"Coke adds life"? Not always...

'Coca-Cola douches' scoop Ig Nobel prize

Tests of whether sodas such as Coke and Pepsi could be used as spermicides were among the many offbeat ideas celebrated at the 2008 Ig Nobel awards on Thursday.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/dn14864-cocacola-douches-scoop-ig-nobel-prize.html?



The tongue-in-cheek awards, presented at Harvard University, are organised by the humorous scientific journal the Annals of Improbable Research for research achievements "that make people laugh – then think".

Deborah Anderson of Harvard Medical School's birth-control laboratory took her first step towards the Ig Nobel chemistry prize in the 1980s when she asked medical student Sharee Umpierre what type of contraception had been used at the all-girl Catholic boarding school she had attended in Puerto Rico.

"Coca-Cola douches," Umpierre replied. Though that was the first Anderson had heard of the idea, her gynaecologist colleague, Joe Hill, remembered a song of the same name by an outrageous 1960s band called The Fugs.

"Coca-Cola douches had become a part of contraceptive folklore during the 1950s and 1960s, when other birth-control methods were hard to come by," Anderson told New Scientist. "It was believed that the carbonic acid in Coke killed sperm, and the method came with its own 'shake and shoot applicator'" – the classic Coke bottle.

To see if Coke really worked, Anderson, Umpierre and Hill mixed four different types of Coke with sperm in test tubes. A minute later, all sperm were dead in the Diet Coke, but 41% were still swimming in the just-introduced New Coke (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 313, p 1351).

But that's not good enough, Anderson warns. Sperm "can make it into the cervical canal, out of reach of any douching solution, in seconds" – faster than anyone could shake and apply a bottle of Diet Coke.