Several netizens recirculated on Facebook (FB) a bogus warning that discourages the public from eating fish after test tubes used for patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) were supposedly discarded at sea by a hospital in Northern Mindanao.
“We would like to clarify that these claims are false and unsubstantiated as verified by the Department of Health (DOH) – Center for Health Development Northern Mindanao,” the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) in Region 10 said in a Nov. 8 advisory.
Published on Nov. 4 and 6, the false FB posts originally written in Bisaya claimed that hundreds of people in Cagayan de Oro, Bukidnon, Misamis Oriental, and Iligan City died and contracted HIV after eating fish tainted by the medical paraphernalia.
“We want to emphasize that consuming fishery products is safe and poses no risk of contracting HIV. [HIV] is not transmitted through the consumption of food, including fish and seafood,” the BFAR advisory added.
Agence France Presse, MindaNews and Rappler have previously debunked this old claim, which first appeared in 2019.
HIV spreads through sexual contact, blood contamination or sharing needles with someone who has the virus. It can also be transmitted to babies born to, or breastfed by, mothers who have HIV, Stanford Health Care explained.
The virus does not survive long outside the human body and cannot reproduce outside a human host, said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The erroneous claim appeared a week after BFAR issued a warning about toxic red tide detected in shellfish from nine areas in western Visayas and eastern Mindanao. It garnered a total of over 112 likes, 99 comments, and 1,556 shares.
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(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
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