“Real Water” that poisoned dozens contained chemical from rocket fuel

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/jury-awards-229m-to-victims-of-real-water-tainted-with-rocket-fuel-chemical/

by perihelions • 3 years ago

121 100 3 years ago

Wow. Quack products like this usually just do nothing. Poisoning people with hydrazine is impressively bad.

netsharc• 3 years ago

Man, I thought they'd just bottle tap water, what the fuck is all that black magic about putting the water through machines?

Did these idiots maybe just bought the machine(s) from someone who was scamming them, and were just cluelessly following the instructions basically written in crayon?

civilitty• 3 years ago

"These people were outrageous," Kemp said. There was "no safety testing, no analysis of the product to see what was in it." He said that the person who developed the water treatment process for Real Water bought the titanium tubes "from some Russian guy in the 80s" and spent four to five months making alkaline waters in his garage, working until he had a formula that didn't make him vomit or have diarrhea.

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

And it’s not even marketed as an energy drink.

SkipperCat• 3 years ago

So true... It is literally the closest thing I've ever seen to an actual, real life energy drink.

e_y_• 3 years ago

Or a malt liquor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUwID1I5nXc

QuadmasterXLII• 3 years ago

Health fads that are tangibly idiotic but seem like just water are actually incredibly dangerous. The problem is that it’s either going to be prepared by a scammer or an idiot, and you better hope for a scammer because the power of idiots is overwhelming. Another Famous case is the homeo pathic teething drops that cause seizures— Yes, and absurd sentence on the face of it.

plagiarist4• 3 years ago

Wow. They must have been using a potent toxin for homeopathy to cause anything at all.

shkkmo• 3 years ago

They were diluting a poisonous plant and had poor controls and processes that lead to inconsistent levels of dilution.

In investigating Hyland’s teething products, the FDA focused on an ingredient known as atropa belladonna, an herb known colloquially as “deadly nightshade.”
In diluted form, the substance is not expected to pose any health risk. In 2010, however, FDA inspectors who examined Hyland’s facilities criticized the company for substandard manufacturing practices and found inconsistent levels of atropa belladonna in its products.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-babie...

KennyBlanken3• 3 years ago

Or we could require that anyone who wants to sell things for human consumption undergo strict regulation.

That this happened for something that shouldn't even be commonplace except for emergency use - bottled water - is especially unacceptable.

willcipriano3• 3 years ago

Just give your kids regular water, don't subject them to your mental illness.

perihelions5• 3 years ago

This was stocked on Whole Foods shelves. I imagine many people who bought likely thought this was some kind of "regular" water.

- "A study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in November 2021 laid out 25 cases of acute liver failure linked to the water—22 in Nevada and three in California, all of which occurred at the end of 2020. Specifically, the cases were linked to Real Water's 5-gallon Re2al Water product, sold in multiple southwestern states in places like Whole Foods."

willcipriano3• 3 years ago

Whole Foods customers are probably buying that water because its "more healthy" than water from Walmart if we are honest.

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

Near as I can tell they were selling this stuff for $2 a liter, which probably should have tipped people off but some people just have no sense for these things ("It's one banana Michael, how much could it cost? $10?")

I would be doubly skeptical of anything like this coming from Whole Foods, the grocery store that has an entire aisle dedicated to fraudulent quackery "medicine" aka homeopathic nonsense. It's not illegal, but it should be, and they shouldn't be selling it even though it's legal, but they proudly do. Fuck whole foods.

dwaltrip2• 3 years ago

I'm very surprised water products like this weren't required to undergo rigorous testing for toxic chemicals.

nytesky• 3 years ago

I am surprised there is zero audit trail for a good purchased at Whole Foods to be honest.

City water in Flint was poisonous, buying drinking water from a respectable retailer should not be risky.

If you sent a a sample to a water testing company, would they have detected the hydrazine, it’s not like it’s a common contaminant and I’m sure it’s is very small quantities which while still harmful are why it wasn’t obvious??

fortran772• 3 years ago

Exactly. Parents of kids who got ill or died should be criminally charged. For some reason, the U.S. doesn't do this under some strange "Haven't they suffered enough?" legal theory.

If, say, a teacher gave the kids the water, there would have been charges.

