WaPo stoops to atrocious clickbait.

Look at this headline, and notice the sidebar "Most read" list:



The photo is captioned "E.coli bacteria." Screwworms are insects. The report is of a lawsuit:

A woman in south-central Texas is suing Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, claiming the restaurant’s red beans and rice contained flesh-eating New World screwworms that have ravaged her body over the past two years.

Karen Goode of San Antonio argued in a 10-page lawsuit filed last week that Popeyes and its franchisee Z&H Foods are responsible for feeding her food infested with the parasite in 2015. She said the bugs entered her digestive tract and laid eggs, which embedded into the interior lining of her small intestine, then hatched and started eating Goode “from the inside out.”

The article — which you can see is the #2 most-read thing at WaPo — goes on to explain how the claim cannot possibly be true, but ends with the brief notation: "This story has been updated." The oldest comment over there is:

I'm calling buncombe.

1) How did she know she got it from Popeye's? It's not like the effect happens before her next meal.

2) Screwwroms are only known to enter the bodies of animals through open wounds. Did she rub the red beans and rice on a cut?

3) She ALSO "was infected with E.coli and Helicobacter pylori"? From the same meal? What a fantastic coincidence.

Please apply critical thinking before publishing.

Here's an older version of the article, via The Wayback Machine, which I think is what the commenters saw. The newer version of the article does a good job of showing the scientific reason why the lawsuit must fail, but that demonstrates why the article ought never to have been published in the first place. Notice that the older headline has the name of the smeared business glaring in the headline: "Woman claims Popeyes meal gave her flesh-eating screwworms that ate her 'from the inside out.'"