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Wee for a Wii radio contest

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Jake_Ellison

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A jury in Sacramento Superior Court today awarded the survivors of Jennifer Lea Strange $16.57 million as a result of her death nearly three years ago from KDND/Sacramento's "Hold Your Wee For A Wii" contest. The seven-man, five-woman jury found that the Entercom Communications Corp. and its local subsidiary, Entercom Sacramento LLC, were negligent in putting on the contest that led to Strange's death from water intoxication, according to the Sacramento Bee. The award is actually much less than lawyers for Strange's family were seeking - they had asked the jury for an award for economic and non-economic damages in the range of $34 million to $44.3 million.

Plaintiffs attorneys filed the wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of her husband, William Strange, individually and as guardian of their two young children, Ryland, 6, and Jorie, 3; and Ronald Sims, the father and guardian of the women's oldest son, Keegan, 13. While the plaintiff's lawyers claimed that the defendants were negligent in holding the contest, defense attorneys countered that Strange's death was unforeseeable and that if there was any liability on the part of the Entercom defendants, it had to be offset by the woman's own "contributory negligence."

Source: http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1567544

So, we have a contest, someone drinks a lot of water, dies. I personally had no idea that you could die from drinking too much water. Who should've known better, in this case: people doing a stupid, hokey radio show, or their listener, who volunteered for a stunt? Or neither?

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So, we have a contest, someone drinks a lot of water, dies. I personally had no idea that you could die from drinking too much water.

For every substance there is a corresponding lethal dose. I thought this was common knowledge.

Who should've known better, in this case: people doing a stupid, hokey radio show, or their listener, who volunteered for a stunt? Or neither?

Both. Physiological stunts, especially involving endurance concerning bodily functions, carry a risk.

To be honest, though, in this particualr stupid contest I'd be more concerned with blader damage and urinary tract infections than with water poisoning.

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They could've just googled "drinking too much water" to find out the effects. As far as I'm concerned the person who drank it voluntarily is to blame for dying, and to my knowledge the radio station had all the contestants sign release forms, no?

This is like a story from my area, where some redneck bet that he could swim through a storm drain during a flood for $50 and died. This is just a part of reality. Disobey the laws of nature and you get wacked. Nobody forced her to drink the water.

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Stupidity is, and ought to be painful and even deadly on occasion, if for no other reason than to remind the merely mentally competent that living is not a foregone conclusion.

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I personally had no idea that you could die from drinking too much water.

Many people who die while using Ecstasy actually die from over-hydration (hyponatremia). As I understand it, basically what happens if you drink too much water is you throw your electrolytes way off kilter and your body loses its ability to maintain a proper temperature. Essentially, you overcook internally. I learned about this some time back during training on "club drugs".

Athletes can also be susceptible to this if they drink too much.

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Yeah, its called drowning. :thumbsup:

Sorry, that's wrong. But thanks for playing! We have some lovely parting gifts for you. Oh, BTW, drowning is what happens when you breathe too much water, which impedes the lungs from absorbing oxygen into the bloodstream, causing asphyxia. Better luck next time.

When you drink too much water over a short period fo time you dillute electrolytes in the body too much, throwing things like cell-wall permeability off-balance (in an attempt by the body to reduce the dilution). That's why athletes drink electrolyte drinks like Gatorade to rehydrate themselves.

BTW every substance you drink, eat, inhale or absorb can be deadly in the right dose (or wrong dose). The things we call poisons are deadly at very low doses.

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I knew about water poisoning when this happened. I was in high school at the time, and I had learned about water poisoning in my chemistry classes. Personally, I was surprised that so few knew about it. Is it the radio station's fault that contestants risked their lives for a video game console? Everybody had the freedom to choose whether or not they wanted to participate. Thus, the consequences lie on the ones who made that decision - not the people who chose to allow their station to become a public forum for idiots wishing to risk poisoning themselves for a Nintendo Wii.

There was most likely nothing in the agreement between the radio station and the contestants that would have bound the station to their contestants' health. People need to take responsibility for their own actions; the radio station may not have been aware of water poisoning, but that doesn't excuse the fact that the contestants need to do their own research and utilize their own knowledge before agreeing to participate. A nurse called in during the radio show's contest warning people that drinking this much water without urinating could be dangerous - if that wasn't enough fair warning (understanding, of course, that the contestants were not rational enough to forgo this contest to begin with) then who else could we truly blame but the participants in the contest?

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Sorry, that's wrong. But thanks for playing! We have some lovely parting gifts for you. Oh, BTW, drowning is what happens when you breathe too much water, which impedes the lungs from absorbing oxygen into the bloodstream, causing asphyxia. Better luck next time.

I'm well aware of that. It was a joke.

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