by Melissa Willets posted in Parenting

My daughter just celebrated her birthday this weekend. To celebrate, we invited a few of her friends to the lake we live near, ordered pizza, had cupcakes. Like at most kids' parties, the time came to sing "Happy Birthday," and my sweet little (big, sniff) girl made a wish, took a deep inhale, and, with much gusto, blew out her candles, which I'd stuck into a variety of cupcakes and arranged on a plate.
I didn't think anything of this traditional celebratory moment, and would hardly have suspected it presented a danger to friends and family in attendance, until the next day, when I read about a new study that links the transfer of bacteria to blowing out birthday candles.
Reading through the research, of course it made sense to me that when kids blow out birthday candles, there's probably a little (or a lot) of spittle mixed in there, and that it could easily land on cupcakes or cake other children at a party would eat.
Have I spent a lot of time worrying about this before" Nope. Was it hard to believe a group of researchers would spend time, money, and resources to explore such a topic" Yep.
Still, in research published in the Journal of Food Research, a team found a whopping 1,400 percent increase in bacteria on icing a person blew on, versus icing not blown on. I'll admit this seems like a lot. It's worth mentioning that in the study, test subjects ate the popular party food, pizza, before blowing on th...