With the Winter Carnival holiday subtracting a day from students' class schedules this weekend, more revelry -- and more beer pong -- may fill fraternity basements. But despite bacteria buildup there, College health officials say, the game will not cause more people to become sick on campus.
Several Dartmouth undergraduates took a culture from an area on a fraternity basement floor near a pong table last term as part of an assignment for Biology 64. After growing the culture for 24 hours, there were 2,000 to 3,000 colonies of microscopic organisms, with at least 10 different types of organisms, but Dr. John Turco, director of health services at the College, said the results are no cause for concern.
"That doesn't surprise me, and it doesn't really worry me. Most of the time humans have enough of an immune system to prevent these infections from causing any problems," he said, stressing that humans come into contact with bacteria constantly.
Most of the organisms found were determined to have thick cell walls by a Gram-stain. Turco, however, emphasized that gram-positive bacteria are an extremely diverse group of organisms, many of which are harmless to humans.
Turco said it is unlikely that a pong ball that bounces onto a basement floor could become a vector for spreading infection.
"It's hard to believe that the bacteria had any chance to colonize the ball. If this was a common source of infections -- knowing that there's a fair amount of beer pong played at Dartmouth -- I think there would be a lot of infections," Turco said.
A more probable cause of Winter-term illnesses is the large number of people packed into a small space without much air circulation, Turco said. He also conjectured that sharing cups with pong partners might contribute to the spreading of germs throughout campus.
Other campus activities have also been incorrectly associated with the spread of illness. After the pinkeye endemic of 2002, the Nathan Smith Pre-Medical Society swabbed public BlitzMail terminals in an attempt to identify a possible way that the bacterial infection had been transmitted. However, the streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria that had caused the outbreak did not show up in those cultures. Bacteria generally do not live very long on dry surfaces like computer keyboards, but it is feasible that bacteria could be spread if students used the BlitzMail terminals in rapid succession.
While one common practice is to simply pour beer or water over a ball that has landed in a particularly grimy corner, students seem largely unfazed by the questionably sanitary conditions in fraternity basements.
"Alcohol is a disinfectant, so I'm not worried. I'm not going to lick a ball off the floor," Will Dekrey '08 said.
At least one student, though, has had a traumatizing experience playing pong. Liz Kolleeny '08 said that she was especially worried about germs on a pong ball when she found it next to a frog.
"I never touched that pong ball again," Kolleeny said.
