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A hoax urging service station customers to exercise caution when pumping gas appeared first on the Internet in early June 2000: In common with other AIDS-infected needle scares (e.g., syringe attacks in movies houses and dance clubs and contaminated needles in payphone coin returns), this rumor plays upon our fear of contracting a dread disease through the pursuit of ordinary and harmless activities. There is no Abraham Sands with the Jacksonville Police Department: someone just invented a name to make this warning look authoritative. No newspaper stories from that city made any mention of Sands, which is unusual (to say the least) about a department's spokesperson; Jacksonville is served by a sheriff's office, not a police department; a phone call to the Jacksonville Sheriff produced the response that they'd never heard of Abraham Sands; and he wasn't listed with the rest of the personnel on the City of Jacksonville Sheriff's Office web site. No news stories out of Florida confirmed the e-mail's claim that 17 people had been injured by these attacks, the City of Jacksonsville Sheriff's Office said the whole thing was a hoax, and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta stated they were not aware of any cases where HIV had been transmitted by a needle-stick injury outside of a health care setting: Although there have been a few isolated reports of copycat pranksters leaving needles in public places (including gas pumps, such as an incident in May 2017) in the wake of this hoax, none of those incidents has involved a needle bearing any traces of HIV. No matter how it is reworded, the Captain Abraham Sands message is naught but anotherhoax dreamed up by someone intent upon enjoying the sight of people thrown into a panic over nothing.
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