After Kegless Tailgate, More Students Sick

While University Health Services (UHS) may have seen fewer serious alcohol cases at Saturday’s football game than at past Harvard-Yale games, preliminary reports indicate that ambulances actually transported more drunk students to area hospitals Saturday than they did at The Game two years ago.

A UHS employee on duty Saturday said this weekend that UHS treated about seven students for intoxication, but that no students suffered from severe alcohol poisoning. Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 has cited four life-threatening cases of alcohol poisoning at the 2000 Harvard-Yale game as a justification for banning kegs this year.

But Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) spokesperson Steven G. Catalano said yesterday that there appears to have been an increase over the 2000 Game in the total number of fans taken to all local medical facilities.

“The initial estimate is that there were more [ambulance] transports this year than two years ago, based on our preliminary information,” Catalano said.

Bill Mergendahl, spokesperson for Professional Ambulance, which handled the emergency incidents at The Game this year, said that “more than 10” students were taken away by ambulance on Saturday.

A source close to Professional Ambulance estimated that the number of fans taken away by ambulance may have been as high as 30, most of them to Mount Auburn Hospital.

The source also said that at least two students were so intoxicated that they had to be intubated—they had tubes inserted in their tracheas and were attached to ventilators to breathe for them—at Mount Auburn.

“I do perceive that there was certainly a lot more alcohol involved this year, and that there were more alcohol-related incidents,” Mergendahl said.

Catalano said the final number of hospitalized students would not be determined for a week.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 wrote in an e-mail last night that he has “heard of several very serious incidents over the weekend,” but only some of them “were in the environs of Soldiers Field or indeed at game time,” and he declined to comment further.

Director of UHS David S. Rosenthal ’59 would not comment yesterday.

In an op-ed in The Crimson earlier this month, Lewis wrote that the ban on kegs this year was a response to the “chaos” that had resulted from the prevalence of kegs at two years ago, at the most recent Harvard-Yale game hosted by Harvard.

But the keg ban seemed, to some, to have had little impact on alcohol consumption at the tailgates around the stadium on Saturday.

Several Game-goers recalled seeing students passed out in the muddy fields where the tailgates were held—reports that were confirmed by Mergendahl.

The cold, combined with the fact that the unconscious students were heavily intoxicated, made hypothermia a major concern for the emergency medical technicians on the scene.

“People can certainly become more hypothermic when they’ve consumed alcohol,” said Christopher M. Coley, UHS chief of medicine.

Coley said it was unclear whether the keg ban had an effect on alcohol consumption at The Game.

“The challenge is to educate people on how to avoid getting themselves into trouble,” Coley said. “Whether a keg ban is of value or not could be argued, but there isn’t enough data to say whether or not it’s effective.”