Warning! Don't Fall for this Fake Miracle Cure!

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is again urging consumers to avoid purchasing or consuming any bleach product marketed as a cure or medical treatment for an array of health diagnoses including autism, cancer, HIV/AIDS and even the flu. The products, often sold under variations of the name “Miracle Mineral Solution,” “MMS,” “Water Purification Solution (WPS),” and others, can cause serious or potentially life-threatening side effects due to its potent ingredients, the agency warns.

“The FDA’s drug approval process ensures that patients receive safe and effective drug products. Miracle Mineral Solution and similar products are not FDA-approved, and ingesting these products is the same as drinking bleach,” FDA Acting Commissioner Ned Sharpless said in a statement posted on Monday. “Consumers should not use these products, and parents should not give these products to their children for any reason.”

Websites pedaling the product instruct consumers to mix the sodium chlorite solution with citric acid before drinking. But the FDA warns that when the acid is added to the liquid, it becomes chlorine dioxide, which is a powerful bleaching agent. Reports of severe vomiting, diarrhea, life-threatening low blood pressure and acute liver failure have been associated with drinking these products.

Source: Bleach products touted as cure for autism or cancer can be life-threatening, FDA warns

A quick scan of the Internet provides a very detailed history of the marketing of this produce as a cure-all for autism. Here is a short excerpt:

“Miracle Mineral Supplement” (MMS, often also called Miracle Mineral Solution), or, as we like to call it here at SBM, a form of industrial bleach. Thanks to a man named Jim Humble and his Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, bleach is sold as a treatment and cure for autism and a number of other diseases, including HIV/AIDS. It’s a treatment that the FDA has issued warnings about, starting in 2010, and for which one of the most notorious sellers of MMS, Louis Daniel Smith, was convicted of conspiracy, smuggling, selling misbranded drugs, and defrauding the United States.

Let’s back up a bit. There are some forms of quackery that I’ve never been able to understand, quackery that is so bizarre, so without a reasonable scientific rationale, and so potentially harmful that it boggles my mind that anyone would ever think it is a good idea. MMS is just such a treatment, and I first took note of it nearly nine years ago. Mind bogglingly, MMS is a form of bleach. Specifically, it is, in essence, industrial strength bleach, 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water. It is frequently diluted in acidic juices, such as orange juice, resulting in the formation of chlorine dioxide, which is, as the FDA characterized it, “a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment”. According to its proponents, MMS can cure almost anything: cancer, AIDS, and just about any other serious disease you can imagine. Never mind that there is no biological plausibility and no evidence, either preclinical or clinical, that MMS can do what its proponents claim it can do. True, bleach can kill bacteria or cancer cells in a dish at a high enough concentration, but that doesn’t mean it’s a useful antibiotic or chemotherapeutic agent. Feeding autistic children bleach or, even worse, subjecting them to bleach enemas, is horrifying—and, yes, this is really a thing. There are quacks out there, in particular Kerri Rivera, who advocates diluting MMS and giving it to autistic children, both orally and in the form of an enema, to treat their autism. Before she agreed to sign an assurance of voluntary compliance under which she was barred in Illinois from selling MMS or similar substances to Illinois residents and presenting at future Illinois conferences concerning the use of such substances to treat autism, Rivera was a regular fixture at the Autism One quackfest in Chicago for multiple years. She is, however, still selling MMS in Mexico.

Because I’m most familiar with her and her quackery, I’ll discuss it mainly (but not exclusively) in the context of Kerri Rivera’s protocols. To the best of my knowledge, advocacy for using MMS, either orally or by enema or both, first bubbled up from the underground autism “biomed” quackery movement around 2010 or so. However, it was at the 2012 edition of the yearly Chicago antivaccine autism quackfest known as Autism One, Kerri Rivera gave a talk touting how she supposedly “recovered” 38 autistic children in 20 months. At the time, Rivera was running a clinic in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico that she called AutismO2 Clinica Hyperbarica.

It goes beyond that, though. I’ve noted in the past that proponents of MMS not only give MMS to autistic children orally, but that some even bath them in it, and, of course, Rivera advocated enemas with it. Rivera advocated continually upping the dose.

You can read the full article at: Bleaching away what ails you: The Genesis II Church is still selling Miracle Mineral Supplement as a cure-all