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 ClO₂ when 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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