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Adam Savage in MythBusters (2003)

Goofs

Hidden Nasties

MythBusters

Edit

Factual errors

The mass spectrometer is indeed an incredibly sensitive and accurate piece of machinery, however it wasn't the machine that claimed dust fluoresces under a blacklight. Chris Adams just lied. Aside from the fact that the substance that was shown fluorescing was obviously drops of liquid, and the fact that no drinks can has ever been so completely clean, except for a couple of drops of dust, the biggest give away that the man was being dishonest about the test results is that dust does not fluoresce under blacklight. (If dust fluoresced then bars and clubs wouldn't need any other lighting, they could just stop dusting and the place would shine.)
For reasons best known to himself, Dr Lee Riley told a very dangerous lie. It is absolutely possible to catch a disease by drinking from a soda can. "Aerosol droplets" do not have to be inhaled to transmit a disease. (It's also nonsensical to claim a pathogen found in urine has to be inhaled, no-one's sniffing that.) Even if his claim that stomach acid kills all bacteria was true (it's not, food poisoning exists), nobody has ever drunk from a can through a feeding tube, which is the only way the bacteria is going directly into the stomach. Plus people get cuts and micro-tears in their mouths and throats all the time, which would be a direct route into the bloodstream. In fact, in the UK where rats are common around large bodies of water, canoeists and canal boat users are warned to keep their eyes and mouths shut if they fall in the water to reduce the risk of contracting Weil's disease.

As the world learned during the pandemic, aerosolised diseases are transmitted through any "soft opening" in the body, ie. eyes, nose, mouth. So drinking bacteria will infect you with the disease.

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