Our "privacy policy" :
We reserve the right to publish what you write us, this includes your name and e-mail address for contact and creditting purposes. If you wish to remain anonymous, please specify. BUT, if you send us spam, hatemail, vulgarity, or plain unsolicited trouble, you can expect us to show you off.

The letters below were sent to us, their writing is in italic, ours is in bold.

==========
To whom it may concern,
My name is Vincent Ho and I'm currently a student at UC Davis. I'm doing a report on water intoxication for my English health writing class. I'm doing some basic research on the topic and it's really frustrating for me to see all these examples of water intoxication, especially when so little is known about it. It has caused the death of marathon runners, an officer in training, a soldier in training, a British teen doing ecstasy, the hazed college student, and most recently the local Sacramento mother of three. The most frustrating part is that I never heard about this topic until the Chico State death. Even then, I didn't pay much attention to it. I have a friend from another school that had to drink water from a bathtub in his pledging process. I think that it's a very common, but deadly hazing practice.

The main point of this email is that education is the most important tool to prevent further deaths from this. We should have a petition for CA schools (CA because two famous deaths have occured recently) to require the education of water intoxication in the physical education classes. Surely, we could spend 20 minutes in our 12 years of PE class learning about the importance of electrolyte balance and risk of over-consumption of water. In PE class, I had to learn the square dance and macarena dance. I'm sure that students could get a lot more use out of something that could potentially save their lives. I propose that we start teaching the students at an early age around 4th grade and just keep reiterating that topic through high school PE classes. Students should learn why they should drink sports drinks like Gatorade or Powerade when they do strenuous exercises. It's a simple lesson and simple proposal, but I think it can save lots of lives.

Sincerely,
Vincent Ho

Dear Vincent :
I agree that 'education' is the most important tool, however, education is not limited to government funded school local or federal I would NOT advocate petitioning our state or local government in any way to create any programs that needs any type of funding whatsoever. I WOULD however be in full support of spreading the word. If you can get a million people to sign a petition, you might as well get a million people to know what the problem is, these people can easily, with little or no effort and money, EDUCATE the rest of the people. Furthermore this makes no boundaries of the education in safety, we want this danger to be made COMMON SENSE.

I don't think our current education system that teaches kids to drink as much water as possible or else they'd dehyrdate was exactly being paid nor was there any special campaign, but rather the word of mouth and constant propaganda with rumors. That is my point, knowledge is contagious (so are rumors, but we have facts and incidents on our side).

In addition, I believe the idea to encourage drinking a certain brand drink may be confused as simply commerciallizing health, if not profitting off fear. I would be in support of teaching WHY sports drinks are good, and encourage adding sugar and salts to your water bottle as it would cost little or nothing (compared to $1 or more per bottle, yeah, when you save your life it's no big deal, but why pay the man).

In conclusion, I'd agree with you, it's a simple proposal that can save lives, that's exactly why were are doing what we do, a simple web page in tribute to Jennifer Strange and others who've died of water intoxication (as well as other deaths by ignorance in health hazards)

Sincerely,
Water Intoxication Campaign
==========