A man who found a dead fly in his bottled water is claiming before Canada's high court that the incident ruined his sex life, hair salon business and even made it hard for him to shower.
Waddah Mustapha of Windsor, Ontario said 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.
They were cleaning the bottle's neck before opening it, and so did not drink any of its contents. Still, Mr Mustapha claims he suffered from major depression, anxiety, specific phobias, and obsessional thoughts flowing from seeing the dead flies in the bottle water.
He said: 'We all know flies of that kind, with the blue butts, they land on faeces and dead rats on the side of the road and end up in the water'. He added, 'this is a public health issue.'
Although a lower court deemed his reaction bizarre, it ruled the nature of bottled water is 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 CAN$341,775 (€216,300) but the award was overturned a year later on appeal. The Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments this week in the case to have the judgment reinstated. Its decision is expected in the coming months.
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