It's fair to say that the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team needs our help.

But not because of any type of baseball stuff that we can do.

We can't do anything.

It's because they have an outbreak of pink eye and pink eye is so infectious that the team has to ban high-fives.

It's an integral part of baseball. It's as if you had to ban the bat. Date gloves.

Bases.

Just how infectious are high fives.

David Whitworth at Aberistwith University

has actually studied this.

Yeah, so the most bacteria transferred by just your average strong, firm alpha male handshake,

then it decreases where a high five,

that's probably about half as many bacteria being transferred

as your strong handshake.

But the best one was actually the fist bump because that was 10 to 20 times fewer bacteria

transferred.

And I don't know if this number will mean anything to us, but how, in your average high five, how many bacteria are transferring from one person to another?

In our experiment, it was millions, but that was an artificial situation where we deliberately co-is our hand in bacteria first to make

the measurements easier.

In everyday life, I imagine that you're going to be transferring in the order of thousands.

Well, tell us a little bit about how you came to these findings, the methods of your research.

Okay, so what we did was we did it all in the lab and so everything was very controlled one of us

dumped a hand a gloved hand into a very rich broth of bacteria so they got a uniform

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