Recent news stories about an alleged CDC study showing a possible link between the drinking game, Beer Pong, and herpes simplex 1, the virus that causes cold sores, are false. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not publish the referenced article.

"If it’s absolutely necessary to play beer pong, use the waterfall method. Many young adults, when asked if they practice safe pong, responded that they rinse the ball after it bounces off the table. CDC statistics have shown that rinsing has a negligible effect on the prevention of HSV transmission." He went on the record, "We’re here to educate students on the dangers of [beer] pong and other casual drinking games. If we can get just one person to abstain, we’ve done our job."

That the popular drinking game beer pong is a font of contagion I do not doubt, but it's my job to separate rumor from fact, so let the hairsplitting begin. Despite what you may have heard on Fox News and elsewhere, beer pong hasbeen implicated in a rise in the occurrence of HSV-1 (the herpes virus responsible for cold sores) among college students.Several venues have claimed the erroneous information came from a reliable source, namely the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Not so , says the CDC:Like so much of what passes for news these days, the beer pong herpes story started out as Internet chatter. The earliest mention of the supposed epidemic appeared last July on the website BannedinHollywood.com , which quoted a CDC spokesman named (pronounce it out loud) Dr.Better late than never, the author of what is clearly an online leg-pull came clean earlier today in a posting on the same blog. "I came up with the idea while observing a few friends playing everyone’s favorite party game," Sean Thomas writes in an Open Letter to Fox News . "In passing, I thought this might be ripe for a satirical article." (Bit of an understatement in retrospect.) "Our first inclination is that no one would believe it was real," he continues. "We thought the ridiculous quotes were a dead giveaway."The irony is, they were.