VERIFYING the authenticity of a viral firework injury X-ray meme that circulates each 4th of July

Independence Day is just one of many holidays in which Americans launch fireworks late into the night. Some states forbid people from launching their own fireworks, but that doesn’t stop many who have gotten their hands on them anyway.

Around the Fourth of July for the past few years, people on social media have posted a set of X-ray photos of destroyed hands with missing fingers, claiming they are the result of firework injuries. VERIFY readers asked us if the photos were of real firework injuries.

THE QUESTION

Does this viral X-ray photo show real firework hand injuries?

THE SOURCES

• Johns Hopkins Medicine
• RevEye, a tool that does reverse image searches through multiple search engines

THE ANSWER

Yes, this viral X-ray photo does show real firework hand injuries. VERIFY traced back the original sources of all nine photos and only one of them is definitely not related to fireworks.

WHAT WE FOUND

The viral photo is of nine different hand X-rays. Each hand is deformed, and all of them are either missing fingers or have fingers separated from the bones in the rest of the hand.

VERIFY traced back the origins of each X-ray in the photo and found all but one of them were attributed as being caused by firework accidents. Additionally, the damage to the hands in the X-rays align with the kinds of injuries typical in firework accidents.

While the most common Fourth of July injuries are burn injuries from sparklers, the second most common are blast injuries that cause severe burns and lead to amputations, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.

“Many times fireworks will go off sooner than expected, taking the person lighting them by surprise,” Johns Hopkins Medicine says. “Also fireworks that don’t go off, which are often termed ‘duds,’ may explode unexpectedly and cause injuries. These types of injuries can be quite severe.”

VERIFY attempted to find the sources of the X-rays using reverse image search tools and search terms such as “firework hand X-rays”.

The oldest instance VERIFY could find of the viral photo with all nine X-rays is a TV broadcast by local Russian television station Kuban 24. The broadcast package, which aired just before the 2022 New Year, was about avoiding firework accidents. The photo appears about 18 seconds into the package.

We found that all but one of those photos is attributed to hand injuries from fireworks accidents.

One of the X-rays first appeared online in a 2021 Wisconsin-area news article about a man who lost his hand to a firework blast in 2020. The X-ray was of his hand, which was amputated and replaced with a prosthetic.

An orthopedic hand surgeon posted another one of the X-rays to Facebook in 2016. The surgeon explained the injury was caused by the explosion of an M80, which is a large, powerful firecracker.

Another one of the X-rays was posted to Instagram by a Russian hospital in 2020. The caption of the photo explains the X-ray shows a 33-year-old man’s hand after a firework exploded in it.

One X-ray was uploaded as part of a 2019 medical journal article about a patient’s surgery after suffering a blast injury from a firework.

Two of the X-rays were first posted online by the North Broward Radiologists Pinterest account. The radiology practice is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A radiologist is a person who takes X-rays.

North Broward Radiologists posted one of the X-rays in 2016. The caption reads: “#Xray shows a #mangled #hand after #fireworks #accident.”

In 2018, North Broward Radiologists posted another firework injury X-ray to Pinterest. The tags of that upload include ‘fireworks’ and ‘trauma’.

Of the three remaining X-rays, two are from anonymous sources that claim the X-rays are of firework injuries, but we could not confirm them with other sources. The last one is of an injury unrelated to fireworks.

One of the hands in the viral photo was first posted online to Flickr on Sept. 25, 2007. The photo’s description said it was taken around 1997 and the uploader explained the X-ray was of a young male that was holding a homemade explosive device. The photo is tagged “copy of original X-ray” and the uploader describes the patient’s surgery in the comments, suggesting the uploader was involved in taking this patient’s X-ray.

A person on Reddit posted one of the hand X-rays to the site in 2019. That person, who posted it to the subreddit r/radiology, said it was of a 20-year-old patient after a firecracker exploded in his hand.

The last remaining X-ray does not appear to be from a firework injury. It was first posted online to Facebook in 2019 by a Thai hand surgeon who said the injury was caused by a stamping machine that cut off the patient’s fingers.