Hoax Email Making the Rounds Still
Got an email this morning entitled “John Hopkins Cancer Update” now having been around the internet long enough to know that even well meaning people can get caught up in a hoax, I decided to do a bit of research to see if the claim in the email was true or not.
If a prestigious university, like Johns Hopkins, made the claim that microwaving food in plastic containers was a way to get cancer then that would be news — something carried by major news outlets. Getting confirmation of the fact, if it was a fact, would be easy.
First off, the email referred to Johns Hopkins’ newsletter, so starting at Johns Hopkins and its current newsletter revealed a nothing on the topic. The next step was a Google search for article with “cancer” and “John Hopkins” in the search terms. The search lead to two credible sources. The Baltimore Sun article Myth-Information Lives which suggested what I had in my email was a hoax. The article is dated August 31, 2007.
The next source was Sidney Kimmel Center at Johns Hopkins. In News and Events section there is an Kimmel e-wire entry ”Baltimore Sun features the mythbusters in Kimmel Cancer Center PR office” that links to an entry entitled Myth-busting at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Center. Within the release is a link to a statement from the Kimmel Center. The statement says indeed the email is a hoax. The statement is dated March 2007.
That statement leads to an interview with researcher, Rolf Halden, PhD, PE, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the Center for Water and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in which he also states the claims in the email are false. He does recommend following the directions on the label of plastic products as some plastics do not recommend exposure to heat.
It took longer to write this blog entry than it did to find out the email was a hoax and find out definitively what Johns Hopkins had to say on the Cancer Update email.
For the web savvy, there is http://www.snopes.com. In the search function put the term “cancer” and the Cancer Update from John Hopkins comes up as number two on the list as of September 26, 2007. So don’t be fooled people by stuff that comes in your email and for goodness sake, don’t pass it on without doing a bit of checking first. Let’s see if we can keep some of these hoaxes from living long enough to become email legends.
Wasn’t all that hard to tell something was wrong after all the University’s name is Johns Hopkins not John Hopkins. Mayhaps there is a John Hopkins too that sprouted your email in the first place. It is good to see you spent some time to end the hoax with you. By chance did you carry it one step farther and send the hoax info back to the sender so he/she could then alert the other members in her/his network it was a hoax too? I mean that make sense if you really want to help end a legend.
Comment by Cynic — September 26, 2007 @ 5:36 pm