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Other rumors spread that the authorities were asking people to stop drinking tap water.
After the panic, the prosecution: Investigators in Paris opened an investigation to find the source of false reports last week that drinking water had been contaminated in the French capital.
In a viral message broadcast on the WhatsApp messaging app last week, one can hear a woman posing as a nurse from a Parisian hospital telling people not to drink tap water at because of the presence of radioactive "titanium".
Other rumors spread that the authorities were asking people to stop drinking tap water.
Alarm has reached a level such that hospitals and public health agencies have been inundated with calls, while water authorities in Paris have aired a public message on social networks this weekend, rebaduring Parisians: "drinking water poses no risk".
"There is no problem with the water, it is excellent for everyone," said Aurélien Rousseau Saturday, head of the capital's health organization, in an interview given to AFP.
Investigators of the prosecutor's office in Paris have opened an investigation into the offense of "disclosure, dissemination and reproduction of false information intended to sow disorder in the public," said Monday to AFP a judicial source.
Anyone found guilty faces a fine of up to 45,000 euros.
Alarmist report
Like many rumors spread on the Internet or email applications, the story contained a kernel of truth distorted or deliberately manipulated to ring the alarm.
Last Wednesday, a small charity for the environment, the Association for the Control of Radioactivity in the West (ACRO), issued a report claiming that low levels of radioactive isotope , tritium, had been found in drinking water.
The group said in an alarmist statement that "6.4 million people are receiving water contaminated with tritium", a byproduct of nuclear power plants that provide the majority of electricity in France.
But the group itself acknowledged that none of the readings it had seen for tritium were superior to the European guideline level of 100 Becquerels per liter – a Becquerel is a measure of radioactivity .
The World Health Organization sets at 10,000 Becquerels per liter the maximum level.
The public water distributor of the Paris region, SEDIF, told AFP that the average of its readings indicated a level of 9 Becquerels per liter.
A worthy debate?
David Boilley, a physicist who heads the ACRO environmental charity, said his intention was to raise awareness of low levels of tritium pollution that could indicate the presence of other unspecified radioactive pollutants.
"Our intention was not to panic people, but to create a debate," he told AFP.
A scientist from the Public Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety, IRSN, stressed that low concentrations of tritium posed no health hazard and that people were exposed to radiation throughout their lives, including under the sun.
Jean-Michel Bonnet said that a person drinking two liters of water a day for a year and containing 10,000 becquerels per liter of tritium would consume the same amount of radiation as in a Paris-Tokyo flight.
"The current situation does not require any special attention," said AFP Bonnet, head of public health at IRSN.
In March of this year, an Internet hoax spread around Paris, claiming that the kidnappers in white vans kidnapped children, which caused what a leader called a "collective hysteria" and a quasi-lynching of Roma.
Dozens of people were arrested after vigilante groups attacked Roma camps in northeastern Paris after false reports that they were responsible for a series of kidnappings.
The violence, which echoed similar incidents in Brazil and Mexico in recent years in India, highlighted the difficulty for governments to control the flow of false information in today's hyper-connected world. .
(With the exception of the title, this story was not changed by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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