Bleach-based ‘miracle’ elixir linked to death, severe illness

MELBOURNE - A bleach-based ‘miracle’ water additive that claims to cure everything from AIDS to cancer has cause death of one and hospitalization of ten others in Australia.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration investigated the online company that sells Miracle Mineral Solution water purification drops after a complaint from a senior public health expert, who warned of fatal complications from the liquid.

Last year in Australia, an American sailor Silvia Fink suffered vomiting and extreme abdominal pain before lapsing into a coma and died 12 hours after drinking the “miracle” solution mixed with lime juice to ward off malaria.

“It went bad from the beginning … from almost the moment she drank the mixture of MMS,” The Age quoted Doug Nash, her husband, as writing to friends in the days after Fink’s death in Vanuatu.

Online supplier mmsbuyaustralia.com.au, one of seven online companies selling the solution, has issued a retraction on its website, posting the ill-effects of the liquid.

However, it continues to sell the product.

Miracle Mineral Solution, known as MMS, is chlorine dioxide - a bleach used in safe amounts as a cleaning agent for drinking water and swimming pools, and used to prepare some foods, such as flour. It is mixed by adding citric acid to sodium chlorite before being consumed.

Sodium chlorite can cause kidney failure and methemoglobinemia, a condition in which red blood cells do not bind with oxygen.

The solution is not legally registered but one of the online companies that supplies MMS here claims it sells more than 40 bottles each day.

In the Melbourne cases, one patient was treated at the Austin Hospital after incorrectly mixing the two solutions, while another who swallowed 50 drops instead of 15 was admitted to the Sandringham Hospital. Both patients suffered from vomiting and headaches. A third person, who was sick for three days and had difficulty swallowing, was advised to seek urgent medical attention at the nearest hospital.

But Jim Humble, the American creator, has defended his invention.

“Out of the estimated 2million people who have already used MMS there are at least 100,000 lives saved and more hundreds of thousands of people have overcome their suffering and returned to living their lives back in a normal fashion,” Humble wrote on an internet site.

“Thirteen years ago, I stood in the jungle of Guyana and accepted the responsibility to take the cure that I had found to mankind … I risked my life to prove my discovery,” he added. (ANI)