Over the past few days, our editorial office has received several text messages saying: “Blood is needed for a child suffering from leukemia. B Rh− is a very rare blood type. Please forward this to your friends […] VERY URGENT”. Where we inserted the ellipsis, there was a woman’s surname (Ms Marzena) and a telephone number. It turns out, however, that this is simply one of many chain messages circulating false information. Interestingly, it was created in January 2015 at the University Children’s Hospital in Kraków-Prokocim. As „Gazeta Wyborcza” reported (in an article from that same year):
At the beginning of the year, a nine-year-old girl suffering from leukemia was indeed admitted to one of the wards. She urgently needed a donor to obtain granulocyte concentrate, one of the components of blood. This concentrate is transfused only when a child undergoing cancer treatment develops an inflammatory condition and the white blood cell count drops dramatically.
The situation was dramatic, so the family circulated this appeal by email and SMS. Fortunately, a donor was soon found. The problem was that some “joker” decided to exploit someone else’s misfortune. “Unfortunately, someone altered the message and added a fictitious first and last name, along with Ms Marzena’s details. The sick girl’s parents repeatedly said that they did not know this woman and that the message had become a chain message. It was impossible to stop it,” Magdalena Oberc, spokesperson for the hospital mentioned above, told „Gazeta Wyborcza” in April 2015. It was also impossible to establish who had sent the altered message.
What do you think? More details in the „GW” article: Fictitious SMS: "donate blood!". And it is just a chain message.