Rock bottom: can rocks in your dog’s water bowl protect your lawn?

Posted on 29 Oct, 2021 by katlday

$fractal image, featuring the hashtag #272sci$

Take a look at the Twitter hashtag #272sci

One quick thing before I dive into this month’s post: if you’re a Twitter user, check out my series of very tiny science tweets under the hashtag #272sci. The aim is to explain a science thing in one tweet – without using a thread – and it’s 272 because that’s the number of characters I have to use after including the hashtag and a space. So far I’ve covered leaf colours, frothy milk, caffeine and poisonous millipedes. There will be more to come!

Now, speaking of Twitter, a couple of weeks ago Prof Mark Lorch tweeted about Dog Rocks. Dog… what? I hear you ask (really quite understandably).

Well, it turns out that Dog Rocks are a product that you can buy, and that you put into your dog’s water bowl. Your dog then drinks the water that has been sloshing over the rocks, and, this is where we start to run into trouble, this is meant to have an effect on your dog’s urine. This, in turn, is supposed to protect any grass your dog might then pee on.

Dog urine damages grass

All right, so let’s start somewhere in the vague vicinity of some science: if you have a dog, or even if you’ve just spent some time with someone who has a dog, you’ve probably noticed that dog urine isn’t very kind to grass. Commonly, you see something like the photo here, that is, patches of yellow, dead grass, surrounded by quite luscious green growth.

Why is this? It’s because dog urine – like the urine of all mammals – contains urea, CO(NH₂)₂. Urea forms in the body when animals metabolise nitrogen-containing compounds, in particular, proteins. It’s essentially a way for the body to get rid of excess nitrogen.

People sometimes confuse urea with ammonia, for reasons that I’ll come to in a moment. But they’re not the same thing. Urea is odourless, forms a pH neutral solution and, if you extract it from the liquid in which it is dissolved, produces solid crystals at room temperature.

Pure ammonia, NH₃, by contrast, is a gas at room temperature (boiling point -33.3 ℃), forms alkaline solutions (with pH values greater than 7) and has that pungent ‘ngggh get it away from me!’ smell with which we’re probably all familiar.

Fresh urine contains urea, but little ammonia

Although these two substances aren’t the same, they are linked: many living things convert ammonia (which is very toxic) to urea (which is much less so) as part of normal metabolism. And it also goes the other way, in a process called urea hydrolysis. This reaction happens in urine once it’s out of the body, too, which is the main reason why, after a little while, urine starts to smell really, really bad.

Okay, fine, but what has this got to do with grass, exactly? Well urea (and ammonia, for that matter) are excellent sources of nitrogen. Plants need nitrogen to grow, but dog urine contains too much, and too much nitrogen is bad – in the same way that too much of pretty much anything nice is bad for humans. It damages the blades of grass and a yellowish dead spot appears, often ringed by some particularly lush grass that, being slightly outside the immediate target zone, caught a whiff of extra nitrogen without being overwhelmed.

Back to Dog Rocks. Interestingly, the website includes an explanation not unlike the one I’ve just given on their fact sheet. What it doesn’t do is satisfactorily explain how Dog Rocks are supposed to change the nitrogen content of your dog’s urine.

Dog Rocks are meant to be placed in your dog’s water bowl

The website says that Dog Rocks are “a coherent rock with a mechanically stable framework”. Okay… so… Dog Rocks won’t dissolve or break up in your dog’s water bowl. A good start. It goes on to say, “the rocks provide a stable matrix and a micro-porous medium in which active components are able to act as a water purifying agent through ion exchange” and “Dog Rocks will help purify the water by removing some nitrates, ammonia and harmful trace elements thereby giving your dog a cleaner source of water and lowering the amount of nitrates found in their diet.”

You’ll note they’re using the word nitrate. Nitrates are specifically compounds containing the NO₃^– ion, but I think they’re using the term in a more general way, to suggest any nitrogen-containing compound (including urea and ammonia). And by the way, nitrates are different from the similar-sounding nitrites, which contain the NO₂^– ion. Fresh urine from a healthy dog (or human, for that matter) shouldn’t contain nitrite. In fact, a dipstick test for nitrite in urine is commonly used to check for urinary tract infections, because it suggests bacteria are present.

Anyway, nitrates/nitrites aside, it’s the last bit of that claim which really makes no sense. Your dog is not ingesting anything like a significant quantity of nitrogen-containing compounds from its water bowl. Urea comes from the metabolic breakdown of proteins, and they come from your dog’s food.

Photo of puppies eating food that I totally picked because it's cute ;-)

The nitrogen-containing compounds in your dogs’ urine come from their food, not their water

It’s faintly possible, I suppose, that Dog Rocks might somehow filter out some urea/nitrates from urine. But then your dog would have to pee through the Dog Rocks and, honestly, if you can manage to arrange that, you might as well train your dog not to pee on your grass in the first place.

I suggest that there are three possible explanations for the positive testimonials for this product. 1) Owners who use it are inadvertently encouraging their dogs to drink more water, which could be diluting their urine, leading to less grass damage. 2) It’s all a sort of placebo effect: owners imagine it’s going to work, and they see what they’re expecting to see, or 3) they’re all made up.

You decide, but there is absolutely no scientifically-plausible way that putting any kind of rocks in your dog’s water bowl will do anything to stop dog pee damaging your grass. This is £15 you do not need to spend. But hey, you could avoid the money burning a hole in your pocket (see what I did there?) by buying me a coffee… 😉

Check out the Twitter hashtag #272sci here, and support the Great Explanations book project here!

Do you want something non-sciency to distract you from, well, everything? Why not take a look at my fiction blog: the fiction phial? You can also find me doing various flavours of editor-type-stuff at the horror podcast, PseudoPod.org – so head over there, too!

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One Flash of Light, One Vision: Carrots, Colour and Chemistry

Posted on 28 Feb, 2021 by katlday

“White” light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow.

Sometimes you have one of those weeks when the universe seems to be determined to yell at you about a certain thing. That’s happened to me this week, and the shouting has been all about light and vision (earworm, anyone?).

I started the week writing about conjugated molecules and UV spectrometry for one project, was asked a couple of days ago if I’d support a piece of work on indicators for the RSC Twitter Poster Conference that’s happening from 2-3rd March, and then practically fell over a tweet by Dr Adam Rutherford about bacteria that photosynthesise from infrared light in a hydrothermal vent*.

Oh well, who am I to fight the universe?

Light is awesome. The fact that we can detect it is even awesome-er. The fact that we’ve evolved brains clever enough built all sorts of machines to measure other kinds of light that our puny human eyes cannot detect is, frankly, astonishing.

The electromagnetic spectrum covers all the different kinds of light. (Image source)

Let’s start with some basics. You probably met the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum at some point in school. Possibly a particularly enthusiastic physics teacher encouraged you to come up with some sort of mnemonic to help you remember it. Personally I like Rich Men In Vegas Use eXpensive Gadgets, but maybe that’s just me.

The relevant thing here is that the EM spectrum covers all the different wavelengths of light. Visible light, the stuff that’s, well, visible (to our eyes), runs from about 400 to 700 nanometres.

A colour wheel: when light is absorbed, we see the colour opposite the absorbed wavelengths. (Image source)

Now, we need another bit of basic physics (and biology): we see light when it enters our eyes and strikes our retinas. We see colours when only certain wavelengths of light make it into our eyes.

So-called “white” light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow. Take one or more of those colours away, and we see what’s left.

For example, if something looks red, it means that red light made it to our eyes, which in turn means that, somewhere along the way, blue and green were filtered out.

(Before I go any further, there are actually several causes of colour, but I’m about to focus on one in particular. If you really want to know more, there’s this book, although it is a tad expensive…)

Back to chemistry. Certain substances absorb coloured light. We know them as pigments. Carrots are orange, for example, largely because they contain a pigment called beta-carotene (or β-carotene). This stuff appears, to our eyes, as red-orange, and the reason for that is that it absorbs green-blue light, the wavelengths around 400-500 nm.

β-Carotene is a long molecule with lots of C=C double bonds. (Image source.)

Why does it absorb light at all? Well, β-carotene is a really long molecule, with lots of C=C double bonds. These bonds form what’s called a conjugated system. Without getting into the complexities of molecular orbital theory, that means the double bonds alternate along the chain, and they basically overlap and… smoosh into one long thing. (Look, as the saying goes, “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” – it’ll do for now.)

