Chocolate Laced With Ebola Ships to U.S. –Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A worker at a candy factory in Africa accidentally exposed a batch of chocolate to Ebola, and it was later shipped to America.
The Truth:
It’s not true that chocolate from Africa was accidentally laced with “Ebola positive blood.”
The false report can be traced back to a Twitter account operated by “Conspiracy Story.” The eRumor claims that a factory worker in South Africa who later tested positive for Ebola bled into a batch of melted chocolate that was shipped to the U.S. and distributed to stores. However, there haven’t been any confirmed cases of Ebola in South Africa, the CDC reports. The virus has been limited to Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Spain and the United States — which makes the eRumor a hoax.
The eRumor may have been inspired by credible news reports that Ebola could disrupt the global chocolate market. About 70 percent of the world’s cocoa supply comes from West African nations, and people began to speculate that cocoa prices, which hit a four-year high in August 2014, were driven by the Ebola pandemic. But Amal Ahmad, a chocolate analyst, told ABC News that basic economic trends were to blame for the higher prices, not Ebola.
Posted 11/03/14