What do the “cures” being touted look like? Unfortunately, parents of autistic children have been advised by M.M.S. sellers to feed their children a protocol of 16 doses of bleach orally, in addition to a bleach enema to “cure” their condition. In the last five years, poison control centers have managed more than 16,000 chlorine dioxide cases, including a 6-year-old autistic girl hospitalized with liver failure.

Thousands of parents have been swayed into the dark world of autism “biomedicine” and their children have become 24-hour test subjects for dangerous protocols such as M.M.S., chelation and other products that have no evidence of benefit and clear evidence of harm. We think of the case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, who died following a “chelation for autism” treatment.

One reason it is so difficult to combat M.M.S. is that it’s more than just a product: It’s a belief system. With Genesis II, for example, bleach products are made by an organization calling itself a “church” and touting its products as “sacraments.” We have seen the sellers create online “parent support communities” where the ideology around the product is continually reinforced. Group administrators, who work directly for the seller, cajole parents to “stay the course” and keep using the product.



Think about the message this sends to children with autism. To know your parents want to “cure” your neurological differences to the extent that they would feed you bleach multiple times a day is devastating.

The lack of regulatory protection is a big part of the problem. Pseudoscience thrives when there is cultural complacency. We reach out regularly to Facebook and other platforms asking for the M.M.S. “support group” pages to be shut down, but often Facebook’s response is that the groups do not “go against one of our specific Community Standards.” Kerri Rivera’s bleach-cure Facebook groups had thousands of followers before they were shut down — only after pressure from the media.

YouTube was also initially slow to respond in our view; however, it is responding now. To their credit, Amazon and eBay have removed M.M.S. products for sale.

While Health Canada has been cracking down on M.M.S., and one seller was convicted under Canada’s Food and Drug Act, the F.D.A. has been much slower to take action. Although we’ve contacted the F.D.A. for years, it wasn’t until this month that it issued temporary injunctions against the bleach-cure sellers based on the groups’ Covid-19 marketing. In our view, this should have happened long before the pandemic, to protect children with autism and others.

This week, scientists, doctors and public health authorities are themselves taking to social media in an attempt to reverse the harm of the bleach-cure myth. We hope this will bring more attention and action against all pseudoscience. For years, we have watched parents become so engulfed in misinformation that they have turned from hopeful parents to abusers, recruiting others into their deluded, fear-based ideology.