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Water beads can be deadly to children and are sending thousands to the ER each year. Experts say they shouldn’t be in homes with young kids.
“Have you ever played with water beads?” asks one Amazon listing. “They’re slippery, squishy, and a surprisingly fun and addictive sensory experience for kids of all ages. . . . Fully tested and exceeds all children’s toy safety requirements.”
These “sensory” toys—little expanding gel balls meant for kids to squeeze and squish and scoop—look like candy and can come in packages of thousands. Some start as tiny as a cupcake sprinkle and grow to the size of a marble when soaked in water. Others, originally the size of small grapes, grow to golf-ball size. They’re made of superabsorbent polymers, a material first used decades ago for agricultural purposes and then for absorbent diapers. They are now often marketed as “non-toxic” toys, and can be found in homes and schools across the country. Millions of packages have been sold.
But emergency room visit data, court documents, medical literature, incidents reported by consumers and doctors to federal regulators, and devastating firsthand accounts from parents show that these toys are anything but safe. Often bought for older siblings, the expanding beads have found their way into the stomachs, intestines, ears, noses, and even lungs of curious infants and toddlers.
Recent Consumer Reports tests of several brands of water beads documented just how large these beads can grow—some of them dangerously so.
An estimated 4,500 visits to the emergency room since 2017 have been related to water bead incidents, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and this is almost certainly an undercount. Inside bodies, the beads can contribute to hearing loss, infections, bowel obstructions that require the surgical removal of intestines, blocked airways that can lead to lung collapse, and even death. Experts say the packaging of many water bead brands have vastly inadequate safety warnings that make no mention of any of these risks.
Meanwhile, court documents and interviews allege that some water bead manufacturers and retailers were aware of these injuries but chose not to recall their products, decisions that safety advocates say have led to tragedy.
One early reported death linked to a water bead involved a 6-month-old boy in Pakistan, according to a 2012 write-up in a medical journal. Another medical report described how an 18-month-old girl in France died in 2019 after eating three. And in July, a 10-month-old girl named Esther Jo Bethard died in Wisconsin after ingesting water beads.
That death recently triggered the recall of one particular product, a Chuckle & Roar water bead activity kit made by Buffalo Games and sold at Target. But other water beads made by the same company were still for sale elsewhere as of late September. And while some countries have banned water beads, they are still widely available in the U.S., sold by dozens of manufacturers.
William Wallace, associate director of safety policy at Consumer Reports, says the federal government should ban or sharply limit the sale of all water beads, and urges retailers and online platforms to stop selling them immediately. He also advises parents and teachers not to buy water beads, and if they already own them, to throw them away.
Other experts agree. “The risks can’t be ignored,” says Michael Alfonzo, MD, a pediatric emergency physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine. “If you have a child under the age of 3, I wouldn’t have them in the home.”
The day in March 2022 when Haley Nickols saw her kids’ water beads scattered on the floor, a box overturned, and a stool next to the high shelf where the beads had been ziplocked, boxed, and stowed, her first thought was of the mess. She reached first for the vacuum, not for a phone to call 911 or Poison Control.
It’s not that she hadn’t taken care when shopping for the beads and storing them. She and her husband, Willie, who live in Wisconsin, have five children, then aged 8 months to 10 years, and she thought about the possible risks of all things they brought into their house. The baby wasn’t allowed to play with the beads, and the older kids were allowed to play with them only under her supervision. The Amazon listing for the 30,000 small and 150 “jumbo” beads, sold by a company called Uwantme, didn’t give her cause for alarm either. (This was not one of the brands included in CR’s tests. The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Eco-Friendly & Nontoxic Materials,” the listing for the same product says today. It has a picture of a smiling diapered baby playing in a giant pile of expanded beads. Even the words “choking hazard” on the online listing didn’t really give her pause, she says now, because, looking at them, especially in their dry form in the package, they were just so small.
Two days after the spill, Deacon, her 8-month-old, woke up vomiting. At first she thought he must have a stomach bug, but when it got worse and he seemed to be getting dehydrated, Nickols took him to the ER, she says. On her way, her husband called to tell her as an aside that she should mention that he’d found a few tiny dry water beads in Deacon’s mouth the day of the spill. She said she would, but in her mind, she dismissed the need. “These aren’t dangerous,” she says she thought at the time. “Even if he did eat them, he would just poop them out.”