NotYourLawyer5• 3 years ago

What’s the theory for parental liability here? If you buy something at Whole Foods you should be able to assume it won’t kill you.

plagiarist4• 3 years ago

I doubt a teacher would have charges because I assume there must be mens rea for this to be a crime.

This is not a "haven't they suffered enough" issue. They are idiots paying too much at an actual grocery for what they thought is magic water without rocket fuel in it. They're not intentionally giving bleach to their child or anything like that. The culpability is with the manufacturer.

infecto2• 3 years ago

I doubt they would be charged criminally in any western nation. Not sure what you are thinking.

asddubs• 3 years ago

maybe if it was one of the listed ingredients, or they bought it from their cousin who makes it in a bathtub in his basement

klyrs• 3 years ago

don't subject them to your mental illness.

This isn't possible.

fzeroracer2• 3 years ago

If only. If you've been on HN long enough, you'll see people peddling miracle cures and homeopathic bullshit.

America has long had a fraught history with falling prey to snake oil salesman, which forms the basis for a lot of our regulatory system around food. But even then it's not strict enough in some sense, considering products tainted with hydrazine were able to make it to shelves.

ruined• 3 years ago

good luck https://www.nrdc.org/resources/lead-pipes-are-widespread-and...

iAMkenough• 3 years ago

The regular water at our home gives them the shits.

Octabrain• 3 years ago

It simply blows my mind the lack of common sense on the processing of something so well known and common as bottled water. I don't know how someone can be this stupid (or evil).

krisoft2• 3 years ago

It simply blows my mind the lack of common sense on the processing of something so well known and common as bottled water.

I tell you one better. Coca Cola was selling filtered and bottled tap water in the UK. During filtering they somehow managed to contaminate it with bromate a substance linked with an increased cancer risk - in excess of UK legal standards.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/19/foodanddrink

bobsmooth• 3 years ago

The bromate was used in the filtration process and did not pose a health hazard, but the levels were above the limit.

creer• 3 years ago

Not chemical FROM rocket fuel but "also used in rocket fuel". The fine article describes in some detail how it may have gotten in there. "May" only as apparently the expert only spent so much time on the mad scientist machinery the company was using. Amazing story.

malfist• 3 years ago

Hydrazine isn't just a chemical FROM rocket fuel, it is rocket fuel itself. On of the most common monopropellants used in RCS thrusters

perihelions5• 3 years ago

On that tangent, there's been a large amount of R&D into finding alternative monopropellants, because this one's so infamously hazardous to work with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Propellant_Infusion_Miss...

- "When compared to the present high-thrust and high-performance industry standard for orbital maneuvering systems, which for decades, have exclusively been reliant upon toxic hydrazine based propellant formulations, the "greener" hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN) monopropellant offers many advantages..."

And: Starlink eschews chemical thrusters entirely, and only flies with electric Hall-effect thrusters (harmless krypton or argon gas). Might be an underappreciated engineering choice: no hazmats at integration should simplify a lot of things for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Satellite_hardware

NotYourLawyer5• 3 years ago

Also one of the first hugely successful bipropellants. Tons of rockets have used IRFNA + UDMH.

fortran772• 3 years ago

They would have been better off and more profitable if they just resold sold tap water as-is! The customers would never know, and they'd still be alive.

The most important takeaway from the article was that this product was sold in Jeff Bezos' "Whole Foods". A good reason to never shop there.

every• 3 years ago

Also known as "Whole Paycheck"...

GordonS• 3 years ago

They would have been better off and more profitable if they just resold sold tap water as-is!

Coco Cola legit used to do this in the UK, not sure if they still do.

qingcharles• 3 years ago

They still do it in the rest of the world, but they never returned with it to the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_Kingdom

gnatman• 3 years ago

[Kemp] said that the person who developed the water treatment process for Real Water bought the titanium tubes "from some Russian guy in the 80s" and spent four to five months making alkaline waters in his garage, working until he had a formula that didn't make him vomit or have diarrhea.

Ha… wow.

ahoka2• 3 years ago

I think this is called the pseudoscientific rigor.

dtgriscom• 3 years ago

That title looked like click-bait to me, with "chemical from rocket fuel" being deliberately scary. Rocket fuel can have very ordinary (and even non-toxic) ingredients.