When molecules with conjugated systems are exposed to electromagnetic light, they absorb it. Specifically, they absorb in the ultraviolet region – the wavelengths between about 200 and 400 nanometres. Here’s the thing, though, those wavelengths are right next to the violet end of the visible spectrum – that’s why it’s called ultraviolet after all.

Molecules with really long conjugated systems start to absorb in the coloured light region, as well. And because they’re absorbing violet and blue, possibly a smidge of green, they look… yup! Orangey, drifting into red.

So now you know why carrots are orange. Most brightly coloured fruit, of course, is that way to attract animals and birds to eat it, and thus spread its seeds. As fruit ripens, it usually changes colour, making it stand out better against green foliage and easier to find. This is the link with indicators that I mentioned at the start: many fruits contain anthocyanin pigments, and these often have purple-red colours in neutral-acidic environments, and yellow-green at the more alkaline end. In other words, the colour change is quite literally an indicator of ripeness.

But the bit of the carrot that we usually eat is underground, right? Not particularly easy to spot, and they don’t contain seeds anyway. Why are carrots bright orange?

Modern carrots are mostly orange, but purple and yellow varieties also exist.

Well, they weren’t. The edible roots of wild plants almost certainly started out as white or cream-coloured, as you might expect for something growing underground, but the carrots which were first domesticated and farmed by humans in around 900 CE were, most probably, purple and yellow.

As carrot cultivation became popular, orange roots began to appear in Spain and Germany in the 15th/16th centuries. Very orange carrots, with high levels of β-carotene, appeared from the 16th/17th centuries and were probably first cultivated in the Netherlands. Some have theorised that they were particularly selected for to honour William of Orange, but the evidence for this seems to be a bit slight. Either way, most modern European carrots do descend from a variety that was originally grown in the Dutch town of Hoorn.

In other words, brightly-coloured carrots are a mutation which human plant breeders selected for, probably largely for appearances.

But wait! There was an advantage for humans, too – even if we didn’t realise it straight away. β-carotene (which, by the way, has the E number E160a – many natural substances have E numbers, they’re nothing to be frightened of) is broken up in our intestines to form vitamin A.

Vitamin A is essential for good eye health.

Vitamin A, like most vitamins, is actually a group of compounds, but the important thing is that it’s essential for growth, a healthy immune system and – this is the really clever bit – good vision.

We knew that. Carrots help you see in the dark, right?

Hah. Well. The idea that carrot consumption actually improves eyesight seems to be the result of a World War II propaganda campaign. During the Blitz, the Royal Air Force had (at that time) new, secret radar technology. They didn’t want anyone to know that, of course, so they spread the rumour that British pilots could see exceptionally well in the dark because they ate a lot of carrots, when the truth was that those pilots were actually using radar.

But! It’s not all a lie – there is some truth to it! Our retinas, at the back of our eyes, have two types of light-sensitive cells. Cone cells help us distinguish colours, while rod cells help us detect light in general.

In those rod cells, a molecule called 11-cis-retinal is converted into another molecule called rhodopsin. This is really light-sensitive. When it’s exposed to light it photobleaches (stops being able to fluoresce), but then regenerates. This process takes about thirty minutes, and is a large part of the reason it takes a while for your eyes to “get used to the dark.”

Guess where 11-cis-retinal comes from? Yep! From vitamin A. Which is why one of the symptoms of vitamin A deficiency is night blindness. So although eating loads of carrots won’t give you super-powered night vision, it does help to maintain vision in low light.

Our brain interprets electrical signals as vision.

How do these molecules actually help us to see? Well, when rhodopsin is exposed to light, the molecule changes, which ultimately results in an electrical signal being transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain, which interprets it as vision!

In summary, not only is colour all about molecules, but our whole visual system depends on some clever chemistry. I told you chemistry was cool!

Just gimme fried chicken 😉

*Ah. I sort of ran out of space for the weird hydrothermal bacteria thing. At least one of the relevant molecules seems to be another carotenoid, probably chlorobactene. The really freaking amazing thing is that there seems to be an absorption at 775 nm, which is beyond red visible light and into the infrared region of the EM spectrum. Maybe more on this another day…

If you’re studying chemistry, have you got your Pocket Chemist yet? Why not grab one? It’s a hugely useful tool, and by buying one you’ll be supporting this site – it’s win-win! If you happen to know a chemist, it would make a brilliant stocking-filler! As would a set of chemistry word magnets!

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Want something non-sciency to distract you from, well, everything? Why not check out my fiction blog: the fiction phial.

Vaccines are one of humankind’s best achievements, and we should all be shouting about it

Posted on 17 Feb, 2017 by katlday

Imagine aliens finally get around to visiting our planet…

“About two hundred years ago,” explains the alien scientific advisor – let’s call him Spuck – “humans developed a way to prevent disease which they call vaccination. It’s really quite fascinating. They use a needle to place a tiny quantity of a fluid into the muscle under the skin of their arm or leg. The substances are then absorbed into their bodies and cause their highly-evolved immune systems to generate an immune response without, and this is really quite ingenious, Captain, their having to contact the actual diseases or suffer the symptoms. This simple procedure has saved millions of lives worldwide, and saved many millions more from having to suffer less fatal, but none the less still deeply unpleasant, consequences of serious illnesses.”

“Sounds great, Spuck,” says the Captain – let’s call him Birk – “is there a downside?”

“Not really, Captain. Side effects are rare and extremely minor compared to the seriousness of the illnesses themselves.”

“Fantastic. Why are you telling me all this? I’ve got some green-skinned action I’d like to get back to, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, it’s interesting that you should mention unusual skin tones, Captain. A leader has recently come to power who, amongst other things, has expressed concerns about vaccination.”

“Valid concerns?”

“The scientific evidence suggests not, sir.”

“Sounds like an idiot, Spuck.”

“I couldn’t possibly comment, sir.”

“Huh. Sounds like he could definitely be detrimental to the future of their race, and besides, I’m bored. Let’s go and shoot some stuff in direct contravention of the Cardinal Directive. Set blazers to ki- I mean, stun. Beam me down, Dottie!”

***

Vaccination. It’s a hot topic at the moment, and one which is so important that I think anyone who has anything to do with science communication ought to be talking about it. I’m not a medical doctor, or an immunologist, or even a biochemist (for more qualified input on the subject, I refer you here, here and here), but I AM capable of recognising scientific consensus and of separating good-quality evidence-based information from conspiracy theory dross.

Vaccination is awesome.

Awesome is a word that is somewhat overused. But I mean it literally. As in, inspires awe. We should stop, for a moment, and just look at how bloody amazing vaccination is. Thanks to these simple, near-painless, injections – most of which we receive as young children and therefore don’t even remember – we are largely protected from the horrors of….

Polio – symptoms and complications include fever, vomiting, headache, back pain, joint pain and stiffness, permanent muscle weakness, permanent paralysis and death.
Mumps – symptoms and complications include fever, headache, meningitis, painful testicular swelling in males and ovarian inflammation in females, both of which can result in permanent infertility, pancreatic inflammation and, occasionally, hearing loss. Death from mumps is rare, but does occur in about 1 in 10,000 cases.
Tuberculosis – symptoms and complications include fever, loss of appetite, severe fatigue, chest pain, coughing up of blood, scarring of the lungs, internal bleeding and death (death is considerably more likely if the patient does not have access to medical care).
Measles – symptoms and complications include fever, painful skin rash, diarrhoea, vomiting, ear infection which can result in deafness, eye infection which can result in blindness, laryngitis, pneumonia, bronchitis, liver infection, encephalitis, and increased likelihood of re-contracting diseases previously survived (measles essentially “wipes” your immune system). Oh yes, and death. As many as 1% of measles patients will die from the disease.

… and umpteen other, horrible diseases, the majority of which most people reading this will have never experienced. Because of vaccination.

A child with a measles rash. The disease can cause serious complications, including immune suppression.

The risks of vaccination are tiny. The most common complications are redness and swelling around the injection site and/or slight temperature which is easily treated with an antipyretic such as paracetamol or ibuprofen. Very occasionally people suffer a serious allergic reaction, but this inevitably happens quickly after the injection is given. Since vaccinations are usually administered in a medical setting, any allergic reaction that does occur can be quickly managed. There have been a few other genuine cases of serious, adverse reactions to vaccines, but problems are still very rare (the swine flu-narcolepsy link, for example, affected 1 in 55,000) and specific to particular vaccines, and the vaccine in question has been quickly investigated.

