ANNOYING URBAN LEGENDS WHICH ARE NOT TRUE

I have been receiving these occassional scaremails where someone forwards you a story warning you of all the dangers that are out there in the cold dangerous world. Worst part of it is that people just forward in indiscretely to all the people in their addressbook. People don’t even try to vet the story before sending it down the line. It is because either they are too ignorant to know the truth or because they are too lazy to really do some research. I have even seen many blogs that publish these myths as a form of public service. Hogwash. We are different out here in kenneyjacob.com. We tell you truth. We now have a new segment where all the forwarded myths are mercilessly slaughtered. So, let me dissect this latest email that I received and show the truth.

Dear Friends,

Please read this carefully!

1 ) Do not drink APPY FIZZ . It contains cancer causing agent.

There is no basis for this argument and no cases whatsoever have been reported. Appy fizz is just plain apple juice which is carbonated. It may contain some preservatives and coloring agents, but they are all approved and for that matter, all fruit drink products from all companies have them.

2 ) Dont eat Mentos before or after drinking Coke or Pepsi coz the person
will die immediately as the mixture becomes cyanide.. Please fwd to whom u care

If you put a mentose in a coke/pepsi bottle, it causes the cola to fizz heavily. The earlier myth was that if you drink coke and eat menthos afterwards, your stomach would explode becaues of high pressure created by a similar reaction. Mythbusters on TV and snopes.com have proved once and for all that there is nothing harmful in drinking coke with mentos; stomach explosion or cyanide. Check it out at snopes.com

http://snopes.com/horrors/freakish/mentos.asp

Read more coke related myths here.

http://snopes.com/cokelore/cokelore.asp

3 ) Don ‘ t eat kurkure because it contains high amount of plastic if U don’ t
Believe burn kurkure n u can see plastic melting.

Please forward to all!!!!!!!!!!!
News report from Times of India

The plastic like substance that you see in kurkure is nothing but starch. Anyone who has tried over starching cotton shirts and all would recognize this shiny plastic like thing that comes when starch dries.  You also see that on rice cookers after the water dries on the side of the vessel.

4 ) Avoid these tablets they are very dangerous
* D cold
* Vicks action- 500
* Actified
* Coldarin
* Cosome
* Nice
* Nimulid
* Cetrizet-D
They contain Phenyl- Propanol -Amide PPA. Which Causes strokes, and these
tablets are banned in U.S.

PPA or Phenylpropanolamine, (can’t even get the spelling right). This is the closest thing to truth that an urban legend comes. It has been found that PPA increases the risk of stroke among younger women. However, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, USA) has issued a warning, and has directed the usage to be regulated by a doctor’s prescription. This makes it easier for the doctors the assess the risks and prescribe the medicine. The medicine as such is not banned. Check out -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylpropanolamine

Still, the risk is pretty low. There have been only a handful of cases reported out of the hundreds of millions of people who have been using pills containing PPA. But since this has a small grain of truth, ye be the judge.

5 ) Cotton Ear Buds … (Must read it)

Please do not show sympathy to people selling buds on roadside or at
Signals…… Just wanted to warn you people not to buy those packs of
ear buds you
get at the roadside. It ‘ s made from cotton that has already been used
in hospitals. They take all the dirty, blood and pus filled cotton,
wash it, bleach it
and use it to make ear buds. So, unless you want to become the first
person in the world to get Herpes Zoster Oticus (a viral infection of
the inner, middle, and external ear) of the ear and that too from a
cotton bud, DON ‘ T BUY THEM!
Please forward to all this may be helpful for someone………….

Here, I talked to two people about this. One is a doctor and then a friend of mine who is into manufacturing a lot of stuff near Coimbatore. Here are the two points that proves why this is just an urban legend.

1. The doctor told me that he has checked out the cotton buds that you get on the roadside. What he says is that, if somehow people manage to wash and bleach the used cotton to make it to such good condition, the process automatically kills any microorganism that may have been in there. Anyway, he doubts that it is recycled cotton. The reason comes from the next point.
2. The manufacturer guy told me that the total cost of a company to manufacture, and distribute through traditional supply chain channels is very small. From the out-of-factory-door cost, at each level of the distribution line, the markup is usually high,  so that usually the MRP would be around 4 or 5 times the out of door cost.  So what that suggest is that the cost of fresh cotton (as opposed to using used cotton) is only a very small part of the total cost of manufacturing. They might even incur more expense in doing the extra cleaning/bleaching needed for used cotton. Fresh cotton needs much less processing.

The bottomline is that it is easy to assume this myth to be true, but the buds that you get on the street are not any more dangerous than the one that you would find at a pharmacy. Of course, it is of slightly poorer quality, but there is nothing dangerous in there.  And did I forget to mention that Herpes Zoster Oticus is a skin rash and not an infection in the ear? Checkout -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_zoster

6) Don ‘ t put your mobile closer to your ears until the recipient answers,
Because directly after dialing, the mobile phone would use it ‘ s maximum
signaling power, which is: 2watts = 33dbi.
Please Be Careful. Please use left ear while using cell (mobile), because
if you use the right one it may affect brain directly. This is a true fact
from Apollo medical team.

Forward this to maximum people
Whom You Care….!

The hoax of Appollo medical team claiming that using left or right ear on a cell phone is disproved lont time ago. It is just crap. There is no evidence to suggest that using the left ear will in any way decrease such risks. - check this out - http://www.hoax-slayer.com/use-left-ear-mobile.html

Signalling power (watts) and antenna gain (dbi) are totally different things. The antenna gain is a measure of the signal strength in a particular direction relative to an ideal situation where the antinna radiation goes to all directions. Check out -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_gain

The power of a cell phone signal before a call is connected is higher in a relative sense. But as an absolute measure, the effect of both are about the same for the human body. I also saw this claim about cell phones cooking an egg in a news paper. (Manorama? HA!) It is nothing much shock journalism. False. Lie. Checkout-http://www.snopes.com/science/cookegg.asp

So folks, if you get any more of these crap, just send a note, put that as a comment here. We will bust those urban legends.