It does nothing for the banana worms, however.
You are so doomed. 
I’m sure you’re right, but it still lets me feel like I’m doing something productive.
Fair enough. Bit like the five second rule (ten seconds if you blow on the item after picking it up)
My friend always wipes her cans off on her t-shirt. She’s given me the rat piss spiel a few times.
If I saw a rat piss on my can, I wouldn’t wipe it up with my t-shirt and carry on my merry, soda-drinking, urine-stained way.
Yeah, I saw some news bit on television <went on for almost half an hour, so it might have been a whole show, maybe on food channel or something> where it was proven that only irradiation gets most of the gunk off veggies. Washing does almost nothing. Scrubbing helps a little more, but not much. (IIRC, doctors scrubbing for OR scrub for a length of time because it’s the scrubbing that helps more than the soap). Even bleach <might have been something else, but similar> only kills part of the bacteria. Hell, irradiation doesn’t even kill it all, but it does TONS more than any of the other options.
So I barely wash things, just enough to get the wax off it.
And I don’t ‘worry’ about cans, I just wonder about it. It’s like licking the ground, if you’re drinking in every dusty, dirty place that can has been. I have no allergies though so apparantly it’s done wonders for MY immune system.
When you wash fruits and vegetables it’s not to clean off germs from other people, it’s to clean off stuff that got on them from being in the field. Like E. Coli. Most restaurants or delis will wash fruits and vegetables in bleach water to be sure to sanitize them before cutting. Even if it wasn’t for the bugs, there’s still actual physical dirt in things like leek or romaine and right on the surface of cantaloupe or watermelon.
<looks around>
Shhhh!
I use wooden cutting boards!
I believe it’s been demonstrated that wooden cutting boards can be more hygienic than plastic.
I just drank some soda from a can before posting this, and I didn’t wash it beforehand! The thought of washing or wiping a can before using had never occurred to me.
Not really, but I can’t find the snopes page that rebuts it.
I used to wash fruit fairly thoroughly after working fruit picking- one of the places I worked had a toilet in the field but no sink.
There was another one in the main buildings, which had a sink (and even a shower) but it was 10 minutes walk away, and I did get sniggered at for walking back to use it.
Having just popped open a beer before sitting down to read the Dope, may I just say that I hate you just a little bit right now?
I’ve never bought sanitizer, don’t scrub fruits and vegetables (I might brush soil off with my unsanitized hands) 
, use a wooden cutting board (well, bamboo) instead of a synthetic one and drink straight out of cans or bottles I buy at gas stations or convenience stores.
Don’t give much thought to germs or rat-hair/bug part counts in my food or whether the person who picked the tomatoes I just bought pissed and then didn’t wash his hands after. Don’t care, really.
Don’t get sick, hardly never-ever, either.
Is mouse/rat piss noticeably less sterile than human piss? If not, why worry about it? It’s probably less bad for you than whatever’s in the can!
You haven’t lived until you’ve had wild hot stock boy / cashier lady monkey sex on top of a pallet of Mountain Dew.
Just sayin.
A healthy rat’s urine isn’t much of a health issue, but as the previously linked Snopes article points out, a diseased rat’s urine can carry and transmit leptospirosis and hantavirus. I’m not saying that it’s likely that you would get those from a can, but you didn’t ask about that.
Besides, it adds flavor.
So THATS where Mountain Dew came from!
Later, I ate an apple and a banana without washing them. I like to live on the edge.
Germophobes always make me roll my eyes. It’s nothing but woo with pseudoscientific pretensions.