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As regular SOTT.net readers will know, a few months ago we inadvertently became caught up, albeit briefly, in the disturbing world of Jim Humble and his alleged cure-all potion 'MMS'. For those that are interested in how that unsavory episode played out, you can read the details here.

To be honest, by now we thought we had closed the book on the Right Honorable 'Bishop' Humble and his friends at Nexus Magazine. Lines had been drawn, positions taken, everyone knew where they stood. But we really should have known better. There's a strange phenomenon that crops up over and over again in our line of work: when you disagree with pathological people, they seem singularly incapable of letting it go and exercising a little 'live and let live' philosophy.

A little over two weeks ago, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a safety alert for MMS which stated that Humble's 'Miracle' solution created a "potent bleach". Now and again, even US government agencies have to get something right. Of course, they only did this after the controversy on SOTT.net brought the issue out into the open.

Around the same time as the the FDA alert was issued, we published a well-researched M.D.-authored article in the excellent Dot Connector Magazine that made a strong case for using MMS in your toilet and swimming pool, but never in your body. Read the article here.

In this case, we found it interesting that the FDA acted only after SOTT made an issue of the matter and literally as our MMS article was sent to press. It is especially interesting when you consider the FDA's reaction to some things in the past that are actually good for you. As Mike Adams of Natural News writes:
...the FDA uses police state powers to bulldoze makers of vitamins, medicinal herbs or nutritional supplements who try to resist the oppression of this rogue federal agency. Let's put this in perspective: while pharmaceutical companies are lying about their drug trials, burying negative results in order to make sure the FDA doesn't see them, hyping dangerous drugs to the public that kill 100,000 Americans each year, and creating a drug import blockade by suppressing sales of cheaper drugs from Canada, the FDA somehow doesn't mind any of that. All crimes committed by pharmaceutical companies, it seems, are perfectly fine with the FDA.
We also learn here:
In 1978, the FDA submitted false data, characterized by then Congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr. as "sloppy and suspect," to justify removing adrenal cortical extract (ACE) from the marketplace, in order to make the public a captive audience for prednisone, which the FDA said was safe. For forty years, Physicians Desk Reference recorded no adverse effects from ACE. ...

When the FDA removed natural l-tryptophan from the market, the public was not informed that it was a genetically modified product that had caused the harm. Natural l-tryptophan had been used for decades with no record of adverse events.
Certainly, in our opinion, the FDA is nobody's friend. However, we find it fascinating that, until we brought it up, the FDA had no official position on MMS and, even now, it is just a "warning", a mere slap on the wrist keeping in mind that the use of some supplements has been criminalized!

Yesterday, the main distributor of Humble's miracle bleach, PGL International, issued the following recall notice for all MMS products it had sold:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: URGENT: MMS Product Recall Notice
Date:Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:13:31 -0500
From:PGL International, LLC Reply-To:
URGENT: MMS Product Recall Notice

Dear Customer,

You are receiving this email because our records indicate you may have purchased a product called "MMS" from our company at some time in the past.

Following discussion with FDA officials, Project GreenLife is effecting an immediate voluntary recall of its sodium chlorite solution product labeled "MMS Professional - Miracle Mineral Solution - Premium Water Purification Drops".

Questions and answers on voluntary recall of Project GreenLife's sodium chlorite product:

Q. What products are affected by this recall?

A. Sodium chlorite solution, labeled as "MMS Professional - Miracle Mineral Solution - Premium Water Purification Drops" distributed by PGL International, LLC. This product comes in a 4 oz green plastic bottle. This recall is for all lot numbers.

Q. Why was this product recalled?

A. PGL International, LLC is initiating this voluntary recall because of safety concerns raised by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in regards to chlorine dioxide. As a precautionary measure, the company is recalling all sodium chlorite product, effective August 13, 2010.

Q. What should I do if I resell or have ever resold this product?

A. Quit selling this product and inform anyone you have sold this product to in the past by sending them a copy of this recall communication.

Q. What should I do if I have some of this product?

A. The FDA recommends that consumers stop using this product. Further distribution or use of any remaining product should cease immediately. If you have any unused product, you may seal the container and return it to the address provided below. Shipping account information will be provided upon request. PGL will work with all customers to make them whole.

