10.31.2007

Always been safe.....

Every year, in early November, the stories hit the media: Some evil people have put razor blades, drugs, poisons, needles etc. in Halloween treats in order to kill or injure children.
This is one of the most tenacious of urban folk tales regularly appear in the media across North America, at that time, describing adulterated candies and apples. They are almost or completely untrue.


An article appeared in Scientific America some years ago on this topic. The authors traced back stories of poisoned food at Halloween and found that each case was without foundation. In 1997, Joel Best, a sociologist from a Southern Illinois University reported the results of a literature search of the razor blade hoax. The study went back 4 decades. He found about eighty cases of sharp objects in food; virtually all were hoaxes. The National Confectioners Association has run a Halloween Hot Line for over a decade. They have yet to verify an instance of tampering. Spokesman Bill Sheehan said: "These myths become truisms."

Despite e-mail warnings, scary stories, and Ann Landers columns to the contrary, there have been only two confirmed cases of children being killed by poisoned Halloween candy, and in both cases the children were killed not in a random act by strangers but intentional murder by one of their parents. The best-known, "original" case was that of Texan Ronald Clark O'Bryan, who killed his son by lacing his Pixie Stix with cyanide in 1974.

There have been a few instances of candy tampering over the years—and in most cases the "victim" turned out to be the culprit, children doing it as a prank or to draw attention. With the exceptions noted above, no child has been killed or seriously harmed by contaminated Halloween candy.

1 comment:

Lisa (the girls' moma) said...

On base here you could actually take your candy over to the passenger terminal where they would X-RAY your candy.

Who DOES that?