Like Birk, if you’ve had nothing to do with the anti-vaccination community, you may be thinking this all sounds good. Benefits massive, risks tiny. Fab. Let’s go.

However, the anti-vaccination crowd – a real, and not entirely new, thing – will tell you that this is all lies. They will tell you this loudly, and at length, and repeatedly. They believe that vaccinations cause every health problem from acne to zygomycosis, but particularly the neurodevelopmental condition known as autism.

Vaccines do not cause autism. At all. As Spuck said, the scientific evidence is clear. It’s absolutely ice-from-a-moutain-stream-in-the-middle-of-nowhere crystal clear. Just for one example, a meta analysis published in the journal Vaccine in 2014 looked at studies involving over a million children. The data revealed no relationship between vaccination and autism. None. Nada.

Vaccines, you see, do not cause autism. And actually, it’s about time we stopped wasting precious resources proving that over and over and over and over again and instead focused on what does cause autism, because that would be a question worth answering.

Infection rates dropped enormously in the US after the measles vaccination was introduced.

Anti-vaxxers will often repeatedly talk about mercury in vaccines. There’s mercury in vaccines, they’ll say, and that’s nasty stuff, so even if we haven’t proved it yet, they must be causing something bad. One problem there: there isn’t any mercury in vaccines. There’s a preservative called thimerosal (or thiomersal) in some flu vaccines – which are not the ones usually given to children – but thimerosal is no more mercury than salt is chlorine.

The anti-vax crowd get whackier after this. Some of them will tell you that vaccinations don’t, in fact, protect against against disease at all – despite huge evidence to the contrary (see also here), not to mention the simple fact that many of our grandparents and even parents remember these diseases, and their complications, as horribly commonplace.

Anti-vaxxers often state that deaths from these diseases were dropping before the vaccines were introduced. This is true. Deaths did drop, because medical science was developing rapidly. A measles patient receiving medical care is, indeed, less likely to die than one left to her own devices. If I may say so, duh.

What vaccines did is to massively reduce infection rates. But just to state the obvious: if people don’t catch a disease, they also can’t die from it.

In short, if an anti-vaxxer shows you a graph, it’s smart to check to the axes labels.

After that they get really loony, and some of them will even tell you things such as smallpox wasn’t eradicated, it was just renamed acne. Or polio has been reclassified as Guillain-Barré syndrome. These ideas are so utterly ridiculous they don’t even deserve rebuke.

This has started up again in the last few days, particularly in the UK, because of the nasty deposit of conspiracy crap that is the film Vaxxed. It’s available online, but I shall not be linking to it here.

The film claims to reveal a massive cover-up at the Centre for Disease Control (the CDC) in America, and evidence that vaccines are generally evil and cause all manner of heinous negative health outcomes. Very little of it is true, and where a tiny nugget of true fact has been included it’s been so beaten and manipulated as to have lost all of its original meaning. There’s an excellent piece about it on Skeptical Raptor website, which I recommend reading before you google the term “vaxxed”. Consider it a sort of inoculation against the nonsense, if you like (hoho).

A Guardian article from 2010 reports on Wakefield.

A Guardian article from 2010 (click for link).

The main brain behind the film is Mr Andrew Wakefield, a former British doctor who was struck off the General Medical Council in 2010, when the GMC said he had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.” Wakefield was, it turned out, trying to patent his own measles vaccine. In an effort to further his own aims, he set out to discredit the widely-used MMR (measles, mumps and rubella vaccine) by fabricating results and, in particular, suggesting a link between the MMR and autism. He denied all this, of course, but a libel judge disagreed.

Wakefield is still pushing his message. He is not a particularly nice individual. Listen to him in this video clip, for example, where he responds to Bill Gates comment, made in 2015, that he (Gates) fears a pandemic could wipe out humanity in his lifetime. Actually, I’ll save you the trouble:

“Ho Chi Minh City, you may have seen this, an outbreak of [laughs] the plague in Ho Chi Minh City. The outbreak that they were not prepared for, they never prepared for, and that is the number of children with autism in Ho Chi Minh City has increased by nearly one hundred and sixty times over eight years. So, Bill, just for your edification, the plague that you’re talking about, the next plague, the next epidemic, it’s already here. It’s already here.”

Yes, you heard that right, according to Wakefield autism is a “plague”. Anyone reading this with an autism diagnosis? You have the plague. Nice, huh?

Andrew Wakefield describes autism as a “plague”.

For the record, the number of autism diagnoses in Ho Chi Minh has increased sharply over recent years, but this is may well be – as often turns out to be the case – largely due to to better diagnosis. Certainly there’s absolutely no suggestion that it’s linked to the introduction of a vaccine or vaccines. There might be an environmental factor – some sort of pollutant perhaps – but no one is certain at the moment. (To repeat myself: perhaps if we stopped wasting time endlessly disproving the link between vaccines and autism, we’d have a better idea.)

By the way, the woman in that video clip is Polly Tommey. She has an autistic son who’s now in his twenties. Back in 2010 she chose to try and raise awareness of autism by posing in a Wonderbra-style advert, and these days she follows the campaign trail with Wakefield, repeating the message that they “will win”. What exactly they’re going to win isn’t entirely clear. Would preventing vaccination, at the cost of many lives, really be a win?

Vaxxed was due to be shown at the Curzon cinema in Soho, London on Valentine’s Day. It was pulled after the cinema realised what the film was – they had merely leased their premises to private individuals and only realised what was going on when a number of science advocates started complaining.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Curzon Cinemas said:

“We do not wish to profit from a film that has demonstrably caused great distress.”

The heyevent.uk page on Vaxxed, explaining that the location will be "annnounced" two hours before the screening.

The heyevent.uk page on Vaxxed explains that the location will be “annnounced” two hours before the screening.

Tommey was predictably unimpressed by this outcome, which she blamed on “our little five trolls in England,” saying “Britain being who they are, being big wussy pussies, just strike it off.”

Unfortunately, the cancellation turned out to be less of a victory than it first appeared. The anti-vaxx crowd then set out to find a new venue. And this time, they kept it quiet. There are many, many places that will rent you a space to screen a film, and I’ll wager that few of them really check the nature of that film. So, the anti-vaxxers correctly reasoned, if we don’t tell people where it is, no one will be able to stop us. People who had previously bought tickets were told it would be in “Central London”, and that the venue would be revealed two hours before the show.

And so, it happened. At Regent’s University London, a private university which was, incidentally, recently identified as the most expensive place to study in the UK.

In hindsight, this might actually have been worse than a screening at an independent cinema. Dodgy film in a cinema – so what? “Official” screening at a university with Q&A sessions afterwards? Hm, sounds important and… academic. The press, naturally, made the most of it, with headlines such as “Disgraced anti‑MMR vaccine doctor Andrew Wakefield gets invitation to university in London.” Sure, the first line of the actual article says the university has been criticised, but who actually reads beyond the headlines these days? Sounds like he’s being taken seriously, doesn’t it?

Regent’s University’s response on Twitter on February 15th

Regent’s University responded pretty quickly to say that they hadn’t known what the film was, that they didn’t endorse its views, and that they would be revetting all their clients.

This provoked lots of complaints about freedom of speech, because many people seem to be under the misapprehension that freedom of speech means that any and all organisations and venues have a duty to allow them to repeat their nonsense. This is not what freedom of speech means. Freedom of speech means you can’t be chucked in prison for saying a thing (with some exceptions). It does NOT mean that everyone has to listen to you, or that you can say your thing wherever and whenever you like, whether the place renting you the space likes it or not.

More alarming still was the Q&A session at the end of the screening of Vaxxed. I watched some of it (one for the team, you’re welcome). There was much talk of “getting the message out there”, “sowing the seeds”, “people have to hear the message x times before they’ll start to accept it” and so on. In short, if you didn’t know it was all about vaccines it would start to sound an awful lot like…. well, at best a religion, and at worst a cult.

Wakefield was also asked if he would ever get his name cleared. This was his response:

Wakefield speaking at the end of the Vaxxed screening.