If you have any questions or comments, please email recall@projectgreenlife.com

PGL International, LLC
2533 N Carson St Ste 1991
Carson City, NV 89706
www.projectgreenlife.com
TOLL FREE PHONE: 888.349.9428
Now before your conspiratorial mind kicks into overdrive, let me make it clear that, no, we don't have any 'in' with PGL International, or the FDA for that matter. We simply stated our opinion on Humble, his product and his partners in Nexus Magazine, an opinion that was based on research and personal experience. We truly had no interest in delving into what turned out to be the rather sordid background of Jim Humble, and we certainly could have done without the disturbing encounter with Nexus owner Duncan Roads. The only explanation we can offer for the coincidental timing of the FDA announcement and the recall is: "the lord works in mysterious ways", something which 'Bishop' Humble surely won't argue with.

But again, as I mentioned, some people, finding themselves in a hole, just don't know to stop digging (maybe they like it down there in the dark), and when we received today an email from Nexus Magazine owner, Duncan Roads, addressed to one of the editors of The Dot Connector Magazine, we expected more vitriol, and Duncan didn't disappoint!
From: "Duncan M. Roads" Date :16 August 2010
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: from Duncan at Nexus Magazine

Wow,

You let Laura and her cult take over your magazine - and now you are letting them publish false and misleading information about MMS.

I hope you are proud to be supporting such a fraudulent cult organisation; and I hope you are aware of the damage you have done to your own credibility and reputation.

I guess you have no allegiance to truth and honesty after all - you were just after someone with money.

Duncan

Duncan M. Roads, Editor, NEXUS Magazine
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia.
Tel: 07 5442 9280; Fax: 07 5442 9381
Apart from the (by now) boring 'cult' slur (taken directly, it seems, from Mr. Roads recent sojourn with kindred spirits over at the godlikeproductions forum), the most interesting parts of this email are the allusion to the "damage" to the "credibility and reputation" of our editor for joining forces with SOTT.net and publishing a scientific article on the dangers of MMS; and the suggestion that our editor has "no allegiance to the truth" and was simply "after someone with money."

Two things immediately spring to mind in response:

The cyber-spittle-flecked invective that issued from Roads during our previous interaction (read it here) made it very clear that he has a rather unique idea of how to maintain one's credibility and reputation in public.

Duncan appears to have a vested (read 'financial') interest in the success of Humble's MMS snake oil (he advertises it in his magazine, arranges conferences for Jim, etc), which makes his reference to "allegiance to the truth" glaringly hypocritical. Indeed, Duncan seems to have marshalled his minions at Nexus Magazine Germany to weigh in on his behalf. Hot on the heels of the first email, our editor received the following:
Dear Paul, dear Dot-Connector staff,

in regards to your article that warned about the use of MMS: You might be interested to read the following paper - link

Please forward it to your author, so that she may educate herself.

Best regards,

Thomas Kirschner

NEXUS MAGAZIN
www.nexus-magazin.de
To which our editor replied:
From: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date : 16 August 2010
To : Thomas Kirschner
Subject : Rép : Article about ...

Dear Thomas,

Looks like you and Duncan (I have received an email from him too) refuse me the right to have my own position in re MMS, and want me to change my mind and share yours. Why? What's the problem my seeing the things a different way?

I'm neither a MD nor a chemist. I will of course transmit the attached article to Gabriela Segura; as for me, I don't need scientific arguments to see that there's no difference between promoting and imposing a 'Swine Flu' vaccine and promoting and selling MMS worldwide - both products pretend to save lives, while both have never been properly tested. Well, MMS has been 'tested' on children in Africa (a very interesting story in itself - how Jim Humble, without any official status, was allowed to use African children as guinea pigs), but the only source of information about the results are Jim Humble and his assistants themselves, nobody else. Also, I wouldn't even call MMS a finished product - as you know, it's up to the patients to make the final mixture, so if they do it wrong, they alone are responsible for consequences. And those consequences may be very, very hard. I personally know at least one person who had to have a long and painful detoxification treatment in a hospital after taking MMS. This single example is enough for me to consider MMS potentially dangerous. Paraphrasing Max Frisch (his Homo Faber novel), if MMS hurt only one person in a hundred, it could be considered a good statistics if I had a hundred children - I would lose 1/100 of them. But I have only one...