The ER doctors told Nickols that Deacon probably had a virus, she says, and that they should return home to wait it out. The doctors had never heard of water beads, and didn’t seem concerned when she mentioned them, but they offered an X-ray as an option. Though the imaging was a bit unclear, there were indeed a couple of spherical shapes in his stomach and intestines, she says.
“The tone changed from ‘Why is this lady even here?’ to ‘We can’t treat him here,’” she says. “It went from ‘He might need some fluids’ to an ambulance ride to Milwaukee 2 hours away for emergency surgery.”
At Children’s Wisconsin, Deacon’s condition worsened. Doctors there eventually performed an exploratory surgery, finding four expanded beads in his intestines though they had only seen two on the X-ray. They searched his intestines, found no more, and closed him up. But the next day, he began vomiting again. Haley suggested an ultrasound, and it found yet another bead that they’d missed. So doctors went in for a second surgery and also discovered an infection and abscess at the site of the first blockage. Six inches of his intestines had to be removed, she says.
After several procedures and more than a week in the hospital, Deacon went home. Haley says that Deacon, now 2 years old, has digestive issues because of the missing intestine, and occasional hives they can’t explain, but he’s hitting his milestones.
Nickols says she feels deceived by the water beads’ marketing, especially in contrast to products like laundry pods or medicine, whose dangers are now well known. “If I had walked into the room, and there had been a jar of Tylenol spilled all over the floor, and we had swiped a bunch out of Tylenol from his mouth, we would have gone to the emergency room right away.”
The Nickols’ experience was hellish, but at least Deacon had two things going for him: Someone had seen water beads in his mouth, and some of them showed up on an X-ray. Other babies haven’t been as lucky, making their medical journeys even more complicated.
One big problem is the small size of the beads when they’re dry, especially right out of the package. Even when handled carefully, the beads can scatter and roll away. They can hide under furniture, in baseboards, or carpets. A crawling, curious baby can find one, and eat it, even months or years after someone has last played with them. So parents who take a child to the ER may, understandably, not even know or think to mention that their child could have swallowed one of the beads.
Another problem: While choking is a risk that’s immediately visible, intestinal obstruction is not, says James Dodington, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital in Connecticut. "An ingestion can happen, and then the intestinal obstruction happens significantly later,” he says. “Those are the kinds of things that keep us up most at night.”
Finally, even when a symptom—like vomiting—does emerge, diagnosing obstruction is difficult, in part because of what the beads are made of: a gel that is almost invisible on X-ray, and sometimes even difficult to see on ultrasound. An endoscope, a tiny camera threaded down the throat, can’t necessarily reach the entire length of the intestines to locate the beads.
As a result, often the only way to diagnose the problem is exploratory surgery of the intestines—an invasive, traumatic event for anyone, not least for a baby.
Alfonzo says his pediatric emergency department sees a lot of kids and babies who have accidentally eaten something—that’s nothing new. But water beads pose a new challenge because of their unpredictability.
“Something like a coin has a fixed size, so you know the areas where it’s going to cause problems, because there are certain areas in your GI tract that have natural narrowings,” he says. Water beads, though, “are unique in that the size can be variable, and it may swell in the wrong place at the wrong time, causing major injury.”
CPSC incident reports, publicly available on SaferProducts.gov, are also rife with stories from parents whose kids got sick in mysterious ways, and then the culprit later turned out to be water beads growing inside different parts of their bodies. Like the 3-year-old girl who had a mysterious ear infection, then started having seizures, according to one report from a grandparent. A water bead had somehow gotten lodged in her inner ear, the report says, and grown to such a size that it destroyed her eardrum. Her seizures continued for months, even after the bead was surgically removed, according to the report. The family wrote that they had no idea where the bead had come from.
When Ashley Haugen’s 13-month-old daughter Kipley woke up projectile vomiting in their Texas home one morning in July 2017, Ashley had no idea what was going on. At the hospital, the vomiting worsened; medication had no effect, and tests and scans showed nothing. She only learned that water beads were the cause when ER surgeons pulled out pieces of them from Kipley’s small intestine after exploratory surgery. Ashley’s heart sank as she recognized that these were the beads she had bought for her older daughter’s 6th birthday gift, about three months earlier. But she never saw Kipley go near them, and she still doesn’t know how she got hold of them.
