Beware sponges!
An alert dating from last February carries a grave warning about "those yellow sponges with the green plastic fibres on the back for scrubbing pots". It names a leading manufacturer of the scourers who, it reveals, "has a new improved version of the sponge on the market that kills odour-causing fungi". There's just one problem: "The fungicide is a derivative [of] Agent Orange, the chemical we sprayed all over Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, that many veterans and war refugees say did them permanent damage to their lungs and nervous systems!" A heartrending anecdote relates the tale of a man who used the scourer to clean his aquarium. His fish died.
All sorts of unsavoury germs may be festering in your kitchen sponge, but lethal substances formerly deployed in germ warfare are unlikely to be among them, says David Emery, urban legends specialist at About.com. For a start, the leading manufacturer mentioned doesn't actually make a pan scourer. The rumour may have originated in the fact that some sponges are packaged with an antimicrobial agent that does not, under US law, have to be listed on the packaging.
Turn off your lights!
Another time-honoured and much-forwarded email warning informs recipients that ordinary fluorescent lights leach vitamins from the human body while you work. The exact mechanism remains unclear, but the consequences of drastic vitamin loss - deficiency diseases including anaemia and rickets - are only too apparent.
Not true. One of the oldest medical net hoaxes, it may be result from a distortion of the genuine scientific finding that fluorescent lights can break down riboflavin and vitamin A in milk when it is stored in transparent glass containers. Conventional, flickery, headache-inducing fluorescent strip lighting, annoying though it is, doesn't cause quite this much damage.
Blind fear!
"I wanted to tell you a story about a very serious thing," wrote an anonymous email correspondent in June 1998. "When Zack was two years old I put on the waterproof sunscreen like I always had. I don't know how but he got some in his eyes ... So I tried to flush it out with water. But guess what? Didn't matter ... Remember: waterproof ... I found out for the first time that MANY kids each year lose their sight to waterproof sunscreen. It burns the eye and they lose complete sight!!! ... Zack did go blind for two days, it was horrible. So please be careful!!!"
It's a moving tale but almost certainly fictional, says Emery, who quotes numerous responses to the scare issued by state health agencies in the United States denying that there is any evidence for the allegations. It's not a good idea to get any variety of sunscreen in your eyes, but the dangers of skin cancer vastly outweigh the risk. If you do, expert medical advice is to flush it out with large quantities of water - even if it's "waterproof".
