Husband and father Mike Nguyen thought he was just bringing some aquatic beauty and peace into his home when he set up indoor aquariums filled with exotic fish and colorful coral. Neither he nor his family had any idea of the danger lurking inside the glass tanks.
And really, no one would. This is a story so bizarre it almost sounds like fiction. Every one of the seven members of his family was taken to the hospital after a leaking tank led to an unbelievable problem—poisonous airborne particles from coral that dried out after escaping the tank.
Nguyen recently came home from work to his London home and found his wife, his sister, and his four children unconscious. Very soon after, he began having difficulty breathing and started to feel very sick. That’s when he called for help. Along with his family, emergency responders evacuated several homes on the same street.
The problem is something you’ve almost certainly never heard of: palytoxin poisoning. It turns out that decorative coral has a secret. If it dries out and is disturbed it emits toxic particles. Mike Nguyen feels terrible about having accidentally poisoned his family, but who could predict this?
After noticing a leak in one of his tanks, Nguyen turned off the water pump and called an expert, who told him to make sure the coral remained submerged because it could emit toxins if it dried out. Nguyen had trimmed the coral back in his 500-liter fish tank to remove some of the parts that had emerged above the water.
In an effort to break up the coral so that it could be resettled under the surface, Nguyen inadvertently jarred the creature (coral is alive) enough to emit the particles. He was aware that the coral needed to stay wet so that his family wouldn’t be sickened, but he didn’t predict that trying to do so would create the problem he was trying to avoid.
As soon as he hit the calcium-based coral, Nguyen said, he started sneezing, but at first thought he just had a Covid infection coming on. Nguyen and his family were treated at the hospital, and all but Nguyen were released the next day. He required three days of treatment.
