Fact Check: Hyderabad police warning on ebola-contaminated cold drinks is fake
No such advisory has been issued by Hyderabad Police.
By Sunanda Naik Published on 10 July 2023 10:02 AM GMT
Hyderabad: An advisory allegedly made by the Hyderabad police has gone viral on social media.
(Source- Screengrab of the viral post)
The viral advisory reads, “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, 7up, Coca-Cola, Mountain dew Pepsi etc. For next few days because one of the companies worker has mixed the contaminated blood of a 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. (sic)”
Is this true? Let’s find out
Fact Check
NewsMeter found that the claim is false.
We started the investigation by searching for relevant news articles on NDTV, as said in the post, but could not find any such report on the contamination of cold drinks with the Ebola virus. Moreover, on analysing the social media handles of Hyderabad city police we could not find any relevant advisory on any of their handles.
Noteworthy, we found an old clarification tweet from 2019 with the same claim but this time with pictures. In the tweet, we can see Hyderabad police deny issuing any such warnings to the citizens of Hyderabad.
With this, it is clear that this is not the first time this fake advisory has been shared with misleading claims. We also found a similar message being fact-checked by PIB (Press Information Bureau) on their Twitter fact-check handle on June 30, 2023.
Hence, beware of this fake advisory that is being shared on social media many times.
