A half a cup of 100% pure D20 won’t kill you. A whole cup won’t kill you. Heck, you can probably down a couple gallons and not suffer much in the way of ill effects. The 50% threshold mentioned in my article doesn’t pertain to the purity, but rather to the amount of it in your body–you have to replace at least 50% of the normal water in your body with D20, heavy water. Since much of the water you drink is quickly eliminated via the lungs and perspiration, you have to consume rather a lot before 50% of your body’s water volume is completely replaced. And that’s just the threshold for any noticeable effects to show up. To actually KILL a person would take a chronic level of 50% or more in their body, over a period of several days at the very least, if one extrapolates from the results of the mouse studies.
Um, it can grow off the deionization media, filtration media, or get contaminated via faucets into the supply lines. And many tests that aren’t specifically intended for bacteria won’t register this degree of bacterial contamination at all (metals analysis, organics, wet chemistry, etc) because that’s not what those tests are designed for. If you’re looking for cyanide then you use deionized water and don’t worry about bacteria; if you’re looking for coliform then you use other techniques. Deionization is not sterilization.
That’s going to be deionized water. Not “created” but purified in a particular way that excludes ions but not necessarily bacteria. You’d think that water clean enough to rinse microchips would be clean enough to drink, but in fact it may have a lot of bacteria. You’ve probably heard this information secondhand and that’s where you’ve gotten it wrong.
No, it isn’t correct at all, even in the loosest sense. Yes too much water can kill you; no it doesn’t have anything to do with excessive purity. Nothing at all.
But they don’t rinse semiconductors with heavy water. Anyway, heavy water is not a particularly pure kind of water, it is a different nuclear isotope altogether. Again, purity doesn’t enter into it.
No it doesn’t, and you have no cite to support this statement.
I have to say Buddy’s situation just improved and I hope I contributed in some small way.
I suggest you go back to her and, with a wide-eyed look of horror on your face, declare that you looked into her claims and found that ‘too much pure water is bad for you’. Wait until the smug expression appears and just as she opens her mouth to say ‘SEE?! I told you!’, quickly point out that this is exactly why they call it ‘too much’.
I can claim that any kind of water can kill you - as long as there’s enough of it for you to drown in. But that claim is uninteresting. Are you making a claim that there is something about pure water that will kill you while other water wouldn’t? If you aren’t, and you’re just saying pure water can kill you like any other kind of water, then I would agree.
Almost right, but not quite. Hyponatremia can kill you if you drink too much water without eating. Treatment for mild hyponatremia can consist of merely eating; use of fluids containing electrolytes is optional, but they usually are used because it’s easier and faster to drink electrolyte containing fluids than to eat something and wait for the digestive system to do its stuff. If you drink some pure, really pure water, but have had enough to eat, you wouldn’t suffer from hyponatremia.
Interesting. After seeing you post this, I decided to check this out at http://www.msdsonline.com/ , which has about 3.5 million MSDSs stored (registration required, but it is free!). I found an MSDS (warning: PDF) on that lists deionized water as an ingredient, but I found no MSDS sheet for just water. Anyway, it gives the LD[sub]50[/sub] as
The only listing was for IPR-MUS, which means intraperitoneal injection into a mouse. There was no listing for ORL-MUS.
190,000 mg/kg is about 86.4 pounds of water for every pound of animal. I think someone’s pulling your leg.
You should be aware that both plain old tap water and the very water that makes up much of your body (not to mention every drop of water on Earth) has H[sub]3[/sub]O[sup]+[/sup] and OH[sup]-[/sup] in it. In fact, there is no way of preventing H[sub]2[/sub]O from existing in equilibrium with a certain amount of H[sub]3[/sub]O[sup]+[/sup] and OH[sup]-[/sup]; that’s why water has a ‘neutral’ pH of about 7. Sure they can kill you if they’re in sufficient quantity, but it’s not really a something people worry about because you’re worried about whether the other substances in solution are acids or bases, not the water in the solution which will become H[sub]3[/sub]O[sup]+[/sup] and OH[sup]-[/sup] depending on what it is in solution with.