Haugen created a website and nonprofit organization called That Water Bead Lady to try to get the word out to other parents and pediatricians about the risks of these harmless-looking toys. She says the doctors that initially treated Kipley in the hospital dismissed the possibility of any long-lasting effects, especially after seeing “non-toxic” on the package. But several years later, Kipley’s pediatrician diagnosed her with toxic encephalopathy (a type of brain injury), saying that it was likely due to toxic ingredients in the water beads. Kipley has subsequently experienced delays that are likely to affect her for the rest of her life, according to her pediatrician.
Haugen was the first speaker on a panel of parents discussing water beads with the CPSC in a May 2023 meeting. She told the commissioners she thought that manufacturers’ emphasis on parental supervision, proper storage, and cleanup deflected from their own responsibility.
“Kipley wasn’t allowed to play with the water beads, the girls had separate play areas, we used adult supervision, and we researched the product,” she said. “We did everything right to keep our daughter safe, and she still got hurt.”
Haugen has made warning parents about the risks of water beads—and helping those whose children are injured by them—practically her full-time job. She collects medical research and publishes briefs for emergency room doctors and poison control center staffers who may need to study up on this strange new problem, and fast. She has seen parents successfully petition school districts to ban them from classrooms, she says. And she has built a support group of affected families, many of whom are in constant touch, and she uses social media to spread her message—a lot.
In November 2022, Haugen’s account was tagged in a TikTok video that showed a desperate mother, Folichia Mitchell, asking viewers to pray for her then-9-month-old daughter. Kennedy was clinging to life in a Maine hospital after she somehow got hold of a water bead from a kit Mitchell had bought for her 8-year-old son, who has autism spectrum disorder, according to a June 2023 complaint filed by the family. One single bead, when swallowed, had allegedly triggered a series of medical horrors: bowel obstruction, sepsis, infections, a ventilator and, she told the CPSC commissioners, blood transfusions and multiple surgeries, to remove first the bead and then about 6 inches of intestine that had been damaged beyond repair.
While Kennedy was in the hospital, Haugen rallied her social media followers to track down Mitchell’s contact information. They connected, and Haugen sent Kennedy’s doctors medical literature and case studies she had collected. Kennedy lived. She went home with a feeding tube, the complaint said. She had to relearn how to eat and crawl, but she has recovered now, Mitchell says.
Haugen and Mitchell are now part of a small but growing group of parents whose children’s grave injuries—and in one case even death—have been linked to water beads, and who have become advocates for change. In the absence of government regulation or of increased warnings from manufacturers, they have taken on the job of spreading the word to other parents, physicians, and poison control centers, and of meeting with the CPSC to call for more thorough warning labels or, ideally, an outright ban.
“Had I seen ‘potential organ damage’ on the warning label, I would have bought something else,” Mitchell says now. “There are so many options for toys, these don’t need to exist.”
Before the Chuckle & Roar recall in mid-September, the CPSC last coordinated recalls with water bead manufacturers a decade ago. The agency cited potentially life-threatening ingestion risks in all instances.
Meanwhile, Italy and Malaysia have banned water beads from being sold as toys, and governmental agencies in Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand have issued warnings to parents about their risks.
In mid-September, on the same day it announced the Chuckle & Roar recall, the CPSC issued a new warning about water beads. It urged parents and caregivers to keep them away from children 3 and under, and told “childcare centers, camps, and schools to avoid these products entirely.”
CPSC chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric told CR in an interview that individual product recalls and public warnings are merely steps “along the way in what we’re trying to do” to eliminate the risks that water beads pose to kids.
“From my perspective I think we need to reexamine the rules that are out there that apply to water beads,” Hoehn-Saric says. That might involve “relooking at the standards around size and consistency, and other people have suggested that they should simply be banned outright for children.”
