An article reporting that there is a Nigerian Ebola patient in T&T, which is currently circulating on social media sites is a fake.
The article, which uses a T&T Guardian reporter’s name under an old-fashioned T&T Guardian masthead, claims a Nigerian doctor had entered the country without a passport and was being treated for Ebola at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex.
Managing director of Guardian Media Ltd Lisa Agard said yesterday the management of the newspaper was disgusted by not only the contents of the article but the fact that the creators had tried to attribute it to the newspaper.
She said: “It was designed to spread fear and panic to the population of T&T.
“We are particularly aggrieved by the fact that someone would use the Guardian’s (old) masthead and fonts and also falsely represent that a journalist attached to the Guardian newspaper was the author of the false article,” Agard said.
“We view this development so seriously that we are going to report the matter to the police for them to ascertain whether any crime has been committed under the Computer Misuse Act, and it is our fervent hope that the authorities would be able to identify who perpetrated this malicious move to scare the population and damage the reputation of the Guardian newspaper.”
Aside from grammatical errors and inconsistencies in the date, the article gives incorrect information about the virus itself.
Nevertheless, the T&T Guardian newspaper received several calls from concerned readers about the story.
One woman noted the errors but said she still had to check and was a little afraid after reading it.
The T&T Guardian posted messages on its Web site and Facebook page yesterday morning to assure readers the story was a hoax and to ask them to ignore it.
Minister denies claim
Health Minister Fuad Khan was quick to deny that the virus had entered the country.
“There is nothing like Ebola in T&T and if people on social media are saying something different maybe they mean a person named Ebola, because the virus is named after a river and people probably named their children after the river too,” Khan said in a telephone interview.
“There is no disease called Ebola in T&T at this time,” he added.