We have received an email from Jim Humble a couple days after the release of issue #10 and have published it here

For me, this email, as well as the discussion that followed on the same web page, is more than enough. We're not going to publish the discussion in the magazine (bimonthly publications are too slow for that). Also, The Dot Connector Magazine has no intention to run any kind of large-scale 'anti-MMS' campaign. The fact that readers now have a different view of MMS will allow people to decide for themselves.

Best regards
Let's have a look at the referenced study here in which Jim Humble and his supporters find "evidence of the safety" of MMS.

First of all, the trial is all about using chlorine dioxide as water purification and is almost 30 years old. It may be assumed that this study was done to justify poisoning the public by putting this stuff in the drinking water. The subjects were all young, healthy males - not weakened, sick people seeking a return to health. In fact, any subject who had any iffy pre-trial medical tests or history of disease was excluded.

The study begins by stating that "careful clinical evaluation of every subject... failed to reveal any clinically important impact upon the medical well-being of any subject as a result of disinfectant ingestion", that is to say, it neither harmed nor benefitted them. But wait, there is something here: It is stated that "there were statistically significant trends in certain biological and physiological parameters" that were judged by the workers to have "no consequence." (That is exactly how negative effects are often covered up in scientific papers.) But, what, exactly, were these "statistically significant trends"? Well, reading on we find:
Further, there was no apparent grouping of the minor subjective symptoms and objective signs noted throughout the study; the "colds," "lymphadenopathy," "sore throats" and "flu" problems noted episodically appear to be randomly dispersed among the treatment groups. ...
So, some of the subjects were getting colds, having swollen lymph glands, sore throats and flu-like symptoms but this is brushed off as "random". But isn't MMS supposed to cure such things? Not cause them?
Hemoglobin electrophoresis results indicated that, in Phase II, a small number of subjects yielded abnormal hemoglobin distributions but these individuals were found to be randomly distributed in both the treatment groups and in the control group.

... On the basis of the small magnitude of change within the normal range and the duration of the study, it was concluded that the trends identified by the analysis of variance are unlikely to be of clinical importance. The possibility that the trends might become clinically important with increased exposure cannot be excluded.
In other words, there did appear to be a problem with red blood cells, but remember, these were healthy young guys and the concentrations were not that high, so we can just brush this off as insignificant. Of course, the researchers wanted to cover their behinds by saying it COULD be significant and that increased exposure could create a problem in this area.

Then:
The analysis of variance yielded statistically significant RG-values in the comparison of the group mean corpuscular hemoglobin values for the chlorite and the chlorate groups and of the group mean urea nitrogen values of chlorate and chlorine dioxide treatment groups to the corresponding control group values, ...

Mean corpuscular hemoglobin levels in the chlorate group yielded a probability of 0.01 upon linear regression analysis. The relative slope associated with the change during the 12-week treatment period was approximately 1% of the normal physiological range per week. We believe that no physiological importance may be attributed with confidence to the variation. However, it is impossible on the basis of this study to rule out the potential physiological significance of the trend. Further study is warranted.
Again, statistically significant problems show up in the blood but it is considered "within normal range" though, again, the researchers cover their behinds by mentioning that it needs to be further studied. This obvious fudging becomes apparent in the discussion because these people KNEW what they were seeing! Their obtuseness above is absolutely shocking! The discussion says:
Several researchers have addressed the physiological effects of oral ingestion of the oxidizing agents, chlorine dioxide, chlorite and chlorate. Musil et al. (9) associated oral chlorite ingestion with methemoglobin formation.
Stop right here. What is methemoglobin?
Methemoglobin is a form of the oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin, in which the iron in the heme group is in the Fe3+ (ferric) state, not the Fe2+ (ferrous) of normal hemoglobin. Methemoglobin cannot carry oxygen. It is a bluish chocolate-brown in color. Normally one to two percent of people's hemoglobin is methemoglobin; a higher percentage than this can be genetic or caused by exposure to various chemicals and depending on the level can cause health problems known as methemoglobinemia.

Methemoglobin is a form of hemoglobin that has extremely high affinity to oxygen, resulting in almost no oxygen delivery to the tissues. When its concentration is elevated in red blood cells, tissue hypoxia can occur. classical drug causes of methemoglobinaemia include antibiotics (trimethoprim, sulphonamides and dapsone), local anaesthetics (especially articaine and prilocaine), and others such as aniline dyes, metoclopramide, chlorates and bromates.

