Meteors cause sickness? Say it ain't so!

Every now and then a story hits the internet that is just so absurd (or premature) that I have to laugh. This is one such story. It claims that villagers in Peru started to become sick after a meteor hit outside town. Now the thing that bothers me is that causality is just assumed. Yes, it is possible that the events are connected, but I think it's far more likely that they're not, this sounds like a serious case of the "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, which means "after this, therefore because of this."

First off, in order for the meteor to have caused the illness, it would either have to have some kind of toxic substance on it (inorganic, the odds of an organic substance that's harmful to humans surviving reentry and being of sufficient quantity to disperse into the atmosphere are infinitesimal), or vaporize some kind of toxic substance in the ground. The first scenario isn't too likely, because meteors are mostly benign materials (rock or iron), and any toxic material wouldn't be very concentrated. Plus the meteor wouldn't be very big to begin with, I highly doubt it would be more than a few feet in size, which would make the total amount of dangerous chemicals in it tiny.

The second scenario is much more likely, but still not nearly certain. Based on the media reports the meteor displace 157,000 cubic feet of material, which is not a whole lot, just a box 53 feet on each side. Granted, it could be a lot more vaporized, but given that it had the entire atmosphere to diffuse into, even an order of magnitude increase wouldn't matter much. I don't think that amount of material would remain concentrated in the area very long, just think of how quickly smoke from fires or smokestacks disappears, but I could be wrong. Even then, the toxic material would have to be present in the soil of the region, and people would be inhaling or ingesting it anyway!

What really gets me is that none of the articles (which, despite seeing it in three different sources are all carbon copies) discuss this. They don't even mention that the events might not be related, and they definitely don't say that if they are, the toxic material is almost certain terrestrial in origin. The headline and article read as if we're being poisoned from space, and that's just stupid. And the real pity is that there will almost certainly be no follow-up article that tells what actually happened, because it'll be something mundane that won't be newsworthy! So it goes, I suppose.