Needle-Attack Legends
photo taken from terumotmp.com
Starting in 1998, large numbers of notices on the Internet warned against contaminated hypodermic needles left in public places that were infecting innocent people. Below is a typical example of one of these bogus warnings forwarded multiple times on the Internet in November 1998:
“PLEASE READ IMPORTANT MESSAGE BELOW AND SEND TO ANYONE YOU KNOW. A very good friend of mine is in an EMT (emergency medical technician) certification course. There is something new happening that everyone should be aware of. Drug users are now taking their used needles and putting them into the coin return slots in public telephones. People are putting their fingers in to recover coins or just to check if anyone left change, are getting stuck by these needles and infected with hepatitis, HIV, and other diseases. This message is posted to make everyone aware of this danger. Be aware! The change isn’t worth it! P.S. – This information came straight from phone company workers, through the EMT instructor. This did not come from a hearsay urban legend source. “
There are many other versions of this urban legend. Although it is said at the end “This did not come from a hearsay urban legend source”, it actually does because of the anonymity of the first-person voice. Other versions like “the underside of gas pump handles”, women being hit with needles in clubs and passed a note saying “Now you have HIV”, and keypads being painted with “a mixture of LSD and strychnine” are other forms of this urban legend. These legends are still heard today. Actually a few such warnings can be found back in the mid-1980s.
Although many of the warnings claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) verified the stories, CDC spokespersons that were interviewed by journalists brand the stories as hoaxes. This, however, does not give us any reason to not look out for such cases.
To learn more about this urban legend, check out Snope’s article, HIV Needles in Coin Returns.
(Source: Brunvand, Jan H. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. 2001.)
