Bloating Germs All Over Someone Else’s Food Is Normal When It’s Birthday Cake.
Blowing on a birthday cake leads to microbial contamination of the birthday cake, according to a recent study. Pretty obvious when you think about it. Would you ever say, “Friend, blow my sandwich, please”? That would be disgusting, wouldn’t it?
But do people really get that sick? I searched PubMed for the words “birthday cake transmission” and actually found one relevant publication— a letter to the editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, written in the midst of the H1N1 flu epidemic. It describes how a “colleague” put out his 50 birthday candles one by one in a cup of water. “In an era of pandemics, do you really want someone to breathe forcefully over all the birthday cake you are about to eat?” a colleague asked.
However, the scientist behind the recent study isn’t overly concerned. “From my point of view, this is not a health problem, ” he told the Atlantic in an interview . “In fact, if you did it 100,000 times, the chance of getting sick would probably be very minimal.”