CR’s safety advocates urge the CPSC to move quickly. “Water beads are being marketed as safe and sold as if nothing is wrong with them, leading parents to unknowingly put their children at risk,” says CR’s Wallace. “The CPSC should ban water beads or at least set strong limits on them so they can’t be sold as children’s products. Retailers and online platforms should stop selling them immediately, and contact previous buyers to warn them about the risks.”
Wallace also recommends keeping water beads out of the home if children or cognitively impaired adults are ever present. “It’s just not worth the risk. Water beads don’t serve a useful purpose, and there are much safer options for sensory play,” he says, pointing to room temperature, digestible foods such as rice, beans, pasta, or peas as alternatives.
Another person who watched Mitchell’s TikTok video was a mom of two in Florida named Sara Gent. Recounting her experience during the May CPSC meeting, she said she had a box of water beads at home, but after she watched that video in late 2022, she threw them all away. Or so she thought.
Just a week after that, in December 2022, Gent says that she found herself rushing her 13-month-old son, Henry, to the hospital as he vomited blood and bile. Surgeons later pulled a bead from his intestines that, while invisible to a scope, an X-ray, and an ultrasound, had grown to 2 inches across, she testified.
Gent told CPSC commissioners that she still doesn’t know how the bead got into Henry, but she suspects he ate it when it was in its small, unhydrated state. “They bounce and roll under furniture, then shrink back down to the size of sprinkles until they come into contact with fluid again,” Gent told the commissioners. “So when you have a bag of 50,000 of them, it’s near impossible to keep track of every single one.”
When the Gents took Henry home from the hospital, she testified, they had friends come over to scour the floors, baseboards, furniture, and toys, looking for water beads that had been somehow overlooked. They found over 50 more.
“Months later, I just found three more in the hinges of a toy that three people checked,” Gent told the CPSC. “They’re still terrorizing our family.”
Haugen says she only stopped finding the tiny, dry water beads hiding in her house after she replaced the floorboards of their entire home. Mitchell says she is in the process of buying a new house so she can move her family out of the one where her daughter’s water bead accident happened, because she is too worried that it could happen again.
“It’s like glitter—it gets everywhere, and you’re finding it for years afterward, no matter how much you clean,” Haugen says.
As a toy, rainbow-colored water beads are a relatively new phenomenon, but the magical-seeming material they’re made out of isn’t. “Superabsorbent polymers” were first widely used by the Department of Agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s to help store water for plants and crops. In the decades that followed, companies began experimenting with using the materials in consumer goods like diapers and feminine products.
Another use for small superabsorbent polymer beads that eventually became common was as vase and centerpiece filler material for florists. The beads were both decorative and useful for storing water, which would then release slowly, feeding the flowers and plants.
It was in a florist’s stall in London’s Camden Market where toy executive Ron Brawer says he first saw the colorful beads, over a decade ago. He bought a few packets and brought them home to his little kids to play with, who were mesmerized.
That was the seed of the idea for Orbeez, which hit the market in 2010. Brawer says he had sent samples to a third-party chemical lab to simulate what would happen if the polymers were ingested, and the lab returned good news: The beads would safely pass right through the body without doing any serious harm.
In fact, whenever safety questions came up in presentations and conferences, Brawer says he would demonstrate how confident he was in his Orbeez by eating a couple of them on the spot. He estimates he must have eaten a hundred in his lifetime, with no ill effects.
When CR interviewed Brawer, he seemed genuinely surprised to hear about the young children whose serious injuries and deaths were linked to water bead accidents. He left the toy business years ago, he says, and an international toy company called Spin Master bought the Orbeez brand in 2019. (Spin Master maintains that Orbeez are safe but did not respond to CR’s questions about how it tests them for safety.) “If there are kids getting hurt by these things these days, then obviously I’m sorry to hear that,” says Brawer, adding that he didn’t hear about problems like this when he was overseeing the brand. “I wouldn’t have created this if I thought there was any chance anybody was going to get seriously hurt.”
CR’s Wallace says the introduction of water beads for children highlights serious shortcomings in how the U.S. regulates product safety. “Our laws generally don’t require showing that a new type of product is safe before it’s put on the market, even if it’s for kids," he says.
Orbeez was once synonymous with water beads, but the industry has expanded as quickly and unexpectedly as its products. The toy company Buffalo Games and its brand Chuckle & Roar incorporated water beads into so-called sensory bins with other tactile toys like sand and shredded paper.
