Mother of sick child frightened

Press, 3 May 1983, Page 1

Mother of sick child frightened

Bananas are as tasty as ever for Andrew Easton, aged two, but his mother, Mrs Wendy Easton, got a big fright yesterday morning when she saw the hoax letter about contaminated bananas.

Mrs Eaton, of Papanui, was one of the hundreds of Christchurch people taken in by the hoax. Andrew ate bananas and ice-cream on Sunday night, and early yesterday morning, developed diarrhoea. “When I read the letter

this morning from the Health Department, I thought that was what he had, she said. “I was really worried. I thought he must have that terrible disease, and I was frightened it was going to affect his central nervous

system — as it said it would in the letter — if I did not do something about it quickly,” she said. Mrs Easton decided to take a sample of her son’s urine into the Post Office, as instructed, but she rang up her local medical centre

first, to see if she could have an infant-sized sample bottle.

that was when she found out it was a hoax. “The medical centre had been getting calls all morning about it,” she said. “Even the doctor’s wife wondered what it was all about, and the doctor rang up the Health Department to find out,” she said. “It was completely credible,” said Mrs Easton. “But it was not very funnv.”