Your Bartender Could Be Spiking Your Drink With Disease-Causing Germs

The simple garnishes we add to our drinks could be teeming with deadly bacteria.

Pixabay

Refreshing drinks like cocktails or iced tea are often accompanied with slices of lemon or lime wedges. Whiles these citrus pieces seem like an innocuous way to spruce up a drink, they also have the potential to make you sick.

Elle recently spoke to Dr. Philip Tierno, clinical professor and author of The Secret Life of Germs, and it turns out that these simple garnishes are teeming with bacteria. In other words, your favorite bartender could be spiking your drink with germs every time he places a lemon wedge in your drink.

In a 2012 experiment commissioned by ABC News, Tierno and his team at the New York University Microbiology Department tested samples of lemon wedges collected from various restaurants and found that half of them were tainted with fecal matter or human waste.

"People are touching the lemon in your glass, handling it, cutting it, placing it in a container or a cup, or a glass; and then picking up those slices at later point in time and dropping them into a drink and putting them on the rim of a glass," Tierno told Elle. "You can easily see how those lemon slices and lemon wedges can be contaminated."

This isn't the first study to reveal such shocking results. In fact, one 2007 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health found microbial growth on 70 percent of lemon wedges served at restaurants. What's more, researchers of the study said these microbes have the potential to cause infectious diseases.

Tierno has also seen bacteria on these wedges that can result in serious diseases, such as E. coli, staph, and the norovirus. Apparently, in the various studies he's conducted on this topic, he "always comes up with evidence of contamination from the skin, respiratory secretions, and fecal matter," on the skin of citrus pieces.

The origins of these contaminants could come from the fingertips of a restaurant employees who've had contact with human waste, -- or use the bathroom without washing their hands -- raw-meat or poultry. In some cases, the fruit may have been contaminated before it had even arrived at the restaurant.

"Hand washing is one of the things that's not practiced very well, especially after using bathroom facilities. There are many major studies that prove that," Tierno said.

The next time you order a cocktail, you may want to ask the bartender to hold the lemon wedge.