[France24] Social media across the African continent is alight with rumours about infected thermos bottles. Some say that thermoses are being laced with pills that carry diseases. Others say the thermoses themselves contain asbestos, putting consumers at risk. These rumours have led dozens of people to post videos to social media showing themselves breaking their thermoses. Our team decided to investigate.Several people from the Ivory Coast contacted our team on WhatsApp last week to let us know about this topic of frenzied discussion online. They showed us photos and videos showing broken thermoses next to small round objects which looked like pellets or pills.
"We discovered pills within several thermoses in Odienné, Ivory Coast," one of them told our team. "Rumour has it that these pills have caused people to fall ill with mysterious illnesses."
Some posts in French claim that these allegedly toxic substances can infect people with AIDs or cause cancers or heart attacks, and that they were planted by "Westerners" or "China" as a means to "finish off Africa".
"Pills causing AIDs and diabetes in thermoses sold in sub-Saharan Africa by China, Europe. China is the Trojan Horse of genocidal Whites," reads the caption on one of the videos published on Facebook.