VS:

CHESAPEAKE, Va — Creating a colourful pile of wrappers, the medical centre technician upends a basket of Skittles, Hershey bars, Twizzlers and other candy onto the bed of an x-ray machine.

Suzanne Mailler is demonstrating a procedure that will be repeated scores of times on Monday evening at the Chesapeake, Virginia medical clinic Patient First.

Across America, paranoid or justifiably cautious parents will bring in their children's trick-or-treat goodies for screening. Their fear is that the candy given to their children by strangers will be laced with glass, metal or other foreign objects.

This person who poisons candy does not exist. Do not scan your children's candy. Do not disrupt this excellent circuit of sociality. We are humans. Our mode is to trust strangers. Without this mode, we would not be seven billion beings.

Patient First, an organization that's been x-raying candy for the past decade in "37 centers in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania," has yet to find this person who puts needles or bits of glass into candy. The reality? This is the reality:

"Children taking their candy to hospital on Halloween night risk involvement in traffic accidents," along with the additional drawbacks of overcrowding radiology departments and emergency rooms with excited children, the study concluded.