I like a drink as much as the next guy but am I a Cocktailian? I am not sure I could even communicate with a Cocktailian if I met one in the street or, better, in a cool darkened subterranean public space. Yet all is not well in the Land of Cocktailia:

...no Pegu imbiber is known to have keeled over from bacterial assault by the cocktail, which has been served there for the last four years. And the drink has drawn neither prior official rebuke nor customer complaint. Nevertheless, on that fateful evening, an inspector from the New York City Department of Health cited Pegu Club, at 77 West Houston Street in SoHo, for serving the MarTEAni without telling the customer who ordered it that it contained raw egg. The notice said it was a serious infraction that required a court appearance. Raw eggs are among the ingredients most fervently embraced by cocktail revivalists who have sought out new techniques and circled back to classic recipes. And the MarTEAni is a signature drink at a bar that is seen as a paragon of the new cocktailians.

Sam and Ella. The bacteria twins. They sound so cheery when given their real names. Yet they bring the plague. There were 167,319 cases (or "extrapolated incidence") of their mischief in Canada during an unspecified period according to this unreliable source which does give one brief pause. Yet we learn from an actual Phd writing on this unreliable source that "Alcohol with a meal can lower the risk of food poisoning" and on this unreliable source we learn that a "Spanish study of an outbreak of acute salmonella gastric infection among people at a banquet found that “the protective effect of alcohol was strongest for subjects who had drunk more than 40 grams of alcohol..."

It is not illegal to eat a raw egg. It is not even wrong. Think about it - it's a well known fact that plucky lads in schoolboy adventure stories suck on gulls eggs to stay fit as a fiddle while lost on wild sea coasts waiting for rescue. Would we not all be comforted were the meal accompanied by a reasonable measure of gin?