Even if they came through it unscathed, it still must've been a PR nightmare for them at the time. Sometimes things like that stick in the public mind, sometime

Even if they came through it unscathed, it still must've been a PR nightmare for them at the time. Sometimes things like that stick in the public mind, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the media can make these types of stories much bigger than they actually are, and sometimes the media ignores stories that ought to be much bigger. You probably know people who are convinced MSG is bad for you, decades after the anti-MSG scare. The MSG scare could've been a tempest in a teapot that blew over immediately. Instead it lingers on decades later, more from the currents and tides of random crowd behavior than anything else. Ditto for scares surrounding pop rocks, vaccines, gluten, witchcraft, marijuana, fluoride, Dungeons and Dragons, Satanism, mind control via backmasking, UFOs, all sorts of things. Lingering public perception is (very) loosely correlated with media perception, which is (very) loosely correlated with reality, and you can't predict which falsehoods will linger in the public imagination (snopes.com wouldn't have anything to write about otherwise!).