“Real Water” that poisoned dozens contained chemical from rocket fuel | Hacker News Reader

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

arstechnica.com

121 pointsperihelions100 comments

> [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.

I think this is called the pseudoscientific rigor.

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.

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

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...

I'll take "foreseeable consequences of not prohibiting companies from adding to food anything that would be poisonous, regardless of concentration" for $500, Alex.

And before someone gets all comic-book-guy on me: yeah, I'm aware things like iron are safe, and we "enrich" a lot of foods to help public health. Such enrichment should also be subject to strict regulation.

I am surprised homeopathic production even bother with including the ingredient. I assumed they just bottled water and called it 2000x or whatever.

Also, how can you screw up dilution at a plant? Bad mixing is the only justification that makes sense to me.

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.

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...

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

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.

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

It's the French word for mushroom. However it seems some English speaking people (who sell mushrooms or food made with mushrooms) do call "regular mushrooms" by that name. Probably because it sounds cooler, or because they don't know any French.

Grandparent might be referring to Agaricus bisporus [0]. At least in my and some of the neighboring countries' languages we refer to these as <local transliteration of champignons>.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricus_bisporus

Both are true, it refers to Agaricus Bosporus [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricus_bisporus

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).

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.)

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.

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

From reading that, my impression is that there's fair evidence it id toxic to people from the occupational health hazards that have been identified, and if it's toxic to workers, it shouldn't be in food. Sounds like in the US the manufactured food industry got away with using it by not doing much or any testing/research on it.

With no pressure from regulators and no additional research, public opinion was all that was left.

Frankly, "I don't want an industrial plasticizer in my bread" is pretty reasonable.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Only simplifies things for them because there's regulation around these materials

Yes, and? There is regulation around these materials. That's what regulation is for: to make amoral corporations cause less collateral damage. (Decent regulation can even, I hear, allow moral corporations to not be competed out of existence.)

What a strange comment.

What are you trying to say here?

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

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

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."

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

That's what they believe. Same for a lot of things sold there. That's what happens in everything that has no controls. Food items, dietary supplements all of those have close to 0 controls, nobody checks what's in them. And it is the same (or worse) in all the kratom and synthetic thc products found everywhere in grocery stores and gas stations around the country. The agencies supposed to check for that are not doing anything for various reasons (they get dismantled, rendered inefficient through bureaucracy or plainy incompetent). This should tell you how much politics (both sides) really value the human lifes they make you believe they defend.

Sorry, I'm familiar with the actions taken by one side to defund and obstruct regulatory bodies, what is the other side doing that warrants a "both sides?" Being incompetent due to obstruction and a lack of funds?

Pretending to care about things like that but instead spending all your money on wars.

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.

I've seen homeopathic nonsense in chain drug stores. Is it a symptom of how unaffordable US healthcare is, or are people in other countries also profiting from selling quackery?

My local pharmacy (not any kind of chain) sells homeopathic crap.

It's a nice pharmacy; it's not actually that local, I have to take a bus to get there. It's tiny - basically a corner shop.

UK pharmacies get a fee from the NHS for each prescription they dispense. But I imagine that's not enough to keep them running; they need the profits they make from manuka honey shampoo, argan-oil skin products, dubious supplements and so on.

> Is it a symptom of how unaffordable US healthcare is

In my circles, it's actually the well-off people who buy into the quack fads.

I'm sure the same snake oil dynamic exists everywhere, but the popularity sure seems like a feature of rampant individualism as enabled by wealth. Don't follow professional "medical advice" - that's boring, we all know it's bound to fail, and that's if you can even get an appointment with an engaged professional. Instead "do your own research" and find that one simple trick that "they" have been keeping from you. The lure of someone believing that they've discovered their own smarter approach is a hell of a drug.

Every country has some degree of homeopathic cures. What makes the US particularly stand out is that people integrate homeopathic bullshit as a replacement for proper medical care and treatment. It's been a long standing problem heightened over the past few years as certain groups grow in cultish fervor.

It exists everywhere in some form. Germany is famous for have homeopathic MDs. Much of Asia is filled with some style of Traditional Chinese Medicine. In the US it exists in mostly the wealthier circles where people can afford to believe in snake oil.

I believe there are definitely certain components/compounds that exist in nature that have been used successfully but I think that dwarfs the vast amount of fake supplements and drugs that exist.

