It is fake, but many family groups and owner groups in Shanghai are forwarding this message.
In the past two days, the Shanghai rumor-refuting platform has received many messages from fans, asking whether the news that "many people in Chongming Branch of Hua Hospital have been infected with NG virus and cannot eat bananas in the near future" that appeared in family groups and owner groups is true or false. In fact, this has been debunked many times, and netizens can confidently tell the forwarder: This is false, don't forward it again.
The Shanghai rumor-refuting platform traced back and found that the rumor that was recently spread was also widely spread in March last year, and there were serious factual errors. For example, there is no "Chongming Branch of Hua Hospital" in Shanghai; "ng" in medicine is usually the abbreviation of gonococci, which is a human parasite, not a virus, and gonococcal infection is one of the common sexually transmitted diseases, commonly known as gonorrhea, and has nothing to do with fruit; bananas are not the specialty fruit of Nanhui, Shanghai, and there is no large-scale banana planting in the area; there is no mass infection incident in any hospital in Shanghai; CCTV News has not reported that bananas cannot be eaten...
Rumors clarified by Shanghai Rumor Refutation Platform in March last year
Looking at the way this rumor is expressed, we can find that it is not logical, sometimes missing words, sometimes extra words. For example, this rumor once had a "Nanhui watermelon" version, saying that the "Nanhui 8424 watermelon" is not edible; and in the news spread in the past few days, "watermelon" has become "banana", but the rumor maker did not delete the words "8424" completely, and it became "Nanhui 24 banana". You know, "8424" is a watermelon variety, but there is no "Nanhui 24" or "24" banana variety. From the above details, it is not difficult to see that the rumor maker himself has a low level of education, and the rumor is the result of random patchwork.
Further tracing back, it can be found that similar rumors appeared as early as 10 years ago, and now there are more than 10 versions. In addition to the fictitious "Shanghai Hua Hospital Chongming Branch", there have also been rumors that different fruits cause different types of virus infections by using the names of real hospitals across the country, many of which are made-up viruses. These rumors have been refuted by local media, police and related hospitals.
Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital clarified the rumor about the same template in 2014
Therefore, the Shanghai rumor-refuting platform has summarized the templates of such rumors. If the public sees a message in the following format, they can basically judge it as a rumor: "At X:X in the morning yesterday at 35 Hospital, X people were infected with the X virus and died. The doctors involved in the rescue have been quarantined. The CCTV X TV news has been broadcast. Don't eat X for the time being. X people have been infected. Send it to the people you care about immediately after receiving it."
It is worth pondering why such a crude rumor keeps resurfacing?
One of the reasons is related to the "moral kidnapping" presented by the rumor. Whether it is the rumor last year or this year, it is spread in social circles such as "family groups" and "owner groups" where people are familiar or semi-acquainted. At the end of the rumor, there is a statement "If you read it, you can reply after fast forwarding it. Helping others is like helping yourself." This sentence is suspected to be a missing word statement of "If you read it, you don't need to reply after fast forwarding it", which is problematic in itself; however, some netizens, out of concern for their relatives and friends, did not notice the text errors at all, nor did they distinguish whether the content was true or not, but "forwarded it with one click", pushing the rumor to go viral.
Therefore, in the face of such rumors, more netizens with sharp eyes and ears need to stand up and question and clarify, rather than acquiesce in the wrong practices of rumor spreaders out of consideration for personal feelings. As a Shanghai rumor-refuting platform, we also hope to expose the way rumors are fabricated again, work together with netizens, let the rumor-refuting news spread further, and put an end to this old rumor that is "fake at first glance".
The WeChat public account "Shanghai Online Rumor Refutation" has set up a rumor-refuting album on the homepage about "death from eating fruit and contracting a virus". Netizens can check out the rumor-refuting reports from previous years.
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