“Well, cleared by whom? Here’s a… it’s a really important… cleared by whom? Do I want to be part of the medical profession again? [muttering from the audience] Do I want to be exonerated by the General Medical Council? Do I want to pay them an annual retainer fee? To be part of… Do I really? Is that… that takes time and effort. What is more important? Making films like this? Or trying to clear my name? [applause]“

Hang on. If he really cared about getting the science right, about doing the right thing by patients, wouldn’t getting his name cleared and being reinstated as a medical doctor be of utmost importance? If he’s right about vaccines, particularly the MMR vaccine, and if he truly wants to prove it for the good of humanity, what better way than to be exonerated?

But as he says, “that takes time and effort.” What he doesn’t add, of course, is that making films like Vaxxed, travelling around the world spreading his message and hobnobbing with Donald Trump, almost certainly makes him a lot more money than being a doctor ever did. And I’ll bet it’s more fun. Why would he go back to the long hours and hard work that being a regular old doctor entails?

Wakefield is playing an extremely unpleasant and disingenuous game. The really worrying thing is that he and other anti-vaccination campaigners might be gaining ground. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Robert De Niro recently announced a $100,000 “challenge” to prove the safety of thimerosal vaccines. Thimerosal has already been extensively investigated – no evidence has ever been found that its inclusion in vaccines causes neurological effects, but anyway, it’s only in a few flu vaccines. Of course, the implication is that all vaccines are unsafe and that no one can prove otherwise – and now those headlines are out there, and that seed has been planted, will people really read further into it? Or will they just decide to skip the visit to the doctor?

The consequences of that are potentially serious. A mumps outbreak was reported in Washington State a week ago, and cases of mumps and measles have also just been reported in Salt Lake County. Last autumn the Guardian reported that the proportion of under-twos receiving their first dose of the MMR vaccine had fallen for the third consecutive year, and there were several reports of measles outbreaks in the UK. Flu outbreaks are also a real concern: years of hearing the phrase “mild flu-like symptoms” have created the misconception that influenza itself is a mild disease. It is not. There have been over 100 deaths from flu in Germany this year alone. People in Germany have access to good healthcare. People are still dying.

Outbreaks put everyone at risk: vaccination is effective, but nothing is 100% effective. In the midst of a full outbreak, even the vaccinated are at risk of catching the disease, and of course, those who are too young to receive the vaccine, or who can’t have it because of a genuine allergy, or because they’re immunocompromised, will be in real trouble. Let’s not forget: measles in particular is a disease with a host of horrible complications, not to mention the potential to reduce a person’s previously acquired immunity to other diseases.

Do we really want to see measles and mumps come back? Really? Because that will ultimately be the result of all of this.

And unfortunately, Captain Birk and Mr Spuck aren’t actually there to fix this mess for us. We need to see sense ourselves.

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What’s all the fuss about glyphosate?

Posted on 31 May, 2016 by katlday

Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup, has been in the news recently. A few weeks ago it was widely reported that a UN/WHO study had shown it was ‘unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans‘. But it then emerged that the chairman of the UN’s joint meeting on pesticide residues (who, incidentally, has the fabulous name of Professor Boobis) also runs the International Life Science Institute (ILSI). Which had received a $500,000 donation from Monsanto, and $528,500 from an industry group which represents Monsanto among others.

And then it transpired that there was going to be an EU relicensing vote on glyphosate two days after the (since postponed) UN/WHO report was released, which resulted in another outcry.

A molecule of glyphosate

So what is glyphosate, and why all the fuss?

It was first synthesized in 1950 by Swiss chemist Henry Martin. It was later, independently, discovered at Monsanto. Chemists there were looking at water-softening agents, and found that some of them also killed certain plants. A chemist called John E. Franz was asked to investigate further, and he went on to discover glyphosate. He famously received $5 for the patent.

Chemically, glyphosate is a fairly simple molecule. It’s similar in structure to amino acids, the building blocks of all proteins, in that it contains a carboxylic acid group (the COOH on the far right) and an amine group (the NH in the middle). In fact, glyphosate is most similar to the smallest of all amino acids, glycine. Where it deviates is the phosphonic group (PO(OH₂)) on the left. This makes it a (deep breath) aminophosphonic analogue of glycine. Try saying that when you’ve had a couple of beers.

As is usually the way in chemistry, changing (or indeed adding) a few atoms makes a dramatic difference to the way the molecule interacts with living systems. While glycine is more or less harmless, and is in fact a key component of proteins, glyphosate is a herbicide.

This probably bears stressing. It’s a herbicide. Not an insecticide. A herbicide.

Glyphosate is a herbicide, not an insecticide.

I say this because people often conflate the two – after all, they’re both chemicals you spray on plants, right? – but they are rather different beasts. Insecticides, as the name suggests, are designed to kill insects. The potential problem being that other things eat those creatures, and if we’re not careful, the insecticide can end up in places it wasn’t expected to end up, and do things it wasn’t expected to do. This famously happened with DDT, a very effective pesticide which unfortunately also had catastrophic effects on certain predatory birds when they ate the animals that had eaten the slightly smaller animals which had eaten the insects that had eaten the other insects (and so on) that had been exposed to the DDT.

Herbicides, on the other hand, kill plants. Specifically, weeds. They’re designed to work on the biological systems in plants, not animals. Often, they have no place to bind in animals and so are simply excreted in urine and faeces, unchanged. Also, since plants aren’t generally known for getting up and wandering away from the field in which they’re growing, herbicide sprays tend to stay more or less where they’re put (unless there’s contamination of waterways, but this can – and should, if the correct procedures are followed – be fairly easily avoided).

Nicotine is an effective insecticide. It’s also extremely toxic.

Now this is not to say we should be careless with herbicides, or that they’re entirely harmless to humans and other animal species, but we can cautiously say that, in general, they’re rather less harmful than insecticides. In fact, glyphosate in particular is less harmful than a lot of everyday substances. If we simply look at LD50 values (the amount of chemical needed to provide a lethal dose to half of a test population), glyphosate has an LD50 of 4900 mg/kg whereas, for comparison, table salt has an LD50 of 3000. Paracetamol (acetaminophen) has an LD50 of 338, and nicotine (a very effective insecticide, as well as being the active ingredient in cigarettes) has an LD50 of just 9.

Of course, there’s more to toxicity than just killing things, and that’s where it gets tricky. Yes, it might take more than a third of a kilo to kill you outright, but could a smaller amount, particularly over an extended period of time, have more subtle health effects?

But before we go any further down that rabbit hole, let’s take a look at that ‘smaller amount’. Certain campaigners (they always seem to have some sort of stake in the huge business that is organic food, ahem) would have us believe that food crops are ‘drenched’ in glyphosate, and that consumers are eating significant quantities of it every day.

Here’s a great graphic, made by Sarah Shultz of the Nurse Loves Farmer blog (reproduced with her kind permission), that answers this question nice and succinctly:

How much glyphosate is sprayed on crops? (Reproduced with permission of Sarah Shultz)

It’s about 1 can of soda’s worth per acre. Or, if you find an acre hard to visualise, roughly ten drops for every one hundred square feet – the size of a smallish bedroom.

In other words, not a lot. It’s also worth remembering that although there is some pre-harvest spraying – particularly of wheat crops – no farmer is spraying their crops five minutes before harvest. What would be the point of that? Farmers have margins, just like any other business, and chemicals cost money. If you’re going to use them, you use them in the most efficient way you can. The point of spraying pre-harvest is to kill any weeds that might be present so that they don’t get into your harvest. This takes time to happen, so it’s done seven to fourteen days before harvesting takes place. It’s also carefully timed in the growing cycle. Once wheat turns yellow, it’s effectively dead – it’s neither photosynthesising nor transporting nutrients – so if it’s sprayed at this point, glyphosate isn’t moved from the plant into the grain of the wheat. Which means it doesn’t make it into your food.

The long and short of all this is that if there IS any glyphosate in food crops, it’s in the parts per billion range. So is that likely to be harmful?

In March 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – the cancer-research arm of the World Health Organisation – announced that glyphosate was ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’, or category 2A. It needs to be pointed out that this outcome was controversial, as this post by The Risk Monger explains. But even that controversy aside, lots of things fall into category 2A, for example smoke from wood-burning fires, red meat, and even shift work. The IARC did note that the evidence mainly involved small studies and concerned people that worked with glyphosate, not the general public, and that recommendations were partly influenced by the results of animal studies (really, go and read that Risk Monger post). The one large-cohort study, following thousands of farmers, found no increased risk.

