OTTAWA (AFP) - A Canadian man who found a dead fly in his bottled water and claimed it ruined his sex life, hair salon business and even made it hard for him to shower lost his legal bid for redress on Thursday.
Waddah Mustapha of Windsor, Ontario had said in court documents that he and his wife saw a dead fly, and later half of another dead fly, in an unopened bottle of drinking water delivered to their home in November 2001.
The couple was cleaning the bottle's neck before opening it, and so did not drink any of its contents.
Even so, Mustapha claimed he suffered from "major depression, anxiety, specific phobias, and obsessional thoughts flowing from seeing the dead flies in the bottle water."
He fought for reparations from the suppliers Culligan of Canada all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which on Thursday threw out his claim.
"We all know flies of that kind, with the blue butts -- they land on feces and dead rats on the side of the road and end up in the water," Mustapha told public broadcaster CBC. "This is a public health issue."
Although a lower court deemed his reaction "objectively bizarre," it ruled the nature of bottled water was to assure "purity and cleanliness" and thus psychiatric injury from finding a bug floating in it was foreseeable.
The trial judge in 2005 ordered the bottler to pay Mustapha 341,775 dollars (Canadian, US), but the award was overturned a year later on appeal.
The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday upheld the appeal court decision, saying that Culligan was indeed responsible for Mustapha's "debilitating psychological injury which had a significant impact on his life."
However, Mustapha's laywers "failed to show that it was foreseeable that a person of ordinary fortitude would suffer serious injury from seeing the flies in the bottle of water," Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote.
"Unusual or extreme reactions to events caused by negligence are imaginable, but not reasonably foreseeable," she said.
I wonder what Mr. Mustapha's reaction would have been if he got his drinking water from GVW's Goose Lake and he happened to venture a trip up to the source!? Any guesses?
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