By the way, it is considered both impolite and detrimental to your credibility to type in all caps as if you are shouting.
I snipped a bunch of stuff that I agree with to get to the nitpick. I think you misplaced a decimal point somewhere. 190,000 mg/kg is only 190 grams/kg, a lot less than 86.4 pounds/pound.
With a 160 pound person we’re talking about 30.4 pounds of water, or about 3.6 gallons.
You are correct, thanks for catching my mistake! 
3.6 gallons injected into the body cavity? Good grief, I should think that would kill anyone simply because of the physical mass. It would be like developing a full term pregnancy within minutes. The pressure on the organs would probably be be fatal on its own without any problems of water balance.
You know, after doing some further research on this, I found some interesting stuff that I didn’t know. First, I do have to reiterate that the statement in the OP is pure absurdity and false on its face, that “water, in its pure form (without any minerals in it, 100% pure H2O), is deadly to humans.” No, HPLC grade water is not "deadly to humans."
However, take a gander at this reputable cite from the World Health Organization entitled Health Risks from drinking demineralized water. While the paper in no way supports the silliness of the OP, it does suggest that drinking completely demineralized water over a long period of time can be detrimental to health, and that it is a bit riskier in terms of hyponatremia. The highlights:
I have to emphasise that these are long-term effects and hardly qualify as “deadly” except under the most determined semantic assault (with the exception of the bacterial re-growth issue, which I’ve already mentioned). The subject of the OP still loses the bet by any reasonable measure. But still, this should serve as a reminder to us never to dismiss something as completely nuts without at least looking into it first. I’ve complained about that before on GQ so I’m a bit embarassed to have done it myself.
Since this vaguely relevant I’ll add this side note. I recall the Mythbusters looking into the “exploding microwaved water” and found that distilled water will not come to an active, rolling boil due to the lack of impurities until some impurities (like a spoon) are added and the water came to an instantaneous and explosive boil.
I suppose then that if one were to drink highly heated purified water the effects could be detrimental.
A stretch, I know.
This assumes that said minerals are not absorbed from other nutrition sources; not entirely implausible in some circumstances where only distilled water would be available–say, a long duration space mission, or perhaps for a person living at sustenance level on a single grain crop like rice or mullet and distilled or demineraled water–but the average person of an industrialized nation does not get a significant amount of minerals from their water supply. The primary source of calcium, for instance, comes from dairy products, and magnesium can be found in sufficient quantities in most meats. (You can get virtually every nutrient you need from fresh, rare red meat–unfortunately, you also get a lot of fats and cholesterols from it as well.)
So the issue isn’t that distilled water is inherently harmful, but that the supplemental nutrition (in the form of dissolved salts) it provides is necessary for people on a marginal or nutritionally restricted diet. This doesn’t really bolster the OP’s claim. It would certainly be valid, however, to state that some of the minerals–particularly floride–which exist or are added to normal tap water contribute significantly to the health and well-being of the public.
The only person who really needs to fear the consumption of water is the Wicked Witch of the West, the poor, poor woman.
Stranger
No, the article doesn’t assume such. It claims that demineralized water is more effective in actually removing minerals from the body and from prepared food during. You’re correct in pointing out that if your diet and water supply already contain an excess of minerals, then the loss would be easily compensated. But unfortunately this can’t be said for much of the world’s population.
Some years ago I was talking to a customer that came in my store who worked for Sony. He told me that where he worked they used (his words) “perfectly pure water”. He said it was somewhat hazardous to work with because it acted rather caustic. He said you didn’t want to get it on your skin because it would burn. Not quickly or seriously, but like some acids, if you wiped it off fairly quickly, you would have no problem, but if you left it on your skin for several minutes, it would irritate the skin like a chemical burn. Drinking it may not kill you, but would probably burn your throat and stomach lining to some extent. He said it acted very corrosive with other materials, like the solvent charactoristics of the water were much stronger.