And by the way, alcohol has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning it’s definitely known to cause cancer in humans. If you’re worried about glyphosate in wine and beer, I respectfully suggest you have your priorities the wrong way round.

So, the tiny traces of glyphosate that might be on food definitely aren’t going to poison you or give you cancer. Are there any other health effects?

Glyphosate isn’t interfering with your gut bacteria (image: microbeworld.org)

One thing that the health campaigners like to talk about is gut health. Their logic, such as it is, follows that glyphosate passes though our body largely unchanged. Now, you might imagine this would be a good thing, but according to these particular corners of the internet, it’s exactly the opposite. Glyphosate is known to be anti-microbial, and since it’s not changed as it passes through the body, the argument goes that it gets into our guts and starts wiping out the microbes in our digestive system, which have been increasingly linked to a number of important health conditions.

It sort of makes sense, but does it have any basis in fact? Although glyphosate can act as an antimicrobial in fairly large quantities in a petri dish in a laboratory, it doesn’t have a significant effect in the parts per billion quantities that might make their way to your gut from food. Glyphosate prevents bacteria from synthesising certain essential amino acids (it does the same thing to plants; that’s basically how it works) but in the gut these bacteria aren’t generally synthesising those amino acids, because they don’t need to. The amino acids are already there in fairly large quantities; bacteria don’t waste energy making something that’s readily available. In short, glyphosate stops bacteria doing something they weren’t doing anyway. So no, no real basis in fact.

I have so far avoided mentioning GMOs, or genetically-modified organisms. “GMO” often gets muttered in the same breath as glyphosate because certain crops have been modified to resist glyphosate. If they weren’t, it would damage them, too. So the argument goes that more glyphosate is used on those crops, and if you eat them, you’ll be exposed to more of it. But, as I said earlier, farmers don’t throw chemicals around for fun. It costs them money. Plus, not-really-surprisingly-if-you-think-about-it, farmers are usually quite environmentally-conscious. After all their livelihood relies on it! Most of them use multiple, non-chemical methods to control weeds, and then just add the smallest amount of herbicide they can possibly get away with to manage the last few stragglers.

Ah, but even a little bit is too much, you say? Why not eat organic food? Then there will be absolutely no nasty chemicals at all. Well, except for the herbicides that are approved for use in organic farming, and all the other approved chemicals, famously copper sulfate and elemental sulfur, both of which are considerably more toxic than glyphosate by anyone’s measure. And, of course, organic food is much more expensive, and simply not a feasible way of feeding over seven billion people. Perhaps, instead of giving farmers a hard time over ‘intensive’ farming, we should be supporting a mixture of sustainable methods with a little bit of, safe, chemical help where necessary?

In summary, the evidence suggests that glyphosate is pretty safe. Consuming the tiny traces that might be present in food is not going to give you cancer, won’t cause some sort of mysterious ‘leaky gut’ and it’s definitely not to poison you. There is a lot of fuss about glyphosate, but it’s really not warranted. Have another slice of toast.

EDIT 2nd June 2016

After I wrote this post, a very interesting article came my way…

Petaluma city suspended use of glyphosate in favour of alternatives. Notable quote:“Having used the alternative herbicides over the past two months, DeNicola said crews have needed to apply the treatments more often to achieve similar results. The plants are also likely to regrow, since the root remains alive underground.The treatments are also said to be extremely pungent during application, with several workers complaining of eye irritation and one experiencing respiratory problems, DeNicola said. Those attributes have required the use of new protective equipment, something that was not required with Roundup.“It’s frustrating being out there using something labeled as organic, but you have to be out there in a bodysuit and a respirator,” he said.”

A classic example of almost-certainly unfounded fear leading to bad decision-making.

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Should you be scared of your shampoo?

Posted on 15 Mar, 2016 by katlday

I was doing some grocery shopping online recently (I have small children, I’ve started to view traditional supermarket shopping in the same way as beating my carpets with a stick and washing clothes in a stream) when I came across some reviews for a particular brand of shampoo.

Most of the reviews were positive, but some were not. In particular, there were a few one star ones complaining about ingredients called methylchloroisothiazolinone and methylisothiazolinone.

methylchloroisothiazolinone

What, you may be wondering, are these monstrosities? Surely with names that long they must be huge great big molecules? Actually no, they’re quite small. Methylchloroisothiazolinone (shown in the graphic) has a mere four carbon atoms and an interesting assortment of other elements. They’re part of a group of compounds called isothiazolinones, which are heterocyclic molecules that include a five-membered ring which contains nitrogen, sulfur and a C=O group.

Not surprisingly considering the unwieldy name, methylchloroisothiazolinone is often shortened to MCI. Likewise, the chemically-similar methylisothiazolinone (imagine the molecule above without the -Cl bit) goes by the moniker MI, or sometimes MIT.

MCl and MI are common preservatives in cosmetic products.

Why are these things in shampoo? Well, they are very effective preservatives. They’re antibacterial and antifungal, and work against both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, as well as yeast and fungi. This is a good thing, because some of these microbes are pretty nasty. The bacteria, for example, include such lovelies as Nocardia (associated with a particular type of respiratory disease), Staphylococcus (associated with various infections) and Listeria (most famous for causing gastrointestinal distress). It may be a small risk, but showers are warm, moist environments – basically the perfect breeding ground for these sorts of things. If these microbes start growing in your shampoo, shower gel and so on, they would then end up on your hair and skin, possibly be inhaled, and might even make their way into your bloodstream if you had a small cut somewhere.

Yuck.

So, that’s why these chemicals are there. That all sounds good, right? Why are people complaining?

The dose makes the poison is an important principle in toxicology (image credit: Lindsay Labahn, click for link)

Well, because they also have their hazards. Now, before I go any further, we should remember a very important principle of toxicology, which is that “the dose makes the poison“. Everything, I really mean EVERYTHING, is dangerous if you’re exposed to too much of it. Oxygen is quite crucial if you want to carry on living, for example, but breathe in too much of it for too long and you’re at risk of developing visual disturbances, tinnitus, nausea and muscle spasms. Too much could even be lethal. Similarly, a pinch of salt is quite nice on chips, but try and drink say, seawater, and you’ll soon regret it. Even plain water can be dangerous if you consume too much in too short a time, particularly if you’re also exercising hard.

Many chemicals that are used industrially have scary lists of associated hazards, but it’s important to remember that these warnings are usually aimed at people who use said chemical in an industrial setting. In other words, they might be handling kilograms or even tonnes of the stuff, all day every day, as opposed to the teeny tiny quantity you’re likely to meet a few times a week.

I could pick literally any ingredient in that shampoo bottle and proclaim that it’s dangerous. This would be perfectly true, but also meaningless. A more pertinent question is: is it dangerous in the quantity that you usually use?

Are methylchloroisothiazolinone and methylisothiazolinone in shampoo dangerous? There’s no evidence that they bioaccumulate (build up in the body) or that they’re linked to any kind of cancer (phew). In 2002, there was an in vitro (i.e. outside of living organisms) study of the neurotoxicity of MI which showed that mature neurons in tissue culture could be killed by 4-12 ppm solutions of the chemical. But these experiments were performed on rat brain cells in culture. Lots of things will damage cells in a petri dish: it doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to worry about them in every day life. A shampoo solution pouring straight into your brain might well be harmful, but I suggest that if that’s happening in the shower you have bigger problems. Namely, major head trauma.

However, in high concentrations, MI and MCl are definitely skin and membrane irritants, which can cause chemical burns. They’re known chemical ‘sensitisers‘. This means that exposure to them, even at fairly low levels, might cause an allergic reaction.

A patient who presented to a medical centre following a severe reaction to methylisothiazolinone in a wipe (SA Government – click image for source).

This is where we get into difficult territory, because exactly how a particular individual is going to respond to something like this can be hard to predict. For example, I’ve never had a nasty reaction to methylchloroisothiazolinone. Give me an aspirin, on the other hand, and I’m likely to be in trouble. Allergies are specific to individuals. But there is no doubt that some people do have nasty reactions to MCI and MI; some sources have suggested it might be as many as 15% of the population (and that this number might, worryingly, have increased in recent years).

