With all the talk of the problems caused when China recently exported pet food containing wheat gluten laden with melamine, a chemical used for plastics which sickened and killed pets. The next scare came from poisoned toothpaste, poisoned fish and tea leaves contaminated by lead from using lead gas exhaust spewing trucks to run over tea leaves to dry them, it's no surprise that rumors of poison Chinese bananas would have a ring of truth.

But it turns out that rumors of poisoned bananas were just that - rumors. The rumor was spread by text messaging on cell phones and caused the price of bananas from China's Hainan Island to drop faster than bananas turn ripe.

The text message claimed the bananas had SARS, the terrible respiratory disease that has killed hundreds of people. That caused a slump in demand for Hainan bananas and cost producers as much as an estimated $2.6 million.

That came on top of an earlier scare this year when blighted bananas were falsely accused of causing cancer and sales plummeted.

Why bananas are the subject of concern is a mystery since they come tightly wrapped up in their own sealed skin that can even be washed before the banana is peeled.

In an April poison banana hoax, people in South Africa received e-mails warning them that Costa Rican bananas contained the flesh eating fasciitis bacteria that causes the "flesh-eating disease." That recycled rumor first surfaced in January 2000.