Banana hoax snares UCR

A college staffer accidentally fuels a bogus Internet rumor about flesh-eating bacteria. Beware the flesh-eating banana hoax, the latest urban legend with an Inland-area link. A

Thursday, February 17th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

A college staffer accidentally fuels a bogus Internet rumor about flesh-eating bacteria.

Beware the flesh-eating banana hoax, the latest urban legend with an Inland-area link.

A false rumor is afoot that Costa Rican bananas carry flesh-eating bacteria, and the University of California, Riverside, has accidentally slipped into the middle of it.

Unknown pranksters apparently started a now-widespread e-mail warning that the bacteria causing necrotizing fasciitis -- popularly known as flesh-eating bacteria -- have attached themselves to the skins of Costa Rican bananas.

An employee at UCR's renowned agriculture school received the e-mail, viewed it as a joke, then passed it along to her sister and some friends outside the university.

With that keystroke, UCR's name became attached to the rumor. The staffer's computer automatically added her name and UCR office as a postscript to the e-mail. When that e-mail continued to circulate, it made it appear the university backed the story.

To make matters worse, someone along the line pasted UCR's name at the top as the warning's source.

That was Jan. 21. Since then, UCR has fielded about 50 e-mails each day about the story, said Kris Lovekin, a UCR spokeswoman. People also are calling the university phone number attached when the e-mail was forwarded.

Some believe the rumor and are worried about banana-related dangers. Others are just curious about how UCR's name got attached to a hoax, Lovekin said.

UCR's agriculture school is responding with a message debunking the story.

"This is kind of a nightmare for them," Lovekin said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the U. S. Food and Drug Administration also have called UCR asking about the hoax.

It's a bit ironic: UCR doesn't even study bananas.

"Bananas are not our thing. We're more into citrus," Lovekin said.

By the way, the so-called flesh-eating bacteria are usually spread by person-to-person contact, not through food surfaces, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which last month put out a press release quashing the deadly banana rumor.

So that's another one for the list of tall tales that have circulated in the Inland area.

Â· Last fall, two UCR entomologists (scientists who study insects) erected a Web site to debunk an urban legend circling the Internet about a spider that hides under toilet seats and delivers deadly bites on people's backsides.

The researchers decided to create a site about the hoax after they got electronic queries about the supposedly scary spider.

The site got nearly 50,000 hits in its first two weeks.

Â· Twice in the mid-1990s, Inland-area school districts fell for a hoax about the drug LSD being slipped to children via rub-on tattoos.

In 1996, the Moreno Valley school district sent out thousands of letters to parents warning about the tattoos, and also stamps allegedly laced with the drug. The district was duped by a fake warning letter bearing the Moreno Valley Community Hospital logo. The rumor had circulated in the school district in 1990, as well.

In 1995, a warning about the tattoos was printed in newsletters published by Corona Regional Medical Center, Murrieta's Hale Curran Elementary School and Elsinore High School in Lake Elsinore.

For more information on the banana hoax, see the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's Web page: www.snopes.com/toxins/bananas.htm or the Centers for Disease Control at: www.cdc.gov/ncidod/banana.htm.

Jeanette Steele can be reached by e-mail at jsteele@pe.com, by phone at (909) 782-7548, or by fax at (909) 782-7572.