SICK JOKE HEALTH HOAXES, RAMPANT ON INTERNET, HAVE RECIPIENTS SCARED TO DEATH.

Byline: Kirk Kicklighter Cox News Service

Emory University senior Shelly Seaver had seen the e-mail message many times over a period of months, usually receiving it from a friend of a friend in her sorority until it was hard to tell where the thing had originated.

The message had made the rounds of campuses nationwide, warning female students of date rapists who use a new veterinary drug, Progesterex, to sterilize and knock out women so they can be raped without becoming pregnant.

``I was very alarmed at first. ... A lot of students were,'' said Seaver, 23. ``It seemed like a real warning.''

Then she found out that Progesterex doesn't exist. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, a drug called Estrus is used to temporarily prevent mares from coming into heat, but it would not be an effective weapon for date rapists. The warning and the rapes were pure fiction.

What Seaver and her sorority sisters experienced was yet another lowlight in the ongoing plague of health and safety scares known as ``urban legends.'' Propelled by e-mail and the Internet, hoaxes that prey on the anxieties of ordinary people are proliferating as never before. They have become so common, in fact, that the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has introduced a page on its Web site, www.cdc.gov/hoaxrumors.htm to knock them down.

They're not the only ones trying to counter such tales.

``Many of the legends are a reflection of current societal concerns or a search for excitement,'' said Barbara Mikkelson of Agoura Hills, who with husband David, runs www.snopes.com, a Web site that debunks urban legends. ``People have always been worried about their health. So today you hear lots of things about needles in play areas and toxic products because we worry about AIDS and cancer.''

The Snopes site is run under the auspices of a group the Mikkelsons founded some years back, the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society. It's accreted more than 1,000 urban legends now, and ``less than 1 percent'' of the tales the couple has come across are true, Mikkelson said. The bad information is particularly prevalent in the health area.

``It's definitely a growing area, because it's so easy to get a wrong bit of information mixed in with other things,'' Mikkelson said. ``It's very easy to misread a complicated story or mishear something on the news, and then to have that fall into place with what the person already believes.''

One recent trend, Mikkelson said, is the array of AIDS-related stories where someone contracts the disease ``through no fault of their own,'' such as through an AIDS-infected needle hidden in a pay phone coin-return slot or taped to a gas-pump handle.

``We've grown to fear this disease very much; the current legends reflect that,'' Mikkelson said. ``You'll have an ordinary person doing something completely ordinary, and get pricked by HIV-infected needles. What all these legends do is communicate very strongly the fear we have of this disease, of becoming victim to it.''

Because the hoaxes won't end anytime soon, experts on urban legends try to educate the public as much as possible about the background and relevance of the misleading stories. The Snopes site, for instance, puts a small colored button next to each of its collected legends; red means false, green means true.

Nonetheless, the e-mails with such tales proliferate.

Friends and co-workers who forward e-mails about such stories are generally well-intentioned, but the far-reaching realm of cyberspace can quickly turn an innocent mistake into nationwide paranoia. In the time it takes to click the send button, modern life becomes a dark gantlet of imagined horrors: The glue on ATM deposit envelopes is laced with cyanide. Infected bananas from Costa Rica eat human flesh. Black-market organ thieves abduct business travelers and remove their kidneys in the middle of the night.

``The Internet is a paradise for people who don't think normal things to be able to connect with other people,'' said David Emery, who writes about urban legends and folklore for About.com, an Internet information clearinghouse. ``You can't always determine what the person was thinking when they come up with these things. Some probably mean well. But it's always a story, and I think it's often a flawed way of using stories to create a community around a shared interest or concern.''

American folklorists started collecting ``urban belief tales'' in the 1940s, and the field blossomed in the 1960s as researchers began analyzing why these bizarre narratives were accepted as truths. By the 1980s, urban legends were a major topic for folklore researchers. And, while past legends concerned such harmlessly outlandish scenarios as alligators living in the sewers of New York, today's mythology often involves health scares.