Other companies sell them in make-your-own “stress ball” kits. Many brands sell water beads in packs of thousands as “gel ammo” or “splatter balls” meant for specially designed guns, an activity that likely raises the risk of the beads spreading in the home and yard. Orbeez has expanded its line as well: It sells foot and hand “spas,” “sensation stations,” bead-dying kits, and “fidget packs,” the last of which actually encourages kids to make the beads “#bounce.”
The water bead market is difficult to quantify because of the number of brands selling from overseas, and because these products are often marketed as both toys and “vase fillers” or similar categories at once. (The title of one recent listing, for instance, was: “gel beads for spa refill, kids sensory toys, vases, plant, wedding and home decor.”)
But a CR analysis of Amazon sales data shows that over a period of just two years—from September 2021 to July 2023—packages of water beads were purchased approximately 3.4 million times.
The most popular version of Orbeez on Amazon (its “fidget pack” containing 1,600 beads) was bought nearly 48,000 times over two years. Over the same time period, the most popular water bead pack overall on Amazon, Elongdi’s package of 50,000 beads, was bought over 200,000 times.
Those sales figures are from just one retailer, Amazon. Toys with water beads are also sold by multiple sellers on other large retail platforms, like Target and Walmart. They are also sold through smaller retailers as well, like a teachers’ supply store called Lakeshore Learning, and repackaged as party favors on Etsy.
Accountability for water bead injury remains a challenge. Parents of kids who are harmed can try to sue, of course, but water beads are a tricky industry for this. Many companies, especially those selling on Amazon and other online platforms, are based overseas so are difficult to bring to court.
Haley Nickols says she can’t sue over what happened to her son Deacon because the Uwantme brand is in China; she can’t even find good contact information for it. She sees this as a dangerous loophole that brands selling on online platforms are taking advantage of, to the detriment of consumers.
There should “at least be somebody’s door you can knock on,” Nickols says. “It’s basically the same as if I flew to China, bought the water beads, and flew back here, and nobody can be held accountable.”
CR reached out to all the companies in this article that make or sell water beads. Target spokesperson Emily Bisek said, “We extend our deepest sympathies to the families affected by these tragic incidents.” Hand2Mind CEO Rick Woldenberg said that his company did not know of injuries related to its water beads but that it had recently decided to discontinue them for other reasons. Walmart said its Hello Hobby brand will no longer offer water beads, adding that it is “reviewing other items” in light of the CPSC advisory. Etsy said it was looking into issues raised by the products.
Spin Master, which sells Orbeez, did not respond to questions for this article but previously told CR that Orbeez products “pass rigorous safety testing” and should not be confused with other “copycat products.” Amazon and Elongdi declined to comment. Buffalo Games (which sells Chuckle & Roar toys), Dazmers, Joann, Jangostor, Lakeshore Learning, MarvelBeads, Supbec, and Uwantme did not respond to requests for comment.
The Toy Association, an industry group, said that consumers should follow age recommendations on product packaging and that when sold as toys, water beads are subject to safety standards while other, nontoy uses are not.
On Aug. 26, 2022, the toy company Buffalo Games received an email from a mother in Las Vegas named Elissa Byer. She wanted the company to know that one of their Chuckle & Roar water beads had almost killed her 18-month-old son, James.
He had accidentally, and unknown to his parents, inhaled a tiny dehydrated seed that then, over two days, expanded in his airway, causing his left lung to collapse, according to his medical records. Surgeons removed most of the bead, Byer says, and he recovered, though some remnants may remain. And had the bead lodged in a spot just an inch higher, the doctors told her, it would have closed off both lungs and he could have died in his sleep.
“I wanted to share our story because I don’t ever want this to happen to anyone else,” Byer wrote the company. She wanted “aspiration” to be added as an added danger on the package’s warning label. “We were lucky, but other kids might not be,” she wrote. “I never in a million years saw this threat.” The same day, she contacted Target, where she had bought the toy, and told them the story too.
