I have a lot of faith in Chlorine Dioxide as a broad-spectrum anti-pathogenic treatment.
Polarizing issues "R us" here at PF, yet I can hardly think of a chemical product that inspires such an extreme divergence of opinion as Chlorine Dioxide, aka Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS). While advocates such as
Jim Humble,
Andreas Kalcker, and the
Genesis II Church describe it as a virtually miraculous cure for almost any infectious disease (including covid-19), the FDA views it as a life-threatening fraud.
Beth Mole, at Ars Technica, colorfully expresses the FDA position:
https://arstechnica.com/science/201...rink-bleach-in-case-you-needed-that-reminder/
People are still drinking bleach—and vomiting and pooping their guts out
The “Church of Bleach” is still strong, despite years of warnings.
The US Food and Drug Administration this week released an important health warning that everyone should heed: drinking bleach is dangerous—potentially life-threatening—and you should not do it.
...When users prepare the solution as instructed, it turns into the potent bleaching agent chlorine dioxide, which is an industrial cleaner. It’s toxic to drink and can cause severe diarrhea, vomiting, life-threatening low blood pressure, acute liver failure, and damage to the digestive tract and kidneys. [....]
According to a June investigation by NBC News, poison control centers across the country have seen 16,500 cases involving chlorine dioxide since 2014. At least 50 of those cases were deemed life-threatening. Eight people died.
The NBC News investigation mentioned above, is rather amusing. While they do briefly mention the 50 life threatening cases and 8 deaths involving MMS since 2014, the story is mainly about a mother, Laurel Austin, who is giving MMS to her adult autistic children, Joshua and Jeremy Austin. The woman's ex-husband, Bradley Austin, is outraged, and has been trying to put a stop to it. But the police wouldn't intervene:
According to the investigation notes, after speaking to Bradley Austin, the officers went to Laurel Austin’s home. She told the officers that she was following Rivera’s chlorine dioxide protocol and said she’d seen improvement in her sons’ behavior since she began giving them the solution. The police observed both Joshua and Jeremy and determined they seemed to be happy and in good health and neither appeared to be in pain.
Although the NBC News reporter (Brandy Zadrozny) is incredulous, the bottom line is that the patients are doing fine. Unfortunately, we have nothing but Laurel's impressions to rely on when it comes to determining therapeutic effectiveness.
The FDA's characterization of the CD preparation as "dangerous and potentially life-threatening" needs to be considered in light of Paracelsus's maxum that "the dose makes the poison". Most if not all drugs become toxic at some dose, characterized as the median lethal dose (LD50) at which half of all the patients die. Hopefully, the therapeutically effective dose is well below the LD50 lethal dose. The ratio of the LD50 to the effective dose for 50% of patients (ED50) is called the
Therapeutic Index.
I was surprised to learn that
the Therapeutic Index for Tylenol is about 3. That is, the recommended effective dose is 3 grams a day (six extra strength tablets) and the lethal dose LD50 is 10 grams. Even 6 grams a day is enough to cause serious risk. According to an article at
HuffPo, Tylenol overdose results in about 150 fatalities a year in the US, as well as 78,000 emergency room visits and 33,000 hospitalizations. Tylenol is also the leading cause of acute liver failure, according to the article.
The concept of Therapeutic Index for Chlorine Dioxide is arguably sketchy, in that there's nothing but anecdotal evidence that it's effective as a cure for anything at any dosage. But as Ruby Gray explained, there is a "standard protocol" which the practitioners recommend, so we can compare that protocol to the lethal dose of Chlorine Dioxide.
Wikipedia gives the LD50 for CD as 292 mg/kg in rats. Extrapolating to a typical 90kg adult male human, we get an LD50 of 26 grams. The standard formulation of the "Miracle Mineral Solution" is a mix of sodium chlorite with HCl, which retains some of the chlorite as well as the CD reaction product. The LD50 of sodium chlorite is similar to CD at 350 mg/kg.
The recommended daily dose of "MMS" is 3 drops of the sodium chlorite 22.4% solution, eight times a day. According to my math, that works out to 312 mg of sodium chlorite, so the Therapeutic Ratio is about 83.
Wikipedia says that a dose of 10 grams of sodium chlorite can be lethal, and even a single gram could be life-threatening to some individuals. Even using the latter figure, we have a safety factor of three. Less if we're considering a 45kg adult woman, or a child.
Kids, please check my math before you try this at home!! And furthermore, anybody who drinks bleach based on what they read on some blog on the Internet, is on their own. And I'm going through this exercise for evaluation purposes, and not meaning to make any recommendation.
If you ask my opinion, the risk benefit ratio is dubious. There's not as much safety margin as I'd ideally like, even assuming I've done the figures correctly.
But if it's true that MMS has a Therapeutic Index of 83, compared to Tylenol's ratio of 3: it seems to me that the FDA ought to spend more of their time railing against Tylenol, rather than putting MMS purveyors in prison.
And, my view of the risk benefit ratio would change if I contracted covid-19 and I couldn't get chloroquine!!
In the video below, Andreas Kalcker recommends mixing the sodium chlorite & the activating acid in a shot glass, and then allowing the chlorine dioxide to outgas from the solution. He then recaptures the gas into a new water solution, thus producing pure chlorine dioxide solution with no remaining chlorite.
Since most of the anecdotal testimonials involve the original MMS, there's no way to be sure whether the therapeutic effects (if any) are because of the chlorite, the CD, or both.
But if one assumes the active ingredient is the chlorine dioxide, then the purified product is probably less toxic since it contains much less chlorine by weight.
[Edit 4/18/20: The video on making CDS keeps getting deleted! First YouTube censored it, then Vimeo. Now it's been posted to yet another hosting site, where the url is https://lbry.tv/@Kalcker:7/Cómo-hacer-CDS--ENG:5 . Videos at lbry.tv aren't supported for embedded view here.]
[Edit 5/1/20: the link at lbry.tv is broken now. It appears to be a technical glitch, rather than deliberate censorship. But meanwhile, here's another url that's working as of today:
https://elopage.com/s/naturalbiophysics/basic-course-clo2/preview?lesson_id=241038 ]