LAS VEGAS (AP) — Federal and local health officials are warning people not to drink a Las Vegas-based bottled water brand, Real Water, after linking it to liver illness in five hospitalized children.
Company President Brent Jones on Wednesday called for stores to stop selling the product “throughout the United States until the issue is resolved.” “Our goal is to diligently work with the FDA to achieve a swift resolution,” a statement from Jones said.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned consumers, restaurants and retailers not to drink, cook with, sell or serve the product, the Southern Nevada Health District said in a statement posted Tuesday.
...The health district, based in Las Vegas, said it began investigating five cases of acute non-viral hepatitis in November 2020 and notified the FDA. It said it also investigated the illness of six other people — three children and three adults — who reported less severe symptoms including vomiting, nausea, appetite loss and fatigue.
Five children required hospitalization but recovered, the health district said. The patients lived in four different households.
Well, it looks like a jury has ruled against Real Water (article by Beth Mole):
A jury this week awarded $228.5 million to seven plaintiffs in their case against Nevada-based water company Real Water, which sold alkaline water tainted with hydrazine, a highly toxic chemical found in fuel for rockets and spacecraft.
The plaintiffs included a 7-month-old boy who was hospitalized with severe liver failure and nearly needed a liver transplant. Another was a 69-year-old woman who was hospitalized for liver failure after drinking the water for years. She died in the hospital on November 11, 2020.
What is strange is what chemical they suggested was to blame:
As federal regulators began investigating the company's water, they found a troubling water treatment process.
According to the DOJ's 2021 complaint and testimony in the trial over the last few weeks, Real Water processed municipal tap water "by carbon filtration, reverse osmosis filtration, ultraviolet light filtration, and ozone filtration." Then potassium chloride is added and the water goes through a proprietary "ionizer" apparatus to apply an electrical current to the water. This allegedly created positively charged and negatively charged solutions. Real Water employees would discard the positively charged solution and keep the negatively charged solution.
That initial batch of negatively charged solution would then go though the "ionizer" apparatus and be separated again. The resulting negatively charged solution would then be treated with potassium hydroxide (a form of lye), potassium bicarbonate (sometimes used in baking powders), and magnesium chloride (a salt used in nutritional supplements and for de-icing roads); this formed an "E2 concentrate" product, which, when diluted, formed their alkaline water product.
The FDA identified hydrazine in product samples it tested. In the trial, Issam Najm, an environmental engineer who specializes in water chemistry and testing, testified that the hydrazine likely formed in the "ionizer," which was just titanium tubes electrified with what looked like jumper cables used to charge a car battery. Najm testified that, in the charged water, nitrogen gas naturally found in air could have reacted with water to form hydrazine (N2H4), or, during the electrolysis, ammonia (NH3) was formed first, before reacting with hydroxide to form hydrazine.
Reader, does this make sense to you? First (unfortunately), we do not have a link for how the FDA determined that hydrazine was present. But I am really under the impression that it is not easy to make hydrazine or ammonia (to make hydrazine), especially from molecular nitrogen. Don't you have to have some kind of reductant? (Where is the hydrogen ion coming from?) Does anyone have a viable mechanism? I am genuinely skeptical, but gee, I dunno. Anyone else?
