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The Poisoned Candy Myth
Decades of fear, no proven victims, and a real danger at the curb.
Picture Halloween night at a hospital, and a line that isn’t for the emergency room. It’s parents. Kids in capes and plastic masks stand next to them, holding pillowcases and plastic pumpkins heavy with loot. One by one, the bags go into the radiology department, where a machine built to find broken bones looks for razor blades in the candy. Everyone in that line came for the same reason: the fear of poisoned Halloween candy handed out by a stranger.
This scene isn’t invented. In the 1980s and early 1990s, many American hospitals offered to X-ray trick-or-treat bags for free.
On Halloween night in 1992, a team of pediatricians from the University of Louisville decided to check whether it worked. They collected data from five hospitals and three immediate care centers that screened candy that night.
They counted 454 bags.
The X-rays found nothing that shouldn’t have been there. And when the researchers tested the screening itself with a small test object, one of the five centers they checked missed it. No doctor looked at any of the images.
So the machines found nothing, and might not have found something even if it had been there. That’s a strange way to spend…
