Yes, your beer pong cup is teeming with bacteria

Also an interesting quote from the article to add to @Todd's:

So the glass of rinse water works! (sort of... It gets rid of large dirt chunks at least...bacteria unchanged)

The lesson here is don't drink from communal cups, which should cause a resounding exclamation of, "Duh!"

 

FTFY.

 

I've probably played 1000's of games of beer pong while I was in college and I'm happy to say that I only contracted Meningitis, Hep C, and Herpes.

 

I'm glad they included that last paragraph. At the end of the day, "players" 16-25 are at the pinnacle of immune system function, which is why no one dies from this.

In college we played "swine pong" (when the swine flu was billed the next apocalypse)- used all water cups for the game and just had personal cups from which to drink. Not as festive, also not as big of a mess the next day.

 

I have never seen someone drink out of beer pong cups. I've only ever seen people play with water, but they have to drink their own beer if they get hit. Interesting. I guess runners tend to party cleaner since we have to wake up and run in 5 hours....

 

Nah... many people [including myself] have fun playing beer pong and the germs and dirt can be avoided by just doing what @Prince_Casual and @THSdrummer stated above - i.e. use water in the cups on table, drink from your own personal cup as needed. Easy.

 

I've always played with the cups only having water and if a cup is hit you take a 2 second pull of the beer.

 

I always assumed the water rinse was just to remove the visible dirt from the ball and put people at ease. Murderball is much more hygienic anyway.

 

In other news, grass is green. People are too worried about germs these days...

 

I know where you went to school and I'm disappointed in you!!!

 

It is interesting though how everyone is so germ conscious and clean 99% of the time. But then get to a party or a tailgate and you'll drink out straight of the same bottle of Tequila as 10 other people, some of which you don't know.

 

The floors in Buchanan were wayyy to messed up not to.

 

Beer pong is fun for the whole family. Don't ruin this time honored American tradition....
I'm just about 40 and I play about once every few years now, and when I do it's fun, and the odds of me getting pimples on my teeth are minuscule...

 

I don't think you have much to worry about germ-wise when sharing something that's 40% ABV at a minimum.

Also beer pong is a terrible, boring game that takes for-fucking-ever to play. And it's disgusting.

 

Dude, I worked at Disneyland for 10 years. The amount of hand rails, children's sneezes, people's unwashed hands, and diseases from around the world I've touched or been exposed to is definitely MUCH higher than anything I could be exposed to from beer pong.

Guess what, I'm alive.

 

Several years ago students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY
got the flu from playing beer pong. And these are the smart kids.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...beer-pong-swine-flu-outbreak-article-1.383631

 

It takes forever if you're bad at it

 

Huh... so people who play beer pong really give a shit about germs? Maybe they should play whiskey pong.