Spermicide!

The word 'spermicide' always makes me think of a cartoon-like sperm saying, "I can't take it anymore. I just can't!" before ramming itself into a uterus wall. As sad as it sounds, dying sperms make some women happy, and apparently Deborah Anderson (not the musician) has found a cheap way to not only kill sperms, but also prevent AIDS - using Coca-Cola. From Reuters: Spermicide Coke, stale chips research wins Ig Nobels:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A researcher who figured out that Coke explodes sperm and scientists who discovered that people will happily eat stale chips if they crunch loudly enough won alternative "Ig Nobel" prizes Thursday.

Other winners included physicists who found out that anything that can tangle, will tangle and a team of biologists who ascertained that dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas.

Deborah Anderson of Boston University Medical Center and colleagues were awarded the chemistry prize for a 1985 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found Coca-Cola kills sperm.

She said she was serious in testing the soft drink because women were using it in a douche as a contraceptive and, later, to try to protect themselves from the AIDS virus.

"It definitely wouldn't work as a contraceptive because sperm swims so fast," Anderson said. But Coke made with sugar quickly kills sperm, she said, probably because sperm soak it up. "The sperm just kind of explode," she said in a telephone interview.

It kills the AIDS virus too, she said.

Really? Usually I'm inclined to believe people who work in universities who win awards, but a quick Google search has made me think twice. Snopes has concluded through its own research that Coke as a spermicide is ineffective. From Snopes: Coca-Cola Spermicide:

However, other researchers were unable to verify these results in later experiments. Subsequent trials performed by medical researchers in Taiwan (using several vari[e]ties of both Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola) led them to the opposite conclusion, that "cola has little if any spermicidal effect"[.]

So what's the deal? Isn't it a little irresponsible to say Coke works as a spermicide and prevents AIDS when it's inconclusive? I can see the headlines for the next 10 years: "Teen pregnancy caused by ineffective spermicide; Coca-Cola sued."

Apparently these Taiwanese researchers were trying to recreate an experiment conducted by Harvard researchers. Maybe Coke as a spermicide only works in America?