Buffalo Games wrote her back Aug. 30: “Thank you for reaching out,” the email said, “and we are sorry to hear about your traumatic experience and are happy to hear that your 18-month-old is doing well.” Target refunded the cost of the water bead kit, she says, and asked her for more information, which she provided. The warning labels were not changed, as far as Byer could tell.
Not even two months later, in October 2022, Folichia Mitchell—mom to Kennedy—also bought a box of Chuckle & Roar water beads at a Target near her home. Her daughter Kennedy went to the hospital Nov. 1 and stayed there for a month, the complaint in her lawsuit against both companies alleges, fighting for her life.
Her TikTok video telling Kennedy’s story went viral later that month, a potential PR crisis for Target that Mitchell believes is the reason the chain pulled that particular product from its shelves by November 2022. Crucially, though, Buffalo Games did not issue a recall until mid-September 2023, almost a year later. Nor did it or Target alert past customers to get rid of the toy or take extra precautions with it.
Buffalo Games did not respond to CR’s request for comment. Emily Bisek, at Target, said the company no longer sells the Chuckle & Roar water beads and urges people who purchased the recalled product to contact Target for a refund. The company did not, however, respond to specific questions about James Byer or Kennedy Mitchell, or explain why it did not alert past water bead customers to safety risks until the September 2023 recall.
Personal injury attorney Daniel Mann finds this inaction inexcusable, especially since Target has digital records for many of its customers and could have easily contacted them. “There’s no reason, in this electronic world we live in today, that that couldn’t have happened,” he says.
And if it had, Mann says, it could have saved a baby’s life.
He represents Taylor and Tyler Bethard, who live in a small town in Wisconsin not too far from Haley Nickols. The Bethards had five children—the youngest was a baby girl named Esther Jo. They bought the same Chuckle & Roar water beads from Target that Mitchell had, for use by their oldest child, who was going into kindergarten. They bought it in April 2022, when Taylor was pregnant with Esther Jo. She was born Aug. 28, 2022, two days after Elissa Byer first contacted Buffalo Games and Target to plead with them to warn other parents about the risks their water beads posed.
The Bethards didn’t know about any of that. They weren’t informed by the manufacturer about an updated warning label, because there wasn’t one. They didn’t hear from the retailer about a product alert or a voluntary recall, because there wasn’t one. Ten-month-old Esther got sick July 6, 2023, exhibiting symptoms identical to a stomach bug. Her mom found her dead in her crib the next morning.
Taylor testified to the CPSC that Esther died from swallowing water beads, although she had never, as far as her parents knew, played with them. The CPSC cited reports of Esther’s death in its announcement when Buffalo Games finally recalled the water bead kit in September 2023.
The Bethards will remember Esther Jo for her curiosity and wonder, for her blue eyes and curly red hair, and for the way she would grin and bounce up and down dancing when her four siblings sang to her. Esther’s mom, Taylor, says that talking about her death is extremely difficult but that she has a message to share.
“Please spread the word to keep this from happening to other children,” Taylor says. She believes water beads shouldn’t be sold to anyone who has kids. “Ideally, they should be banned and no longer allowed to be marketed as a children’s toy. If I had known of the risks, I would’ve never allowed my older kids to play with them. They would’ve never been in my house.”
Chuckle & Roar water bead kits are now nowhere to be seen on Target.com, but were still available on Amazon as of late September. And many, many, many other brands of water beads are still for sale, and still being purchased by parents and schools and summer camps and daycare centers.
“I’m the warning bell that they chose to not listen to,” Elissa Byer says now. She had alerted Buffalo Games and Target to her son James’ story last August—just days before Esther was born, and 10 months before Esther died.
Byer has joined Ashley Haugen and the other affected parents who are fighting for a ban on water beads. She says that every time they have a meeting, there are more of them. And she says that hearing the stories about what happened to their kids—especially Esther’s story—has “lit the fire” in her. “We can’t stop, because it’s not going to stop,” Byer says. “Nobody should lose their child over a toy.”
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Lauren Kirchner is an investigative reporter on the special projects team at Consumer Reports. She has been with CR since 2022, covering product safety. She has previously reported on algorithmic bias, criminal justice, and housing for the Markup and ProPublica, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2017. Send her tips at lauren.kirchner@consumer.org and follow her on Twitter @lkirchner.
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