It’s lunchtime in the Parker home in Richmond, B.C. But before eight-year-old Lucas can be fed, his dad checks the boy’s blood sugar levels. Nathan Parker figures out the dosages for his son’s medications and fills a small plastic bag with liquid nutrition that will be delivered through a feeding tube into Lucas’s belly.
“One day,” Parker says to his son, “Come on, let’s get to steak and potatoes, OK? I think you’d be tired of this food by now? I know I would be.”
But that day is not coming. Lucas is considered to be one of the most severely injured survivors of a food-borne illness.
CBC Marketplace did a story about Lucas in 2021, while investigating a rash of E. coli outbreaks involving romaine lettuce in the U.S.
Earlier this year, Parker was looking to show a friend that piece, but he found something else — Lucas’s life story was being used to sell a machine called the Amazing Water Multifunctional Food Sanitizer for $256.
- For the full investigation, watch “Profiting off Pain” tonight at 8 p.m. (8:30 in N.L.) on CBC TV and CBC Gem.
Parker said he knew nothing about it.
“I believe they’re exploiting my son — and that’s the part that hurts the most.”
As a toddler, Lucas Parker ate salad that had been contaminated with E. coli. He lost the ability to walk, talk and it affected his eyesight. Now eight, the boy’s story is being used without his family’s permission to market a food sanitizer.
The video Parker discovered uses animation to retell Marketplace’s original story of how Lucas shared a contaminated romaine salad with his dad while on a family road trip to Disneyland in 2018.
Lucas nearly died when his kidneys shut down from an E. coli infection. And the complications from the illness caused brain damage that left the then-toddler unable to walk or talk, and affected his eyesight so that he can barely see.
The Amazing Water video suggests its food sanitizer could prevent this from happening to another child by removing “harmful toxins, bacteria, viruses and added hormones in food within minutes.”
Parker is appalled.
“My son is so unique. The situation that happened to him was unavoidable.”
Put to the test
So, Marketplace launched an investigation. It bought one of Amazing Water’s food sanitizers online and sent it for testing at the University of Guelph’s food science lab, where researchers inoculated fruit and vegetables with a harmless form of E. coli.
The goal was to see if the sanitizer could remove the bacteria any better than regular tap water. Bacterial cultures would show how much E. coli was left.
According to Amazing Water, its food sanitizer uses something called “active oxygen” to remove pesticides, bacteria (including E. coli and salmonella), hormones and viruses, all within a 10-minute cycle.
Microbiologist Keith Warriner told Marketplace he had doubts the food sanitizer would live up to its claims.
“Active oxygen is just another name people give for a lot of different things, one of them being ozone,” said Warriner, a food science professor at the university who specializes in helping companies bring clean food to market.
“So we know ozone from the ozone layer, how it protects us from the sun. But it’s also a very potent anti-microbial and oxidizing agent,” he said. “[It] breaks things up and it can kill things.”
But he said that it would be difficult for a home-use machine to safely produce the amount of ozone needed to to sanitize food.
“A lot of these domestic units claim to,” he said. “But [they] produce a very small amount [of ozone] because they want to avoid what we call off-gassing.”
The reason for that is because ozone is a toxic gas that can decrease lung function and cause premature death in high-risk people. In others, it can cause chest discomfort, coughing and irritation of the eyes, nose and throat. Health Canada advises against having ozone-generating devices in our homes.
As Warriner tested the machine for Marketplace, an odour was detected that prompted him to reach for an ozone alarm, common in many labs.
“Wow,” he said, pointing to the alarm’s maxed-out digital meter. “Look at that. It’s off the scale; it’s really off-gassing … This tells you that this is unsafe to use.”
Before shutting down the test, Warriner double-checked the readings with a monitor that measures ozone in parts per billion (PPB). He said 300 PPB is considered dangerous; his monitor recorded a reading of 41,000 PPB.
“So basically this machine is dangerous,” he said. “We’re breathing in ozone now. This is a dangerous machine.”
Not only was it dangerous, he said, but the bacterial cultures showed that the Amazing Water Multifunctional Food Sanitizer was no better at reducing E.coli levels than tap water.
The company using Lucas’s story
In the course of its research, Marketplace discovered the main person selling the food sanitizer is a man named Methsiri (Lal) Palliyaguru.
Records show Amazing Water was incorporated in May 2019. Palliyaguru is listed as the company’s manager with the Better Business Bureau. He also advertised the food sanitizer heavily on his personal Facebook page, and several videos on Vimeo feature him extolling the virtues of the machine.
A man with the same name and other similarities has been indicted on federal fraud charges in the United States. The Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois announced in September 2015 that two foreign nationals were wanted in connection with an alleged $10-million telemarketing scam that targeted elderly investors in the U.S.
One of the foreign nationals was named Methsiri (Lal) Palliyaguru.
The press release said the accused were each charged with eight counts of mail fraud, with each count carrying a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. Both defendants were considered fugitives, with Palliyaguru believed to be in Canada.
The Palliyaguru facing the U.S. fraud charges also shares the same date of birth as the man behind the food sanitizer, and both are said to be living in Canada.
Marketplace tried repeatedly to contact Palliyaguru for his perspective and reaction to its investigation, including visiting Amazing Water’s offices in Port Coquitlam, B.C., and Palliyaguru’s home.
He eventually agreed to a short phone chat in which he said he has nothing to do with the fraud case in the United States. Palliyaguru told Marketplace that he no longer sells the Amazing Water Multifunctional Food Sanitizer and that he has removed the video of Lucas from the company’s website.
But when this story is published, the video of the boy is still up there.
When Parker learned that Marketplace had found Palliyaguru, he became more angry.
“Hell holds a special place for people like him,” he said.
And when he learned that testing showed the machine his son’s story is selling could be hurting other families through dangerous emissions of ozone, he said he was heartbroken.
“What a sad thing to have my son’s name attached to.”
Parker said he plans to take back Lucas’s name with a new foundation in his honour.