Old fake warning of Ebola virus in soft drinks attributing to Hyderabad Police has revived.
Claim
Please forward it to all friends Information has been given by Hyderabad Police all over India. Please do not drink any cold drink like Maaza, Fanta, 7 Up, Coca Cola, Mountain Deo, Pepsi, etc. for the next few days because one of the company’s workers has mixed the contaminated blood of dangerous virus named Ebola in it. This news was told in NDTV channel yesterday. Please help by forwarding this message as soon as possible. Forward this message to your family. Share this as much as you can 07:12 Thank you.
Rating
Explanation
A short alert message asking not to drink any cold drinks like Maaza, Fanta, 7 Up, Coca Cola, Mountain Deo, Pepsi, etc. for the next few days is viral and is attributed to Hyderabad police. The reason is stated as one of the company’s workers has mixed the contaminated blood of a dangerous virus named Ebola in the soft drinks. The message further mentioned the source as NDTV channel. This claim is viral on Facebook and WhatsApp now and was circulated earlier with unrelated images. Some of the posts with such a claim can be seen here and here.
What is the truth?
When searching for the news published by NDTV, we found no such information on its website or social media accounts. We also searched to know if any other media published such news, but ended up with no such news.
Further, we looked for the notice issued by Hyderabad police asking not to consume contaminated soft drinks. But we found none. Instead of the notice, we found multiple news reports dated 2019 mentioning that Hyderabad police refuted the viral claim. In addition to it, multiple fact-checks are found to have debunked the claim since 2019.
A tweet dated 13, July 2019 by Hyderabad City Police is found carrying the viral message and images with the caption “Fake news spreading on social media about cool drinks and a warning from Hyderabad city police is fake one and Hyderabad city police never released any message regarding this.”
Conclusion
It is found that an old fake warning against the consumption of soft drinks is falsely attributed to Hyderabad Police mentioning that it is mixed with contaminated blood of the Ebola virus. The information is old and fake.
