Last month, Tone Deaf reported on the story of Elizabeth Dazzio and her sister, whose lives were saved by a light-up concert wristband when the two were involved in a near-fatal car crash as they were driving home from a Taylor Swift concert.
The girls used the light-up wristbands given to them at the Swift show, which had been programmed and synced to the beat of the music, as makeshift emergency flares to get the attention of people driving by. It worked and they were saved from a hideous wreckage.
However, it seems Elizabeth’s story is something of a unique case, because according to a study by the University of Surrey, your old music festival wristbands can actually kill you. Turns out, they’re rife with potentially dangerous bacteria.
As The Mirror reports, Dr Alison Cottell, a microbiology professor at the University of Surrey, found that old festival wristbands, the kind you may even have on your wrist right now, can contain more than 20 times the amount of bacteria normally found on our clothes.
She examined two wristbands which had sat on the wrist of one festivalgoer since 2013 and found around 9,000 micrococci and 2,000 staphylococci bacteria. These two strains of bacteria, which thrive on the skin, can cause health problems and even potentially fatal conditions.
“Staphylococci are usually harmless but can cause boils and also infect cuts and grazes,” Dr Cottell told The Mirror. “They can also cause acute food poisoning if they are ingested.”
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“Infections are most likely to affect the ability of cuts and grazes to heal. More serious but rare complications include septicaemia.”
Septicaemia, it should be noted, is a fancy way of saying “blood poisoning” and is caused by large amounts of bacteria entering the bloodstream.
If you wish to lower your chances of death by blood poisoning, Dr Cottell suggests you don’t “wear [festival wristbands] if working in industries such as healthcare or food preparation, where there is a risk that the bacteria may spread to other people”.
So when you’re walking around town the day after a festival and spot someone still sporting their wristband, maybe it’s best to avoid shaking their hand, and maybe you should go ahead and take yours off, too.
