Are millions of children in danger from Easter Egg recall? Fact Check
A number of clickbait websites are recycling a now out-dated product recall for Hatch & Grow Easter eggs in a bid to lure traffic to their websites.
In April 2017, Target recalled 560,000 water-absorbing Easter egg and dinosaur toy products. These included Hatch & Grow Easter Eggs, Easter Grow Toys and Hatch Your Own Dino Egg products. There had been concerns – but no reported injuries – that the toys could have caused internal injuries if digested by children.
Despite that recall being a year old and now completely out-dated, a number of websites have published articles about the year-old recall to make it appear like a relevant, current and “breaking” news story, which it now clearly isn’t.
For example, the website news24fresh.info published an article in February 2018 about the recall with the headline “ALERT: Massive Easter Egg Recall Leaves MILLIONS Of Children In Danger- THROW THEM AWAY – They WILL Kill Your Kids”. Weeks later, in March 2018, the website FitnessAndMedicinal.com duplicated that headline along with the entire article.
ALERT: Massive Easter Egg Recall Leaves MILLIONS Of Children In Danger- THROW THEM AWAY- They WILL Kill Your Kids
Target has issued a massive recall for water-absorbing egg toys ahead of Easter Sunday after discovering the object can expand inside a child’s body, causing life-threatening conditions if ingested.
If the small toy is ingested, it can expand inside a child’s body and cause intestinal obstructions, resulting in severe discomfort, vomiting, dehydration and could be life threatening. Surgery is required to remove the toy from the body, if ingested. Medical professionals and parents should be aware that there is a possibility that the toys might not show up on an x-ray.
This recall involves Hatch & Grow Easter Eggs, Easter Grow Toys and Hatch Your Own Dino. Hatch & Grow Easter Eggs and Easter Grow Toys have model number 234-25-1200 on the back of the product’s packaging.
The article itself was just a slightly rehashed modification from a CNN article that was published in April 2017 shortly after the recall was announced.
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Essentially what these sites are doing is stealing articles from mainstream outlets, modifying the articles slightly and giving them clickbait headlines to make the articles appear current, despite the article subject matter now being woefully out of date.
Yes, the recall was real, but it is unclear how many of these affected products are still about. It is not likely to be many since the recall is a year old, and since there were only 560,000 products recalled in 2017, the claim in the headlines that “millions” of children are in danger is clearly misleading.
With that said, affected products will have the 234-25-1200 or 234-09-0016 model numbers. If you do have one, make sure you throw it away.
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