I think the difference is we have entire shelves in many stores stocked with products with zero proven efficacy related to what is claimed on the packaging.

I believe that too.

There are none in homeopathic “remedies” though, as their process of manufacture removes any and all potential active ingredients.

China.

Whole Foods is simply responding to market forces. Blame the market, not the Whole Foods.

That's only a valid approach if the responder is not also an influencer.

Marketplaces are under no obligation to stock things just because someone is dumb enough to buy it and someone else unscrupulous enough to make it.

Hate to see Big Homeopathy bully Amazon/Whole Foods. They're not under any obligation not too either. If people want to buy quack products either let them or just ban them.

> Blame the market, not the Whole Foods

I blame the regulations (more specifically, the lack thereof)

Whole foods chooses not to stock meat they believe is unethically produced. They have a whole list of ingredients they reject: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/quality-standards/food-ingr...

They could take the same stand against homeopathy. It's really strange that they don't.

I think homeopathy is bullshit. I also think Whole Foods is acting completely rationally here. The people who take quack products are probably in the intersection of people who value ethically produced meat.

$2 a liter is not out of line for 'normal' fancy water - that's around the cost of fiji or evian.

Your point stands... that's a ridiculous $$$ for water, but we've been conditioned for a long time that that price point is 'reasonable'.

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

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??

A common drinking water test (which will run $100 or so) will not run tests for hydrazine but there is a more exhaustive test ($600 or so) which will.

We use etrlabs.com for these tests.

Edit: hrmmm… troubling to see Hanna meters called out as defective or malfunctioning - presumably their ph meters - as we use those for everything…

Are you certain you've understood their product offering? That vendor doesn't mention hydrazine in the long list of things they say they check for, on their website.

Indeed, that one doesn’t appear to. There are plenty of standalone kits that do as it’s used to prevent boiler corrosion, however. Here’s an example:

https://www.chemetrics.com/product-category/test-kits/hydraz...

I don’t know if there are any “all in one” tests that include it but I’m not involved in the field in any way aside from using a reverse osmosis filter on my tap.

The article states these other companies played a role in faulty pH measurement, leading to less dilution with actual real water.

"That vendor doesn't mention hydrazine ..."

You are correct.

I'm surprised it isn't in the "ultimate water test" and I assumed that it was.

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.

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.

Why? Is Whole Foods more blessed than other retail outlets?

I don't know about you, but I usually don't have time to do rigorous testing on every food item I buy from the grocery store. Life is busy these days. /s

---

It'd be nice to live in a society where common, basic food and drink products designed to be consumed by humans and sold in your local grocery store have some sort of safety guarantee.

E.g. Someone checked for toxic chemicals

If you buy drinking water at any retail outlet you should be able to assume it won't kill you. Obviously.

Exactly. My point is: some people seem to elevate Whole Foods to some pedestal, as if the products they sell are somehow healthier than those of other retailers. In fact they sell products made by third-party manufacturers, just like any supermarket.

I've never been into a Whole Foods; I imagine they have some stuff that I couldn't get in other shops, and I imagine that everything is marked-up, whether it's exclusive or not, and whether it's fresh or canned. Is that about right?

Nah I hate Whole Foods. That was just the retail outlet that was mentioned as carrying this. Dunno if it’s even true honestly.

I don't think anyone actually thought that Whole Foods was special. It's just the specific store that happened to sell this poison stuff. It could have been Kroger or Food Lion or whatever and OP would still have legitimately said "If you buy something at X you should be able to assume it won’t kill you."

In general, it’s a reasonable assumption, in a developed country, that if you buy water in a shop it should be safe. The obvious liable parties here would be the manufacturer, maybe the retailer, maybe the relevant regulator, maybe the government (for not giving the regulators sufficient powers to deal with this sort of thing upfront). Dunno how you get to the _purchaser_ being liable.

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.

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

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

> don't subject them to your mental illness.

This isn't possible.

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.

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

The regular water at our home gives them the shits.

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.

Also known as "Whole Paycheck"...

> 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.

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

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

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?

> "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.

Mmmm grayons.

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.

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).

> 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

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

> The bromate was used in the filtration process

I don’t think that is accurate. It makes it sound like they were filtering the water through or with bromate, but my understanding is that it is a unwanted side-product generated by ozon treatment.

> 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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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

Or a malt liquor

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

Would be perfect advertising to call it Rocket fueled water

How much hydrazine was in the water?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com