This ice age is over.
Experts are urging air travelers to avoid adding ice cubes to their drinks while on a plane, saying you could contract nasty germs by doing so.
“Don’t get ice in your drink,” warned a flight attendant in a Reddit thread, detailing unsavory industry secrets. “The ice is put in a tray with a scoop, and the trays don’t get cleaned very often.”
“Every surface on the plane is touched by hundreds of people daily and not often disinfected,” the attendant continued. “We don’t have the opportunity to wash our hands at all during the beverage service.”
“A consistent percentage of the microorganisms identified from ice are known agents of human infections, and their presence indicates an environmental contamination,” researchers wrote in a 2017 study. Svitlana – stock.adobe.com
Meanwhile, airplane cleaners have corroborated this dirty little secret.
“Some flight attendants get upset because it’s not clean,” Verna Montalvo, a cabin cleaner at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, told The Washington Post in 2022. “Of course, it’s not clean — because this is how much [time] they give us.”
She claimed that her crew only has five minutes to clean and has even had to tidy an aircraft by herself due to labor shortages.
Even if the ice tray is clean, the ice cubes inside it may not be. Airline ice, which is procured from third-party sources, is likely of dubious quality — because all ice is.
Experts advise mitigating the microbes with soda and alcohol. wertinio – stock.adobe.com
As part of a 2017 study, researchers sampled 60 ice cubes from both domestic and industrial facilities, finding that they harbored more than 50 different bacteria strains, per Travel + Leisure.
“A consistent percentage of the microorganisms identified from ice are known agents of human infections, and their presence indicates an environmental contamination,” researchers wrote.
If travelers must have ice in their drink, experts advise ordering soda or alcohol to mitigate the number of microbes.
According to a 2019 study by the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center at the City University of New York, there is a “consistent reduction of bacterial risk due to alcohol, CO2, pH and antibacterial ingredients of vodka, whisky, Martini, peach tea, tonic water, and Coke.”
However, researchers agree that the best way to remain safe is by bringing one’s own bottled water.
That same study found that drinking water on 11 major and 12 regional airlines is possibly unsafe for human consumption.
“My takeaway from doing the research was to not drink the coffee and the tea” said Charles Platkin, study author and the executive director of the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center.
