Flesh eating bacteria

E-mail about bananas having flesh-eating bacteria called a hoax

Knight Ridder News Service

Saturday, February 19, 2000

A widely circulating e-mail message warning people not to eat bananas because they are infected with flesh-eating bacteria is a hoax, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said Friday.

The CDC has been inundated with calls. The agency has set up a special banana hotline, at (404) 371-5375, to ease consumers' minds; it also explains the situation on its Web site, at www.cdc.gov.

The e-mail, which has been mass-forwarded for weeks, says: "Several shipments of bananas from Costa Rica have been infected with narcotizing fasciitis, otherwise known as flesh-eating bacteria. Recently this disease has decimated the monkey population in Costa Rica."

The agency acknowledged the flesh-eating bacteria, or necrotizing fasciitis, can be transmitted in food. But it usually passes from person to person.

CDC said that getting flesh-eating bacteria from food would be unlikely.

"The FDA and CDC agreed that the bacteria cannot survive long on the surface of a banana," the recording said.

The banana-scare message is "signed" by Manheim Research Institute at the CDC. There is no such division, a CDC spokesman said Friday.

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