Keeping your music festival wristband on is more than just a keepsake or a token of the good times had. It’s a way of sticking it to the man and making sure the party doesn’t have to end. The greasers had their leather jackets, hippies had their long hair, and we have wristbands.
And if you’re one of those people who’s never taken off their festival wristband, despite the fact that the actual festival where a volunteer haphazardly wrapped it around your wrist before you entered was three years ago, you’ve also got a hot zone of infectious bacteria around your wrist.
It’s something we’ve known for a little while, having previously assumed as much. But triple j’s Veronica and Lewis decided to find out just how filthy your old festival wristband is by testing a bunch sent in by a listener who’d been wearing wristbands from as far back as Falls 2009.
As a control, they also tested one that Veronica had put on shortly before heading to the microbiology lab. The result? Veronica’s was relatively clean, but one of the listener’s wristbands was so grotty it actually began growing antibiotics.
Last year, Dr Alison Cottell of the University of Surrey told The Mirror that old festival wristbands contain more than 20 times the amount of bacteria normally found on our clothes. She discovered around 9,000 micrococci and 2,000 staphylococci bacteria on one wristband.
“Infections are most likely to affect the ability of cuts and grazes to heal. More serious but rare complications include septicaemia,” she said. Septicaemia, it should be noted, is a fancy way of saying “blood poisoning” and is caused by large amounts of bacteria entering the bloodstream.
