Well, urine for something that’s not a treat. There’s a new TikTok trend that has people apparently urinating in different public places where they shouldn’t and then sharing evidence of the pee deed using the hashtag #PeeChallenge. As you can imagine, this pee challenge is more than a “wee” bit disturbing.
This trend certainly seems to be p-ing off a number of officials and other adults around the country. For example, Ozark High School in Montana has had to close its bathrooms because students were urinating on the floors as reported by KY3 News. The 101.9 radio station known as “The Bull” didn’t sound too bullish about TikTok videos showing people urinating on playground equipment at Western Plateau Elementary School and on the parking lot of Randall High School in Amarillo, Texas. Such videos bring new meaning to the term streaming on social media. And the Bristol, Connecticut, Police Department posted on Facebook the following: “Our department is aware of a nationwide trend of people claiming to be urinating in public places. We are currently investigating similar complaints in our city.”
The Pee Challenge Can Lead To Nasty Smells
One clear problem with having urine that’s not quickly flushed down the toilet is the smell. Yeah, there’s a reason why you haven’t seen too many perfumes or colognes named “Urine Number Five” or maybe “Urine Number One.” Even when you are healthy and well-hydrated, your urine doesn’t exactly smell like a bakery. Instead, it typically has a mild ammonia aroma. That’s because one of the primary waste products in urine is urea, which can break down into ammonia. That ammonia smell can get stronger when you are dehydrated and the urea is, in turn, more concentrated. Things can get even nastier if you’ve something going wrong in your body. For example, a urinary tract infection can make your urine quite foul-smelling.
The Pee Challenge Can Attract Nasty Critters
While urea and its odor may not not attract any dates for you—human dates that is—it could attract other things, namely a variety of insects such as flies and cockroaches. These are probably things that you don’t want around no matter how lonely you may be. Such critters not only can be can be nuisances, they also can carry dirt and microbes, which in turn can contaminate food, water and different surfaces.
The Pee Challenge Can Spread Infectious Pathogens
Speaking of microbes, don’t buy into the widespread myth that urine is somehow sterile. That Patches O’Houlihan character in the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story may have drunk his own urine. And some wellness influencers may be encouraging you to do so too, as I’ve covered previously in Forbes. But drinking your own urine or anyone else’s for that matter would be a bad idea. So would letting urine touch any sensitive parts of your body like your eyes, nose or wounds.
That’s because urine not only has waste products such as urea, uric acid and ammonia, it also can contain different microbes such as lactobacillus and staphylococcus. These microbes may be in relatively small concentrations in normal urine. But even small amounts of not-so-friendly microbes can be problematic. Moreover, such microbes can get very plentiful when you have a UTI.
Plus, the opening of your urethra—the hole where your pee comes out—is located in a somewhat nasty neighborhood. On the one hand, you’ve got your genitals. There are reasons why you don’t regularly store food in your underwear, one of them being that your genitals may not be the cleanest things in the world. In the other direction, you’ve got your anus. And we know what happens there. With so many microbes living in the neighborhood of where your pee comes out, it is quite possible that they could get into the urine that you may be spraying.
The Pee Challenge Also Could Lead To People Exposing Themselves In Public
Sanitation is a number one big reason why humanity has established separate locations called bathrooms for people to, well, go number one. But that’s not the only reason you typically have to excuse yourself from a date, job interview or work meeting to go to the bathroom. Urinating requires you to expose certain parts of your body that you usually keep in hiding. Many people don’t want to see those parts of the body in public, which is why there are laws against such exposure. Therefore, if you are urinating in public, you are putting yourself at risk to get in trouble or even arrested.
Some Are Questioning How Real The Pee Challenge Is
Of course, anytime you see anything on social media these days, you’ve gotta wonder how much of it is faking it to make it. Some have questioned whether all of these posts pee real, so to speak. Who knows how much of it could have been staged such as using bottles, tubes or some other kind of contraption to spray some other fluid besides the real deal? After all, how many people are willing to risk that whole get-arrested thing?
Nevertheless, even if some of this pee challenge turns out to not pee what it seems, it still is not a good thing. It’s already wasted the time and resources of schools and other locations. In other words, it has already become more than a wee bit of a problem.
