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A patient in Zimbabwe had an X-ray taken on his chest. Doctors noted a live cockroach and recommended him to India for surgery. He sold everything and went to India, where another X-ray was taken. It showed he was fine. The cockroach was in the X-ray machine used in Zimbabwe. The image has been widely shared on Facebook. This version makes a snide joke of both people in Zimbabwe – he sold everything – and the country’s health system: the cockroach was in the X-ray machine, and the doctor had no clue. In January 2019 Zimbabwean doctors ended a near six-week strike for better working conditions. The cockroach is unnaturally large and inexpertly photoshopped onto the X-ray. Snopes checked a slightly different version of the claim and confirmed the image and caption are fake, and have been circulating online since at least 2012. But Snopes’s fact-check reveals another unfortunate side of the story. The original X-ray is of the chest of Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was an American sex symbol of the 1950s, an actor once married to playwright Arthur Miller . She died of suspected suicide in 1962, at the age of 36. The chest X-ray was taken in 1954, when Monroe was 28 and admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for surgery. The X-ray doesn’t only show her ribs and spine: it also shows the outline of her breasts. Snopes reports: A set of three X-ray images from this hospital visit were sold at auction in 2010. The price was US$45,000 – about R600,000. A reverse image search confirms the origin of the X-ray, showing that the undoctored version was first posted on the internet in 2010.
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