'Netlore' doing the rounds via e-mails

A little boy dies after being pricked by a heroin-filled syringe in a fast food restaurant playground ball pit - but venomous snakes may lurk in those ball pits too.

Many people have come to believe such 'netlore', preposterous tales circulating via the Web and apparently landing on the inboxes of email users in the UAE.

The first one was a made-up cyber story about a child who supposedly died after being pricked by a heroin-filled needle found in a ball pit at a McDonald's outlet in Texas.

Though this legend has got around, there are no real-life incidents that correspond to it, according to www.snopes.com, a website which keeps track of Internet hoaxes.

"No children have been bitten by venomous snakes lurking in ball pits. Though injuries and a death have occurred in ball pits, none of them was snake-related," it added.

"I've seen similar stories in my inbox. But I simply ignored them because though they seem to be geared more towards pushing people's emotional buttons than communicating facts," said S. Abdullah, a media practitioner in Dubai.

The snakes-and-heroin -syringes-in-a-balls-pit stories are arrayed alongside the tale about Nostradamus' prediction of 9/11 terror attacks or the picture of a shark attacking a diver climbing a helicopter near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. They spread like the summer wild fire, thanks to the power of the Internet.

The fatal fanging is said to have taken place in several places in the U.S.

It is not only rattlesnakes that are commonly mentioned but also other critters such as water moccasins and vipers. The heroin-syringe story paraded a semblance of authenticity by referring to a newspaper article.

But it did not offer a link to a specific website. There are several versions of the story, but the only thing consistent about this tale is Kevin Archer, the supposed name of the three-year-old victim, whose father allegedly originated the email.

"No matter which version you can remember, there is no Kevin Archer and nobody has died as a result of heroin injections or any other types of drug injections while playing in the ball pit at McDonald's," said snopes.com.

"That is not to say that one could not encounter a used diabetic syringe or a pocket knife (more likely a plethora of McDonald's plastic utensils) or any number of things that could fall off, or be dragged in by small children."

Also, a story about a Discovery Zone ball pit filled with faeces, vomit, and every other disgusting thing you can think of was circulating in conjunction with some of the versions mentioned above. "All these stories appear to be false," it said.

Fast-food outlets acknowledged there might be the odd half-eaten piece of candy, or similar items that might have fallen out of kids' pockets, buried in the ball-pit, but discounted the possibility of there being vast amounts of disgusting things lying around on the floor.

The ball-pits are on average cleaned out once a month, they added.

When to be sceptical about e-mails
* If the text was not actually written by the person who sent it to you,
be sceptical.

* Virtually any chain email you receive (i.e., any message forwarded multiple times) is more likely to be false than true."

* Look for the tell-tale phrase, "forward this to everyone you know."

* Look for statements like "this is NOT a hoax" or "This is NOT an urban legend." They usually mean the opposite of what they say.

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