These chemicals are, or at least have been, also used as preservatives in other products such as sunscreens, moisturisers and wipes (baby wipes, facial wipes and moist toilet tissue, for example), which is a particular concern because you don’t wash off the the residue from these products – that generally being the point of using them – so it lingers on the skin.

A 2014 report from the International Journal of Toxicology concluded that although MI and MCI are sensitisers at concentrations of 50 ppm and above, they weren’t at concentrations of 15 ppm (and below). And therefore they, “may be safely used in ‘rinse-off’ products at a concentration not to exceed 15 ppm and in ‘leave-on’ cosmetic products at a concentration not to exceed 7.5 ppm”.

However, also in 2014, the European Commission Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety argued that: “For leave-on cosmetic products (including ‘wet wipes’), no safe concentrations of MI for induction of contact allergy or elicitation have been adequately demonstrated.”

People have been particularly worried about children, especially with respect to baby wipes. This is not unreasonable, since not only is the contact dermatitis that can occur painful and unpleasant, but once sensitisation has occurred it can’t be reversed: anyone affected will have to read labels extremely carefully for ever after. As a result, consumer groups have campaigned to have MI and MCI removed from any product that’s left on the skin over the last few years.

I happen to have three different brands of baby wipes in my house at the moment (small children you see), and a quick glance at the ingredients tells me that MI and MCI aren’t in any of them, and nor are they ingredients in the packet of flushable moist toilet tissue in the bathroom. This is hardly a comprehensive survey of course, but it suggests that these substances might be falling out of favour. Big companies aren’t really out to get us: pictures of people with nasty skin lesions after using their products doesn’t do them any favours.

Some consumers have complained about the use of MI and MCl in products.

Some consumers have complained about the inclusion of MI and MCl in products.

Do you really need to worry? Were these consumers right to highlight the fact that the shampoo contains MI and MCI in their reviews? Well, if you know you have sensitive skin then these substances probably are best avoided. But is shampoo likely to cause sensitisation if you’re fortunate enough to be blessed with the sort of skin that generally doesn’t erupt into a rash if the wind so much as changes? No one can say for certain, but it seems unlikely because you wash it off: these substances are only in contact with your skin for a few seconds.

So, whilst it doesn’t hurt to be aware of such things, there’s probably no need to panic and throw out all your shampoo just in case. On the other hand, if you’ve been wondering why your skin seems to be permanently irritated, it might be worth checking a few ingredients labels.

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Are you ok? You look a little flushed.

Posted on 20 Nov, 2015 by katlday

Yesterday was World Toilet Day (yes, really). This is actually an admirable campaign by WaterAid to raise awareness of the fact that one in three people around the world don’t have access to a safe and private toilet. This, of course, leads to unsanitary conditions which results in the spread of infection and disease. You’ve probably never given it a second thought, but loos literally save lives.

Has the TARDIS’ replicator function gone funny?

So, with the topic of toilets in mind, I started thinking about chemical loos. If you live in the UK, the name Portaloo ® will probably spring to mind. This has practically become a generic word for a portable toilet, but it is (like Hoover, Sellotape and others) actually a brand name. I’m told that in America they call them porta-pottys or honey-buckets, which I rather like. In any case, all the chemicals and plastic make them seem like modern inventions, surely?

Actually, not at all. The idea of a self-contained, moveable toilet that you can pick up and take from place to place may be newer, but people have been using chemical toilets for hundreds of years. For example after, ahem, ‘business’ had been completed in an an old-fashioned wooden outhouse – basically a tall box built over a hole in the ground – the user would sprinkle a little lye or lime down the hole to help with the smell.

Don’t get sodium hydroxide on the toilet seat.

Both of these are strongly basic chemicals. Lye is either sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, and lime is calcium oxide. Both mix with water to form extremely corrosive, alkaline solutions and, incidentally, give out a lot of heat in the process. Both are very damaging to skin. These were the days before health and safety; whatever you did, you had to try not to spill it on the seat.

Urea, a key chemical in urine, reacts with strong alkalis in a process known as alkaline hydrolysis. This produces ammonia, which is pretty stinky (if rather tough on the lungs), so if nothing else that helped to cover up other smells. Ammonia also kills some types of bacteria (which is one reason it’s popular in cleaning products). Flies generally don’t like high concentrations of it either, so that’s another plus.

Alkalis also have another effect in that decomposition of human waste is pH dependent; it works better in acidic conditions. Adding lye or lime raises the pH and slows down this decomposition. On top of this (literally) both lime and lye are hygroscopic: they absorb water. This keeps moisture down and allows a solid ‘crust’ to form on the surface of the waste, making it difficult for any volatile, smelly chemicals to escape. Lovely.

Bleach and ammonia could result in a rocket up your…

One word of caution: it’s very, very important you don’t try to clean such an outhouse with any kind of bleach. Bleach, which contains sodium hypochlorite, reacts with ammonia to form hydrogen chloride, chlorine gas and chloramine. None of which are good for your health. Even more dramatically (if this is more dramatic than death – you decide) if there’s lots of ammonia you might get liquid hydrazine, which is used in rocket fuels because it’s explosive. Who knew that toilet chemistry could also be rocket science?

But you don’t find buckets of lye in modern chemical toilets (although, apparently, there are still some people out there using it). So what’s in there? At one time, formaldehyde, otherwise known as methanal, was common. You probably recognise it as embalming fluid; the stuff that Damien Hirst floated that shark in. It’s an extremely effective preservative. Firstly, it kills most bacteria and fungi and destroys viruses, and secondly it causes primary amino groups in proteins to cross-link with other nearby nitrogen atoms, denaturing the proteins and preventing them from breaking down.

Don’t worry, this won’t appear in your chemical toilet.

Interestingly, whilst definitely toxic in high concentrations, formaldehyde is a naturally-occuring chemical. It’s found in the bloodstream of animals, including humans, because it’s involved in normal metabolism. It also appears in fruits and vegetables, notably pears, grapes and shiitake mushrooms. The dose, as they say, makes the poison. I mention this because there are certain campaigners out there who insist it must be completely eliminated from everything, something which is entirely unecessary not to mention probably impossible (just for the hell of it, I’m also going to point out here that an average pear contains considerably more formaldehyde than a dose of vaccine).

All that said, because formaldehyde is extremely toxic in high concentrations, and because it can interfere with the breakdown processes in sewage plants (because it destroys bacteria), formaldehyde isn’t used in toilets so much anymore. In fact, many of the mixtures on sale are explicitly labelled “formaldehyde-free”. Modern formulations are enzyme-based and break down waste by biological activity. They are usually still dyed blue (if you work your way though the colour spectrum, it’s probably the least offensive colour), but usually using food-grade dye. As a result, what’s left afterwards is classed as sewage rather than chemical waste, making it easier to deal with.

So, this has been brief tour around the fascinating world of toilet chemistry. You’d never have guessed there was so much to it, would you? Now, have you considered twinning your toilet?

A horrifying story: autism, miracle mineral solution and the CD protocol

Posted on 30 Mar, 2015 by katlday

It looks lovely, but what IS it?

UPDATE: August 2016
I’ve written a summary of the key CD/MMS facts, which you will find if you follow this link. The numbers quoted are slightly different in places, as I revised my calculations based on new reading.

In my last blog post I wrote about people using apricot kernels, which contain amygdalin, as a cancer treatment. I explained how this chemical is toxic, and why eating apricot kernels could be extremely dangerous. For me, the scariest thing was that some groups were recommending that children eat them to ‘ward off cancer’. If an adult makes a bad decision about their health and treatment and consequently makes themselves more ill, or even dies as a result, it is of course a tragedy. People who prey on vulnerable individuals in this way should have the book thrown at them (and as I said in my last post, the owner and director of The Vitamin Service Ltd was given a six-month suspended prison sentence and his company was fined £10,000 for just this).

But when these dangerous treatments are given to children it’s worse. It’s much, much, MUCH worse, because children aren’t consenting. They haven’t read around the whole area and made a conscious decision, even if deeply flawed, to ignore the advice of medically-trained professionals in favour of following some other regime. They trust their parents. If their parents are somehow persuaded into giving them something dangerous and toxic, they don’t know any different.

