair, we were probably averaging closer to 1.25 beers an hour, rather than merely one. I'd like to call my co-researcher Aaron Heffner out for inexplicably not being present when the games were played. However, his presence would have lowered our beer-per-hour rate (BHR) to the embarrassing number of 1.11 BHR.
Also, in a fit of embarrassment, my roommates are claiming that we were "probably ripping a lot of shots at the same time. This definitely is not true.
ClayNation: What were your results?
Morrissey: Disgusting. Our first move was to test the water cups using a statistical test which assesses the "most probable number" of a certain type of bacteria being present. Normally, using dilutions, some samples come up positive, some come up negative, and accordingly you can calculate the amount of bacteria present. When we first did this, every single one of the tubes came up positive, leading our teacher to exclaim that those levels were "dangerous."
When isolating, we found Enterobacteria present, which include strains like E. coli and salmonella. While this initially sounds really bad, take this with a grain of salt. Not all strains of bacteria are virulent. However, it's generally not a good idea to play Russian roulette with a potentially very pathogenic bacteria (see Taco Bell), so there most definitely is a risk involved. In general, the less bacteria you consume, the less likelihood of you becoming ill.