Urban legends can travel by word of mouth or print, but the Internet has become the prime vehicle for their dissemination. However they spread, they all share the same characteristics, according to Harold Brunvand, a professor emeritus of English and folklore at the University of Utah and author of a recent study of urban legends titled ``The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story!'' (University of Illinois Press; $22.95).

``Those who spread them always insist on the truth of the story and usually attribute it to the neighbor of the radio dispatcher who knows the deputy who talked to the doctor who treated 18 slash victims at the local mall,'' said Brunvand. ``The tales are always about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and acquire a persistent hold on the imagination with their bizarre elements of suspense.''

Such tales can create headaches and a lot of extra work for companies, police departments and public health officials. Take a scare over Costa Rican bananas supposedly containing ``flesh-eating'' bacteria. The rare disease mentioned in the banana myth, known as necrotizing fasciitis, strikes fewer than one in 15,000 Americans a year. It is most often passed person to person, and the consumption of fruit would be a highly unlikely source, because the bacteria cannot survive long on the surface of a banana. But that story that began as a drip created a tidal wave of queries to the CDC.

``At the peak of the scare, we were getting 250 phone calls and about 500 e-mails per week,'' said Dr. James Watt of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases. ``After a few days it became clear this was a big problem for us. We set up automated systems to give people recorded messages and e-mail responses just to try to get some other work done.''

CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said the agency's decision to create its new myth-busting Web site was prompted by the spread of legends and hoaxes. ``So many of the hoaxes used the CDC as a supporting voice of authority in their messages, so we decided to make a formal response,'' Skinner said.

So far, no one has been able to target the sources of these e-mail scams. ``That would be a mission more appropriate for the FBI, and I assume they already have their hands full with hackers and computer viruses,'' said Watt.

Part of the problem is an ingrained American distrust of government, Mikkelson said. Many of the experts agree that Americans living in the age following Vietnam, Watergate and Monica Lewinsky have been conditioned to be suspicious of authority, of anything bigger than them. One example: The AIDS virus strikes minorities disproportionately, and many in the black community believe AIDS is part of a government conspiracy to control nonwhite populations.

``The urban myths acquire a convincing pseudo-veracity because they suggest information the government and public health officials might be trying to hide from the rest of us,'' said Mikkelson.

At worst, such stories lead people to make bad decisions about their health. For example, minorities who believe AIDS is a government plot may refuse to listen to public health advice about AIDS prevention. A recent e-mail urged all women to seek screening for ovarian cancer using a test that, in reality, is not reliable.

``These stories are also dangerous because they distract us from the real health concerns like smoking and bad diets and the common-sense things we need to do to stay alive,'' said Jeff Stier, associate director of the nonprofit American Council on Science and Health, which educates the public about health quackery.

Stier and other experts say the best antidote for an outbreak of ``urban mythitis'' is a daily dose of skepticism. In other words, as always, don't believe everything you read or hear. Though some urban legends contain the slightest grain of truth, none has ever proved to be true. Yet.

Looking for red flags

How do you recognize and stop the spread of a health-related urban myth? Experts generally agree on these guidelines:

--If the story seems suspicious or its explanations are only somewhat plausible, it's probably not true.

--When the message says, ``Please forward this to everyone you know,'' that's a dead giveaway. Have you ever seen press releases from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health or the New England Journal of Medicine that made such an urgent request? Don't forward the message, even if you think it's funny. E-mail forwarding is how the story's credibility grows.

--Beware of messages with lots of exclamation points. Real health scares don't need school-kid punctuation.

--If the message refers to an expert, do an Internet search on that person. Chances are good that the name won't come up as an expert on anything.

--When doubts remain, check the CDC, About.com or Snopes.com Web sites on medical hoaxes. If you're still worried or confused, don't hesitate to call your local public health department or family doctor.

Times Square - Cox News Service

Staff writer David Bloom contributed to this story.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) MEDICAL MYTHS

Dose of skepticism is best antidote for Internet-spread rumors

(2) David and Barbara Mikkelson run www.snopes.com, a Web site that debunks urban legends. The couple has accumulated more than 1,000 urban legends, with less than 1 percent of the tales actually being true.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer

Box: Looking for red flags (See text)