I got the impression that you needed to handle the water with care so as to avoid prolonged skin contact or splashing any in your eyes, but it wasn’t so dangerous as a concentrated acid.
No, not at all. He is reporting something he’s heard secondhand that sounded novel to someone and has been embellished in the retelling.
You have to consider that any kind of water reacts with other materials, and demineralized water slightly more so. But not to the point of being acutely hazardous to the skin, eyes or body.
I’ve worked with water of all degrees of purity and never had the slightest discomfort or illness. Of course I did not drink the water due to warnings of bacterial impurity but there is no reason to believe it would corrode your innards.
I just want to say that Your Buddy’s EX-Girlfriend is an excellent username and since you tied it up for a guest pass, the least you can do is subscribe and allow us the pleasure of sharing a board with someone who has such a cool username.
Apart from that I got nothing.
A) to 73 Elsie: welcome. Looks like you posted a good one to start with.
B) Stranger: Doesn’t the story from the man from Sony sound a bit strange to you? After all, many of us have worked with distilled water, which I gather is what is meant by “perfectly pure water,” have poured it on our hands, have splashed it around with no noticeable effects. I find his accounts fairly peculiar.
Okay, let’s review some basic chemistry.
First of all, a substance can be rated in its causticity in terms of its reactivity (i.e how fast and at what activation energy the reaction occurs) and its concentration. This is grossly simplifying, of course–the activity of the reactants in relationship to one another and the activated complex of reactions that occur in order to resolve to the final products play a significant role in reaction rate and equilibrium state–but since we’re talking about pure water in relationship to everything else we can assume water to have a standard relative reactivity.
Pure water–without any impurities to dissociate the hydrogen atoms from the polar water molecule–at standard temperature and pressure (STP) is going to be comprised of predominantly H[sub]2[/sub]O, with small and absolutely equal amounts of H[sup]+[/sup] and OH[sup]-[/sup], and tiny, transient traces of more complex O & H compounds. By definition, this makes the solution neutral, neither an acid (pH < 7) or a base (pH > 7). For water to react with something in significant quanties, it hs to dissociate into H[sup]+[/sup] and OH[sup]-[/sup], or 2H[sub]3[/sub] and O[sup]-2[/sup]. This requires energy, either in the form of enegetic reactions by some other substance, or a large injection of energy under pressure, causing the water bonds to break down.
Water does have the nice characteristic of readily forming hydrogen bonds with other substances (i.e. it “shares” hydrogen atoms) and by virtue of its polar (electrically nonsymmetric nature) it reacts readily with polar molecules like most inorganic salts, but in both of these ways it is still fairly weak in concentration; it serves as a medium for highly reactive salts to go into solution, not the primary reactive agent like a strong base or acid. Or, in other words, pure water will not spontaneously generate high concentrations of free ions characteristic of caustic substances. If pouring pure water on your skin were to make it irritable, then exposure to a slightly acidic or basic solution should have even more exaggerated results. The only way in which pure water is “more reactive” than tap water is that it can support higher concentrations of reactants before coming to equilibrium.
Stranger
Sweet zombie jesus. Two pages for a discussion on whether pure water without anything in it (such as is commonly made by vapour condensing, perhaps in the upper atmosphere) can be dangerous - possibly by absorbing CO2 from the air (similar to the process said upper-atmosphere condensate goes through as it falls to earth).
:smack:
That’s because the issue is not as simple as it appears at first glance. I suggest you read up on it.
Oh, for Christ’s SAKE!
If perfectly pure water were very “caustic”, what would that mean? It would mean it would dissolve things more quickly than impure water, right? And once it’s dissolved a tiny amount of whatever that was, what would that mean? It would mean that the water wasn’t totally pure anymore!
It’s extremely easy to make “perfectly pure” water, it doesn’t require a lab. Just get some pure hydrogen and some pure oxygen, combine them in a 2:1 ratio and give it a spark. Perfectly pure water is the result!
I swear, what are they teaching kids in school nowadays? “Perfectly pure” water, however you define it, is just as safe to drink and handle as distilled water.