Various social media posts claim to show “the world’s tiniest poisonous snake” or a killer worm in a green pepper.
It doesn’t show this. The creature is probably a nematode parasite that is unlikely to be harmful to humans.
A video that’s been shared over half a million times on Twitter and Facebook shows some sort of creature being pulled out of a green bell pepper. Sometimes the accompanying text claims it shows “the world’s tiniest poisonous snake” while another claims (in Portuguese) that it’s a worm that can infect and kill humans.
The video shows neither. We asked experts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine what they thought.
Cheryl Whitehorn, a medical entomologist at the university’s Diagnostic Parasitology Laboratory, said that it wasn’t a snake, venomous or otherwise.
She said: “It may be a nematode worm of some type but is certainly not one that we cover in our studies and is therefore unlikely to be of any medical importance.”
The NHS does recommend that you wash raw vegetables and fruit before eating, mainly to avoid E. coli.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false as it’s not a snake, it’s probably a nematode worm that’s unlikely to be harmful to humans.
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