Signs and symptoms of methemoglobinemia (methemoglobin >1%) include shortness of breath, cyanosis, mental status changes (~50%), headache, fatigue, exercise intolerance, dizziness and loss of consciousness. Arterial blood with elevated methemoglobin levels has a characteristic chocolate-brown color as compared to normal bright red oxygen containing arterial blood.

Severe methemoglobinemia (methemoglobin >50%) patients have dysrhythmias, seizures, coma and death (>70%)

Healthy people may not have many symptoms with methemoglobin levels < 15%, however patients with co-morbidities such as anemia, cardiovascular disease, lung disease, sepsis, or presence of other abnormal hemoglobin species (e.g. carboxyhemoglobin, sulfehemoglobin or sickle hemoglobin) may experience moderate to severe symptoms at much lower levels (as low as 5-8%).
Obviously, a doctor reading this study would know what that word meant but the average person does not and clearly, Jim Humble did not or he would have understood the implications of this study that he uses to justify selling people bleach to drink. It does NOT justify it; just the converse. It has information that should make any thinking person realize that MMS is a dangerous substance especially to a person who is not in a state of robust health!

But, there is more!
In studies by Heffernan et al. (7,8), Abdel-Rahman et al. (5) and Couri et al. (6), hemolytic anemia and suppressed glutathione levels were observed in animals treated with chlorite. The oral administration of chlorate to laboratory animals has been shown to induce oxidative destruction of hemoglobin and methemoglobin formation formation (10, 11). The possibility of renal toxicity at high levels of chlorite ingestion was suggested by the increased kidney/body weight ratio reported by Heffernan et al. (7). Haller and Northgraves (12) and Fridlyand and Kagan (13) examined the chronic toxicity of orally consumed chlorine dioxide in rats; a slightly increased two-year mortality rate and a decreased rate of weight gain were observed. Oral administration of chlorite (14-16) to mice was shown to increase mean corpuscular volume, osmotic fragility, and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activity of erythrocytes; morphologic changes were reported. In the African Green monkey, chlorine dioxide adversely affected thyroid function; chlorite ingestion yielded transient changes in hemoglobin levels and red cell count (17). The maternal toxicity, embryonic toxicity and the teratogenic potential of concentrations of sodium chlorite was evaluated in rats (18).
In other words, very, very toxic effects of this substance have been shown in laboratory animals but clearly, the government wanted to put this in drinking water and that is why this study was designed for the express purpose of showing that a few weeks drinking of chlorine dioxide by some very healthy guys wasn't going to kill them! The researchers again cover their behinds on this with the following:
Unfortunately, the information available on the impact of chlorine dioxide, chlorite, and chlorate ingestion in man is severely limited. Epidemiological studies (19,20) have failed to conclusively identify any significant exposure related effects. The clinical evaluation described in this report was an attempt to elucidate the effects of the chlorite, chlorine dioxide and chlorate in man under controlled clinical conditions....

No definitive finding of detrimental physiological impact was made in any of the three phases of this human investigation of the relative safety and tolerance of oral chlorine disinfectant ingestion. In several cases, statistically significant trends were associated with treatment; however, none of these trends were judged to have immediate physiological consequence. One cannot rule out the possibility that, over a longer treatment period, these trends might indeed achieve proportions of clinical importance. However, within the limits of the study, the relative safety of oral ingestion of chlorine dioxide and its metabolites, chlorite and chlorate, was demonstrated by the absence of detrimental physiological response.
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And so, based on a limited study of very healthy men drinking poison over a short period of time, they justified putting this stuff in everyone's drinking water where babies, fragile old people, the severely ill and disabled, will ingest it. They did this despite the severe flaws of the study and the awareness of what chlorine dioxide and related chemicals can do to animals. And Jim Humble bases his claims on this study. He is sure that no one will actually read it. Well, we did and we are appalled at the callous irresponsibility shown by this man who claims to be a chemist and who, of all people, should understand how scientific papers are written to serve the agendas of those funding them.

The entire MMS/Nexus fiasco, as it has evolved to this point, has left us a little perplexed. Have we accidentally poked our inquisitive noses into the middle of an international 'medical bleach' trafficking scam, complete with a type of mafia employed to 'take out' the opposition, all of which is now in the process of unraveling? Or is this simply the tale of a latter day snake-oil salesman with a messianic complex and a foul-mouthed magazine owner who, in true pathological style, doesn't know when to stop digging...

Stay tuned for updates as they come in.