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Triple J Study Proves Your Old Festival Bands Are Swimming With Bacteria

Many of you have kept a festival wristband on for at least a few days after a festival but some like to wear them for years and now it’s been proven that’s, unsurprisingly, not a great idea.

triple j‘s Veronica and Lewis found a listener with a number of bands on his wrist and snatched from him bands from Falls Festival 2009, Groovin The Moo 2010 and Splendour In The Grass 2016.

They then took them to a microbiologist named Dr. Nick who tested the bands to see how much and what sorts of bacteria they had grown on them.

What he found after a few days of incubation was pretty gross, as you can probably imagine. If you like wearing your bands and don’t want anything to change that, you may want to stop reading now.

Dr. Nick found bacteria on all the bands and while some contained unharmful, there were signs of golden staph which can cause severe infections.

Interestingly, there was also the type of bacteria found that makes antibiotics and it was working to kill off the other bacteria.

Still Dr. Nick reckons you’re crazy if you want to keep wearing the bands and put yourself at risk of serious infection.

“We can’t see for sure that these are dangerous bacteria, but the numbers are so high, I would advise people against doing this and wearing them for years and years and years,” he said which is a much smarter way of saying what we’ve really known all along.

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