Top:Society and Culture:Mythology and Folklore:Urban Legends:

Well, if it looks like an urban legend, sounds like an urban legend, and smells like an urban legend, it probably is one.

Fast food just ain't what it used to be-TRUE STORY...

You'll never eat fast food again!

This girl was really in a hurry one day so she just stopped off at a Taco Bell and got a Chicken soft taco and ate it on the way home. Well that night she noticed her jaw was kind of tight and swollen. The next day it was a little worse, so she went to her doctor. He said she was just having an allergic reaction to something and gave her some cream to rub on her jaw to help.

After a couple of days the swelling had just gotten worse and she could hardly move her jaw. She went back to her doctor to see what was wrong. Her doctor had no idea, so he started to run some tests. He scrubbed out the inside of her mouth to get tissue samples,and he also took some saliva samples.

Well he found out what was wrong. Apparently her chicken soft taco had a pregnant roach in it that she ate!!!! The eggs then some how got into her saliva glands and she was incubating them. They had to remove a couple a layers of her inner mouth to get all the eggs out. If they hadn't figured out what was going on, the eggs would have hatched inside the lining of her mouth!!!!!!!!!!

She's suing Taco Bell. The article can be found in the Nov. 19th NY Times.

Specifically, this one fails the "Sniff Test".

I visited the New York Times archives for the last 365 days and found no mention of this story, either.

I did find mention of it at other urban legend sites. One in particular, http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa112598.htm, debunks this one rather well. It's been circulating around the 'net for quite awhile now in various forms.

According to my wife, who is a pediatrician, such an infection (from an anatomical standpoint) is THEORETICALLY possible, but so unlikely as to be pretty much impossible. If it had actually happened, it would be unusual enough to have been written up in a medical journal.

This particular version of the story is medically bogus because the salivary glands are located quite a ways up the jaw from your mouth. In other words, it would require a biopsy to get a sample, and pretty invasive surgery to get rid of such an infection, not just scraping a few layers of tissue.

So, there MIGHT be some tiny grain of truth to this urban legend somewhere, but it is very tiny.

It's a good story, though... <grin>

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Page created 2/11/99.
Last updated 03/17/03 at 14:37.

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