After the Tripletts’ discovery of the needle got airtime on CNN, the possibility of tampered soda tore through national media. A woman in Federal Way, Washington, just 10 miles from Tacoma, claimed she, too, had found a needle inside a Pepsi can. Caffeine-Free Pepsi, Crystal Pepsi, and Mountain Dew were also implicated. Coverage sometimes ran into gleeful morbidity: USA Today ran a map of states where needle reports had originated with the offending areas in red, as though it were a viral outbreak. “It would be highly unlikely for one needle to find its way into a can,” Pepsi spokesperson Andrew Giangola told Newsweek.