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“I never knew any of this,” the man said one day this week. “It isn’t just super-strong coffee. If this is something that can happen to people, this has to get out. People need to know.”

He said he’s been drinking Red Bull, which sells some six billion cans a year, since age 16. Before the seizure, he was drinking a couple a day, sometimes more, and usually cracks a can during his break in the 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. shift, where he makes about $15 an hour.

Photo by KAREN BLEIER / AFP/Getty Images

Maybe an hour into his shift on April 4, the first seizure struck. Other workers quickly came to his aid and, within an hour, he was in hospital unconscious and intubated. (He has no memory of the day’s events.)

His mother, meanwhile, rushed to the hospital from her home outside Smiths Falls. She wouldn’t leave the hospital for four days. “It was an experience I would never want another family to go through.”

The family says the young man has no seizure-prone medical condition, like epilepsy, and a battery of tests — MRI, CAT scan, spinal tap, blood tests — found nothing conclusive, leading the medical team to focus on his intake of caffeine drinks.

What the family didn’t know is that authorities from the World Health Organization to Health Canada to Ottawa Public Health have raised concerns about adverse health effects from high-caffeine drinks, especially in young people.

And, coincidentally, a Scarborough man, Jim Shepherd, had only the night before (April 3) delivered a heartfelt presentation to the Ottawa Board of Health about his suspicions that an energy drink contributed to the death of his son, Brian, only 15, in 2008 from sudden cardiac arrhythmia.