This is why when I heard about miracle mineral solution (MMS, sometimes called ‘master mineral solution’, or ‘miracle mineral supplement’) and the CD Protocol I felt I had to write about it. Plenty of others have written about this and tried to warn people, but this is one of those times that I feel that the more people that talk rationally about this, the better. If someone is even a bit undecided and goes looking for more information, I want them to stand every chance of finding words like these rather than dangerous and inaccurate information. So here goes.

This year’s controversial Autism One conference is in May.

MMS and CD have been around for a few years, but they’re in the public eye again at the moment because of the upcoming Autism One conference*. This is a conference that claims to provide education and support advocacy efforts for children and families ‘touched by’ an autism diagnosis. Which all sounds very worthy and positive, but the conference is deeply controversial for, amongst other things, its anti-vaccination stance, its support for highly questionable therapies, and the general assertion that we are currently suffering some kind of ‘autism epidemic’ caused by environmental factors (although it’s true that autism diagnoses have risen in the last few years, evidence suggests this has much more to do with better diagnostic techniques than anything else).

This year’s Autism One conference is at the end of May, and someone called Kerri Rivera is planning to speak there.

Kerri Rivera

Rivera is one of the founders of CD Autism. Visit the CD Autism website, and you will see that their headline is “Autism: Avoidable. Treatable. Curable”, which ought to right a few alarm bells right there.

For those who might not be aware, autism is what’s called a neurodevelopmental disorder, which essentially means the brain doesn’t develop in the ‘normal’ way. In particular, children with autism struggle with social interactions and often engage in repetitive, compulsive behaviours such as flapping their hands or compulsively lining up objects. Autism symptoms usually appear gradually as the child gets older, but occasionally children get to one or two years old and then suddenly appear to go ‘backwards’ and lose their ability to communicate with the world around them. Exactly why this happens isn’t well understood. There is strong evidence that autism is primarily genetic, although it is possible that environmental factors (pollutants, certain drugs, etc) in the first 8 weeks of pregnancy might also trigger it. Either way, it looks like children are born with autism, even if their symptoms don’t appear until later.

Children with autism often repetitively stack objects.

Autism has no cure, in the sense that there isn’t a medicine or a treatment plan you can follow which will make it go away (although Kerri Rivera would have everyone believe otherwise). Children, however, often improve as they get older. This is probably simply due to the fact that as children grow their brains develop, and the human brain is remarkably adaptable and flexible. Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means there’s a huge range in the level of impairments individuals suffer. Those at the more severe end of the spectrum will always need huge amount of support and will never achieve independence. On the other hand, you do very occasionally hear stories of children ‘recovering’ from autism and losing their diagnosis (although it’s more likely that they were misdiagnosed in the first place). Others are able to learn coping strategies as they get older and, while they will probably always find certain aspects of daily life difficult, are ultimately able to function quite successfully in society.

This is where it gets dangerous, because a condition that naturally tends to improve over time is an absolute gift to anyone pushing quackery. It means that no matter what you do (or don’t) do, you’ll always be able to find lots of positive testimonials from people who are happy to say “I tried this and it worked for us!”, “My son/daughter is so much better since we started this treatment!” They probably did see a genuine improvement. Thing is, they would have seen it anyway. The really worrying question is: might they have seen a bigger improvement without the treatment?

And so briefly back to CD Autism’s tagline: “Autism: Avoidable. Treatable. Curable”. Scientific research suggests that autism probably isn’t avoidable; children are born with it. It’s not curable. There are strategies which can help children and their families to mange it (along the lines of speech therapy, social skills therapy, structured teaching and so on), but there’s no one, single proven ‘treatment’ for autism.

As a parent myself, I can empathise with parents who don’t want to believe these things. You gave birth to an apparently normal and healthy child, and then you’re told they have this condition which will affect them for the rest of their life. A condition which prevents them from interacting normally with you and the rest of your family, and one which other people will find very difficult to understand. People who don’t know them may very well think they’re rude and disruptive, and that you’re a weak parent who needs to start dishing out some discipline. Your child probably isn’t going get the education you hoped for them. They might not be able to live independently, or even ever communicate effectively. And there’s no cure for this, although some therapy might help. Your child might improve with time, but you’ll just have to wait and see how much. The uncertainty, and the stress of dealing with a child exhibiting such difficult behaviours, must be incredibly difficult to deal with.

So yes, I can understand why parents might not want to believe the science. The whole ‘big pharma has all the doctors on its payroll‘ thing must be very tempting. People like Kerri Rivera say they’re not making money from selling these treatments – they genuinely just want to spread the word – so that makes them trustworthy, right? There are many stories of other parents who’ve tried it, and they say their child improved. Surely doing something is better than doing nothing?

Well, no. No, it isn’t. Not in this case.

Have you been wondering what the CD in ‘CD Autism’ stands for? It stands for chlorine dioxide. The ‘CD protocol’ is the chlorine dioxide protocol and CDS (another common acronym) stands for ‘chlorine dioxide solution’.

CDS is made from MMS: ‘miracle’, or ‘master’ mineral solution. Minerals sound good for you, right? It’s important to eat your vitamins and minerals, isn’t it?

Let’s get down to the chemistry. Kerri Rivera has previously attacked her critics for not knowing any chemistry, and describing MMS and CDS inaccurately as a result. Well I know some chemistry. I have a BSc and a PhD in the subject, and I taught it for over ten years. So I reckon I know enough not to get this wrong.

On the CD Autism site Rivera quite openly states that this treatment is based around chlorine dioxide, ClO₂, which is produced when two liquids – sodium chlorite and citric acid – are combined. I reiterate, this isn’t hidden in any way, they are quite open about it.

Sodium chlorite, NaClO2

There is also an MMS Wiki, which explains in more detail exactly what is in this solution and how it’s ‘activated’. Here they are again quite open: MMS starts out as a 22.4% solution of sodium chlorite, NaClO₂, along with some table salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) and other trace ‘neutral’ chemicals “such as sodium hydroxide, sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate”. I find it interesting that they use the term neutral, because sodium hydroxide certainly is not, and least not in the pH sense of neutral. Sodium hydroxide is a strong alkali with a pH of (depending on the concentration) somewhere between 11-14. Sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate are also alkaline, although not as strong as sodium hydroxide. That said, Wikipedia gives a pKa value for NaClO₂ of 10-11, which I estimate ought, for a 22.4% solution, to produce a slightly acidic pH of about 5 (I was expecting it to be alkaline, so fellow chemists, please weigh in if you disagree – is the pKa value wrong?) I suspect that enough sodium hydroxide is added to keep the mixture slightly alkaline, since NaClO₂ is stable in alkaline and neutral solutions.

To a chemist, this list of chemicals is not very surprising. Bleach solution, the stuff that you use to clean your bathroom, is made by mixing cold sodium hydroxide with chlorine gas to produce a mixture of sodium chloride, sodium chlorate(I) (NaClO, also sometimes called sodium hypochlorite), and water. Just to be absolutely crystal clear, bleach is not one single pure chemical, it’s a mixture. Household cleaning products have even more stuff added to them to make them more effective, so it’s probably not accurate to directly compare MMS to household bleach (this doesn’t mean they’re safe, please read on).

NaClO₂, the stuff in MMS, is made slightly differently. But it still starts out with the reaction between chlorine and sodium hydroxide, except this time the solutions are hot. This produces yet another form of sodium chlorate, NaClO₃, which can then be combined with a reducing agent to ClO₂ and a mixture of other things.

NaClO and NaClO₂ are not quite the same things, something which Rivera and other CD advocates have been keen to point out. MMS is not bleach, they say, no matter how the media reports it. They have similar formulas, yes, but ozone and oxygen (a favoured example) also differ by one oxygen atom, and it’s safe to breathe oxygen whereas it’s not safe to breathe ozone.

Well. Yes. The thing about ozone and oxygen is true. Yes. But does that imply that NaClO₂ and chlorine dioxide are completely safe and inert? Er, no. NaClO₂ is a strong oxidant and, although it may not technically be bleach, and isn’t as corrosive as the bleach solution in your bathroom cupboard, will still make you sick if you drink it. In particular, it could affect blood-oxygen transport and cause kidney failure, amongst other things. It has an LD50 of 350 mg/kg for rats. That means that if rats are fed 350 mg per kg of body weight, half of them will die. If we scale that up to a 20 kg child (very roughly 6-7 years old), that suggests that 7 grams is enough to kill. Remember that MMS is a 22.4% solution, which I assume means 22.4 g per 100 g of water.

