Skin Injuries from Flip Flops Purchased at Wal-Mart-Truth!
Summary of eRumor:
The eRumor is a combination of story, journal entries, and pictures from a woman who says she got chemical burns from wearing a pair of inexpensive flip-flop shoes or thongs purchased from Wal-Mart.
The Truth:
This is one of the more elaborate forwarded emails we’ve seen. It includes more than 30 pictures documenting a woman’s painful ordeal that she says was the result of a chemical burn from a pair of leisure flip-flops or thongs purchased from Wal-Mart in late August, 2007.
When millions of products like these “Sand-N-Sun” thongs are released on the market, it’s not hard to imagine that someone somewhere might experience a reaction to one of them. People are allergic to a wide variety of substances that might not affect others in the population.
It turns out, however, that this woman’s experience is not an isolated one.
A Fox News article dated September 12 said that at least 10 people were affected in similar ways and that Wal-Mart has stopped selling them. Wal-Mart spokesperson John Simley told Fox News that there have been about 7-million of the thongs sold through Wal-Mart but the company is testing them and other Sand-N-Sun products. It has not yet been determined what exactly caused the skin reactions.
Some versions of the story refer to the shoes as sandals and say they are from a Chinese manufacturer.
Updated 9/15/07