Public Health Rumors

In regards to public health concerns, there are several Truisms, or Old Wives' Tales, regarding the contamination of food and water by human waste that circulate with some frequency and are given considerably more credibility than they deserve, in many cases causing undue alarm with the public. Most of this phenomenon can be traced to the Internet, wherein when one false or questionable e-mail gets wide circulation, and takes on the appearance of legitimacy. This is a well documented phenomenon, and this and ones like it have inspired various fact-checking sites such as "Snopes" and "Mythbusters".

We review some of the more common myths below:

Myth No. 1) The average person will eat a "peck" of dirt before they die. A peck is equivalent to a quarter-bushel, eight dry quarts in terms of volume, or nine litres on the metric scale.
Harking back to at least the 17th century, this has been an oft repeated - and much beloved - bit of conventional wisdom. While convincingly more plausible back in the 1600s when people washed their vegetables none too often and their persons even less, it has become less so today by virtue of ever-improving standards of cleanliness for food as well as general hygiene. While there is considerable documentation of the intentional ingestion of dirt - or coprophilia - this is considered to be an isolated phenomenon. References to the unintentional ingestion of dirt, far from being a societal problem of any import, rather are considered to be a cultural means to console people in times of personal crisis. Parents have for generations used this simple aphorism to comfort a child who finds a bug in their cereal, or a friend who has suffered a financial reversal.

While the Truism is almost universal in its application, it also turns out to be essentially true. Over the course of a 78 year lifespan, a person would need to ingest a mere 1/10th of one percent of a dry ounce of dirt per day to consume a "peck" over a lifetime. Persons who invoke the "five second rule" just once per week ingest in excess of ten times this amount in a single occurrence. Persons of even the most stringent hygiene consume this much dirt regardless of their precautions.

Myth No. 2) If you drink a quart of water per day, you will consume a quart of E. coli bacteria in one year.
This is one of the more popular rumors circulating, but for this to be true, the water would have to be .27% pure E. coli, or 2,700 ppm (parts per million). Since E. coli is generally found in concentrations only 10% of the more common Coliform bacteria, total contamination of water by fecal matter would have to be an astounding 27,000 ppm of Coliform. At that rate, fecal contamination would be detectible by taste, smell and sight. These concentrations have only ever been found in the drinking water of some Third World countries, parts of Detroit, MI, a small section of a neighborhood known as "The Heights" in Houston, TX, and France.

Further to these studies, while all Coliform originates from feces, E. coli is shown to be the only form that has any noticeable impact on public health.

Myth No. 3) Water on commercial airliners is routinely contaminated by the self-contained septic systems on the airplane.
This has been a regular concern with airliners, as sundry studies by the FAA have found an incidence of Total Coliform contamination in the drinking water of commercial aircraft as high as 15 times that of normal drinking water. Coincidentally, studies over the past five years have shown that the frequency of occurrence of contamination seems to have risen in direct proportion to the financial reverses suffered in the airliner industry. Since Coliform bacteria concentrations are unaffected by the frequency with which the water is cycled through the self-contained systems on most airliners, this has led to some uncomfortable assumptions by health experts as to the source of contamination. Subsequently, Federal investigators spent three months reviewing the maintenance logs of all commercial airliners to investigate the phenomenon.

Those in-depth studies revealed that American-based airliners routinely fell within safe Coliform guidelines, while airliners from the Middle East (with the exception of Israel), showed Coliform contamination over 50% of the time. Surprisingly, while Western European airliners showed Coliform contamination an average 30% of the time, airliners from France were contaminated 90% of the time, as were 90% of all the planes of all other carriers combined who replenished their water supplies during stopovers in France. Thus, it is assumed that France skewed the averages of all other European countries.

A review of Third World countries found a wide range of Coliform contamination, with India and Cuba doing the worst, with contamination on average of 60% of the time, while Australia and New Zealand did the best, with average contamination of only 25%, slightly better than their counterparts in the more developed West.

A separate study on military aircraft found that over 99% of the U.S. fleet passed all tests for the presence of Coliform. Only Air Force One routinely failed, showing the presence of Coliform 100% of the time. The period of the study ran from Jan. 20th to April 20th, 2009.

Myth No. 4) The Mexican beer Corona is yellow because brewery workers urinate into the vats during the brewing process.
This Myth turns out to be absolutely true, and is the reason it is always consumed with a precautionary slice of lime.

Myth No. 5) Dark beer is colored with Feces.
This appears to be mostly apocryphal, and more attributable to the fact that the consumption of Dark Beer is likely to turn one's feces dark upon defecation, as opposed to any external contamination of the brew itself. There is also little in the historical record to support such a practice, other than the following poem, traced back to an issue of Poor Richard's Almanac in the mid-18th century, and possibly the hand of Benjamin Franklin:

ODE TO DARK BEER

Why oh why drink beer that's dark?
It leaves a coating on the tongue.
It tastes as if it's made from bark,
and dirt and sweat and lard and dung.

But dark beer drinkers love its savor,
swish it in their mouths, they do,
the fetid, musty, fecal flavor,
From a moldy running shoe.

So hoist a tankard of this vile,
felching, belching bitch's brew,
It must be borne of stomach bile,
shit and used tobacco chew.

Final Note: Curiously, the provable incidence of these various contaminations was much more prevalent in countries that used the Metric system of measurement, as opposed to the traditional English system.