That means that a 100 ml bottle of MMS might be enough to kill a young child three times over.

Perhaps this is disingenuous of me. CD Autism don’t advocate drinking whole bottles of MMS, they suggest using a few drops at a time. Perhaps it’s not fair to talk about toxicity in this way. After all you can, for example, perfectly safely take a small amount of paracetamol, but if you swallow a whole packet you’ll be in serious trouble.

Chlorine dioxide, ClO2

But here’s the kicker, you don’t use MMS as it is. You ‘activate it’. Ah yes. This means mixing it with an acid solution, in particular citric acid, the acid found in citrus fruits such as oranges and lemons. When you do this, another chemical reaction happens, and ClO₂ (chlorine dioxide), NaCl (sodium chloride) and water are formed, and the resulting pH ends up somewhere around the 2.5-3 mark (which is acidic). Now we have a chlorine dioxide solution, hence “CDS”.

You really don’t want to swallow this stuff.

Let’s look at the safety data for chlorine dioxide. Chlorine dioxide IS a bleach. You see, they’re clever here. When denying the whole bleach thing, they say ‘MMS is not bleach’ (true), not ‘CDS is not bleach’ (which would be false). Chlorine dioxide is a strong oxidising agent and under EU classification it’s described as very toxic, corrosive and damaging to the environment. It’s LD50 is lower than NaClO₂‘s (lower is bad, it means less of it will kill you). Under US classifications, it has an NFPA Health rating of 3, which means that “short exposure could cause serious temporary or moderate residual injury”. Compared to chlorine dioxide, NaClO₂ is practically harmless.

Industrially chlorine dioxide is used to bleach wood pulp and in water purification, but because it’s toxic the US Environmental Protection Agency has set a maximum level of 0.8 mg/L for chlorine dioxide in drinking water. Now, it’s difficult to be sure exactly how much NaClO₂ actually gets converted to ClO₂when it’s ‘activated’ by adding citric acid, but based on the only half-sensible balanced equation I could find and allowing for 70% conversion, I estimate conservatively that there would be about 9.5 grams of chlorine dioxide per 100 ml of activated master mineral solution (plus, don’t forget, there’s still some NaClO₂ as well). That’s 95,000 mg/L, which is over one hundred thousand times the safe limit for drinking water. Even if the conversion is much less than I’ve estimated, I think we can be sure it’s well over safe limits.

And this, THIS, is the stuff that CD Autism are advocating that parents give to their children to swallow, and use in enemas.

Oh, but wait, I know what’s coming: you don’t use the whole solution in one go. You use a few drops at a time. Fine. How many drops? Well, there are different ‘protocols’ for different diseases, and for different stages of ‘treatment’, but to pick one fairly randomly I have seen someone mention 15 drops in 700 mls. Assuming a drop is 0.1 ml, I reckon that’s still about 200 mg/L. To reiterate, US safe limits are 0.8 mg/L. This is two thousand times safe limits. Even if some of my assumptions turn out to be over-generous, we are dangerously over safe limits. Do not listen when CD Autism tell you chlorine dioxide is safe because it’s used in drinking water, and because they’re only using small amounts. It is not. The amounts they’re suggesting are not, in fact, that small. This is highly dangerous and is highly likely to make your child seriously ill.

As the FDA warns, CDS can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, and symptoms of severe dehydration. There have also been reports of liver failure and severe kidney damage. CD Autism will say that the nausea and diarrhoea are symptoms of ‘detox’. It is just your body getting rid of ‘parasites’ and ‘toxins’ that have accumulated. It’s not. These are symptoms of acute toxicity. The chlorine dioxide is poisoning you, or worse, your child. These symptoms are a sign that you should stop before you do any more damage. If it’s not already too late.

The advocates CDS say that “the chlorine dioxide molecule has a chemical characteristic that changes and makes it selective for pathogens“. In other words, chlorine dioxide somehow ‘knows’ to only attack harmful microorganisms. It doesn’t – chemistry doesn’t work that way. Molecules aren’t capable of distinguishing one from another. Chlorine dioxide attacks and damages all the cells in its path, healthy and (possibly) harmful alike. And bear in mind that the bacteria in and on our bodies still aren’t that well understood. Our bodies contain a hundred bacterial cells for every single human one. Most of these bacteria are not harmful; in fact quite the opposite. They help us digest our food, bolster our immune system, and may be involved in all kinds of other processes (there was a even a paper recently suggesting that a change in gut bacteria had caused obesity in a patient). If you put something inside you, particularly straight into your gut in the form of an enema, which indiscriminately destroys pretty much everything in its path you could be literally be doing untold damage.

I mentioned parasites back there, and I just want to say a little more about this. CD Autism and their ilk are big on parasites. They believe that huge numbers of the population are infected with parasites, and that these are causing everything from cancer to autism. Their evidence for this mainly seems to come from enemas, where the ‘results’ of enema treatments (I’ll spare you pictures) show long, mucous-y strands. They say that these are worms, and sometimes call them ropeworms. Critics, on the other hand, say they are intestinal lining, removed by the harsh enema process.

Of course there are some real intestinal worms that actually exist. Roundworms and tapeworms for example. If you think you may have one of these, see a doctor – there are safe and effective treatments you can use to get rid of them without resorting to chlorine dioxide enemas. There is however no real evidence for the fictitious ‘ropeworm’. It was born out of the fevered imaginations of Nikolai Gubarev (who works, or possibly worked, in occupational safety in Russia) and Alex Volinsky (a mechanical engineer). The articles which describe their ‘discovery’ have never been published in any kind of peer-reviewed journal, although they are available online. And the very fact that they claim in one of their papers that people with “blood pH of 8-10” are more susceptible should immediately tell you everything you need to know about their (lack of) medical background. Someone with a blood pH in that range would be dead. Blood pH is strictly maintained by your body to be between 7.35 and 7.45. If it somehow gets out of that range you’re in serious trouble. A high blood pH is otherwise known as alkalosis, and results in muscle pain, muscle weakness and low blood calcium levels, and ultimately leads to seizures.

In short, don’t believe anyone that tells you that you’re infested with parasites, unless it’s a qualified medical doctor who’s had a sample of your stool properly analysed in a laboratory.

Jim Humble, who started it all in 2006 with a self-published book on MMS.

Finally, I have focused mainly on autism in this piece, and that’s because I find the use of MMS and CDS in this area the most upsetting. These chemicals are being used on children, doing them terrible damage, and it’s completely out of their control. But I also want to point out that MMS and CDS are suggested for the ‘treatment’ of a whole raft of conditions. There are ‘protocols’ for everything from acne to cancer, and from mad cow disease (seriously) to yeast infections. This all seems to have started with a character called Jim Humble, who is in his own words “an inventor” (and not a scientist, and certainly not a doctor). There is an article all about him here, which I strongly recommend. Of particular note is the fact that more than one country has an arrest warrant out for him, regarding the poisoning and death of several people.

All of which means that there is a real danger that if you go looking for alternative treatments for pretty much anything, you might at some point run into someone selling MMS and CDS. And if you do, please, turn and run.

Update June 2015

On the 28th of May 2015 a man called Louis Daniel Smith was convicted, following a seven-day trial, of conspiracy, smuggling, selling misbranded drugs and defrauding the United States. Smith operated a business called “Project GreenLife” (PGL) from 2007 to 2011, which sold a product called “Miracle Mineral Supplement,” or MMS, over the Internet. The government presented evidence that Smith instructed consumers to combine MMS with citric acid to create chlorine dioxide, add water and drink the resulting mixture to cure numerous illnesses including cancer, AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, lyme disease, asthma and the common cold.

The jury convicted Smith of one count of conspiracy to commit multiple crimes, three counts of introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud or mislead and one count of fraudulently smuggling merchandise into the United States. The jury found Smith not guilty on one out of four of the misbranded drug counts. He faces a statutory maximum of 34 years in prison at his Sept. 9 sentencing.

For the full press release from the United States Department of Justice, just follow this link.

One down…

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* Here, and throughout this article where I have felt that I ought to link to websites associated with MMS proponents, I have used the Do Not Link service. This allows me to link to the relevant pages without giving them any kind of boost in search engine rankings. I urge anyone who writes anything of a skeptical nature to use Do Not Link. Let’s not help these guys out if we don’t have to.

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the chronicle flask

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