I’m hoping some of our science dopers can give me the straight dope.
Lets say I’m outside working barehanded in the flower bed. That rich moist soil covers my hands and gets under my fingernails. My neighborhood cat spent the winter enriching the soil for me.
My wife brings me a frosty cold root beer, opens it, and hands it too me. I carefully grasp it by the bottom 2 inches of the can. Take a couple swigs and set it down. I continue working in the flowerbed for 15 mins and take another swig. A hour later I finish off my root beer. Each time I handled the can it was from the bottom edge.
Can the germs/bacteria travel several inches up the can and into the area where my mouth touches?
If I took scrapings from under my fingernails and grew a culture in the lab. Would I get similar results from the mouthpiece of the can?
How fast can germs move on a surface like a soda can or bottle?
Unlikely. It is possible that bacteria could travel down to your mouth in a trickle of condensation as you tipped the can back to drink. But the bacteria won’t propagate across the surface of the can without a medium (moisture, soil) to feed them.
However what is far more likely is you will breathe bacteria in as you work. Legionnaires Disease is commonly caught from moist mixes of gardening mulch.
Depends what they are. Some micro-organisms are motile, some only move by growing, and others leave themselves at the mercy of time and chance.
If the outside of the vessel is dry, then there’s very little chance of anything microscopic and harmful travelling up the outside.
If it’s covered with a film of condensation, there’s a nonzero chance that something mobile and nasty could get up there, but the low temperature of the beverage is likely to reduce the activity of the organisms, slowing them down and making this less likely.
But one little bacterium isn’t likely to kill you. In most cases, you need to ingest a dose of pathogenic organisms to be at risk of illness, and below that dose, the chances are good that your immune system will destroy them before they do any harm.
The only one I can think of where ingesting a single organism is risky, is Toxicara (a parasite), but the phase that puts humans at risk is a non-motile egg.
Contamination by flies is a more significant possibility.
dirt under finger nails will have lots of organisms and their eggs.
for safety sake use a beer hat for the root beer, have the wife place it there. you are alone in the garden, no one besides the wife will see you, unless the wife has a camera. hide the cameras before gardening would be best.
I came in here to say exactly the same thing. It’s the capitalization of “Germs” that does it. When I see “Germ” with a capital, I’m expecting “German”.
Interesting. I had always wondered if germs could crawl on surfaces.
Grasping the bottom edge of a container is something I started doing as a teen doing yard work. Really, its better to come inside and wash my hands before drinking anything. Especially if hands have been down in a flowerbed.
Did your wife sterilize the top of the can before handing it to you? Or at least rinse it off? Because that can has spent some time in warehouses and none-too-clean stockrooms behind the refrigerated displays. Stuff has maybe spilled on it from higher shelves and mice and insects have used it as highways (and worst case, rest stops).
According to a book I read the other day, “Of the millions of bacterial species on the planet, only about fifty are harmful to humans”. I can’t comment on the accuracy of that.