But then I read it was hydrazine. Whoa: that's bad, and justifies the title. (Moral: always read the article.)

mortenjorck• 3 years ago

The first place my mind went was “yoga mat chemical,” where a GRAS food-grade additive used in Subway bread was also commonly used as as an industrial plasticizer, and this connection, when seized upon by some media-savvy activists, was enough to get Subway to discontinue its use.

But yeah, hydrazine is not that.

perihelions5• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azodicarbonamide?useskin=vecto...

mindslight2• 3 years ago

It's almost like we'd be better off if the headline simply said "hydrazine".

the__alchemist• 3 years ago

Same reaction. I froze for a minute and said out loud "wow, hydrazine" after realizing preconceptions led me astray.

logosmonkey• 3 years ago

I love that some influencers who were marketing alkaline water would gush over how much they loved it with a wedge of lime or lemon squeezed into it.

denton-scratch4• 3 years ago

This allegedly created positively charged and negatively charged solutions.

This sounds like an "interesting" usage of the term "charged". In general, the process they developed sounds like total, antiscientific BS.

And advertising the product as "Real Water", when it's deliberately made alkaline, is false advertising; real water is Ph-neutral.

wolf550e• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine

Hydrazine is the reason for the full hazmat suits and chemical sniffers used by personnel handling loading spacecraft propellant, handling landed spacecraft [1], and even the F-16's EPU [2].

1 - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/X-37B_OT...

2 - https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jun/17/2002743830/1200/1200/0...

hef19898• 3 years ago

And there I was thinking the "raw" water hype was the stupidest thing around drinking water I heard of. And then comes "alkalized"...

ahoka2• 3 years ago

The EPU is a generator that is used as an emergency backup if someone wondered.

Fun fact, some mushrooms also contain hydrazine, including champignons. Proper heat treatment gets rid of it.

kyleee• 3 years ago

Is champignon a specific type of mushroom in english? I thought it was just the word for “mushroom” in french

perihelions5• 3 years ago

More info about that F-16 EPU:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21373197

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/23417/why-is-hy...

It's basically a small gas turbine powered by catalytic decomposition of hydrazine (the same highly energetic reaction used in hydrazine monopropellant rockets, but applied differently).

(This is one of the oldest ideas in turbine history. The turbopump in the original Nazi V-2 rocket was powered by the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. That's not to be confused with the rocket propellants, which were ethanol + liquid oxygen. It's the small-but-powerful pump that pressurizes the propellants flowing into the combustion chamber).

edit: (Basically, these are same things as jet engines, except there's only propellant instead of two (fuel + oxidizer). It's simpler).

greybox• 3 years ago

Does anyone know where the "Alkalized Water" fad came from? I honestly don't get it

ChoGGi• 3 years ago

Google is saying it's used for weight loss via the high ph levels.

kevinmchugh2• 3 years ago

The alkaline food trend comes at least in part from a quack who called himself "Dr. Sebi".

blincoln• 3 years ago

Around 2011-2014, a coworker told me about a fellow online who was claiming that he'd solved all the world's health problems by narrowing the cause down to peoples' bodies having an acidic pH level instead of alkaline. The history of alkaline water pseudoscience goes back much farther,[1] but that was the earliest I heard of it in 21st century America. There was a list of "alkaline" vs. "acidic" foods, etc.

It was very much in the same vein as the "aspartame is POISON!!!" chain emails of the 1990s, so I was disappointed when I started to see products on store shelves catering to the belief.

I'm not seeing any obvious hits for the original source now, unfortunately. Maybe someone else has traced its modern incarnation back even further.

[1] https://ua.pressbooks.pub/pseudoscienceessays/chapter/the-al...

beefman• 3 years ago

How much hydrazine was in the water?

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Would be perfect advertising to call it Rocket fueled water

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

Wow amazing. I tried a few bottles of "alkaline water" a few years ago when it caught my eye. Assumed it was just water with a bit of KOH or NaOH to bump up the pH a bit.

Feel bad for the parents of these kids. When my first child was born, we lived in an area that had high natural Radon levels in the municipal water. High enough that the city had "may cause cancer" warnings on the water bills. We had water delivered in 5-gallon jugs for drinking, but it was regular bottled water, not anything that made any snake-oil type of claims. Not that I ever had it independently tested -- you just assume that mainstream food products like that are safe.

“Real Water” that poisoned dozens contained chemical from rocket fuel

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