Parents are poisoning their children with bleach to ‘cure’ autism; these moms are trying to stop it

Authored by kristv.com and submitted by ATPP_
image for Parents are poisoning their children with bleach to ‘cure’ autism; these moms are trying to stop it

The groups are filled with parents who say they have tried treating their children with chlorine dioxide.

“Have not been able to get 5 year old to cooperate with enemas,” a Massachusetts mother complained, according to a screenshot provided by Eaton and Seigler, who work together in their investigating.

One Georgia mother posted a photo of a long thread of what looks like mucus that she said dislodged after giving her autistic son a chlorine dioxide emema. In the caption, she wrote, “It broke in half when Jojo trying to escape.”

NBC News reached out to each of the parents behind the posts but did not receive any responses.

The worst part is the comments, which suggest that the children’s adverse reactions are just proof that the chlorine dioxide is working, Eaton and Seigler said.

Eaton and Seigler often do their work with little sense of whether they’re making a difference. State privacy laws mean they don’t hear back on most of their child abuse reports, and federal agencies have been hesitant to act on their tips, often claiming a lack of jurisdiction or evidence, according to emails viewed by NBC News. The Department of Justice declined to comment, and the FDA did not respond to a request for comment. And for years, until the recent crackdown on health misinformation groups, Eaton said, Facebook simply replied with a “blanket statement that it doesn’t violate their policy.”

It’s not just Facebook. Evangelists for dubious autism cures have long relied on Amazon and eBay to sell their books and chemicals like chlorine dioxide, YouTube to share their how-to videos, and Skype and other social media to spread the word to their millions of followers — adherents who take to all these platforms to profess their devotion.

Chlorine dioxide — a hazardous mix of sodium chlorite and an acid activator such as citric acid — was first promoted as a miracle cure two decades ago by Jim Humble, a former Scientologist and gold prospector.

Humble, 86, claimed he’d used the chemical compound to heal a case of malaria while on a South American expedition. It worked so well, Humble says in his book and on his website, that he named himself the archbishop of a new religion devoted to chlorine dioxide, branded it the Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS for short, and promoted it as a cure for AIDS, cancer, diabetes and virtually every other malady. Humble did not respond to a request for comment.

But it was Kerri Rivera, a former Chicago real estate agent, who brought chlorine dioxide to the autism community and became its best-known proponent.

As she tells it in her 2013 book, “Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism,” Rivera, who is not a doctor, stumbled across Humble’s teachings while experimenting with autism cures on her son. Rivera had made contacts in the autism cure world by trying different en vogue regimens like hyperbaric chambers and heavy metal antidotes.

“Disappointingly, there was absolutely nothing on the Internet about autism and Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS),” Rivera wrote in her book.

Rivera changed that, laying out the particulars of her chlorine dioxide protocol in her book, which she promoted on her website, in Facebook groups and in YouTube videos. Rivera created a line of supplements and built a consultation business through Facebook and Skype to bring the “treatment” to all autistic children, all while traveling the autism cure circuit, where parents attending autism and anti-vaccination conferences received her as a savior. Today, she lives and operates a clinic offering chlorine dioxide regimens in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and claims to have cured autism in more than 500 children.

The ingredients that make up Rivera’s chlorine dioxide protocol aren’t illegal — sodium chlorite and acid are used together for purposes outside of human consumption like bleaching paper and for wastewater treatments — so regulation of its sale is nearly impossible. But it is illegal under both federal and state consumer protection laws to market or sell chlorine dioxide as a cure for human ailments. After inquiries from the Illinois attorney general’s office in 2015, Rivera agreed not to conduct seminars or sell products in the state.

Rivera declined to be interviewed by NBC News, but in emails she defended chlorine dioxide and her credentials. “This is a medical issue. I have a degree in homeopathy and work with MDs and PhD scientists,” she wrote. Rivera did not respond to requests for more information about these doctors and the institution that granted her degree.

Doctors warn chlorine dioxide could do irreparable harm to a child’s body, by damaging tissues in the digestive system and wreaking havoc on red blood cells.

“It can lead to kidney damage and kidney failure,” said Dr. Daniel Brooks, medical director at Banner University Medical Center’s Poison and Drug Information Center and Outpatient Toxicology Clinic in Phoenix. He called its use to treat autism “ludicrous.”

“This stuff does nothing other than introduce potential risk,” Brooks said.

In a video, Rivera scoffs at doctors’ warnings: “If it’s deadly, we would see dead people.”

In fact, we do. In the last five years, poison control centers have managed 16,521 cases nationwide dealing with chlorine dioxide, according to data provided by the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Approximately 2,500 of those cases involved children under 12; it’s not clear how many of those children were autistic.

The data showed serious side effects from chlorine dioxide poisoning in 2,123 cases since 2014. Fifty of those cases were considered life-threatening, and eight people died.

A review of a separate database, the Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System, found eight cases of serious injuries from chlorine dioxide since 2004. The cases included a 6-year-old autistic girl hospitalized with liver failure in 2017.

In 2018, Jose Serrano called the Indianapolis police department to complain for the second time in weeks that his wife was making their 2-year-old daughter drink a chlorine dioxide solution in an attempt to cure her autism. Police responded by calling the state’s Child Protective Services division, who removed the child from her mother’s home.

Serrano, 29, who was separated from his wife at the time, told NBC News that she had been secretly dosing their daughter in the bathroom to hide it from him and the rest of her family, who all disapproved.

“She was just frustrated with the autism,” Serrano said.

She learned about the concoction in a Facebook group, according to the police report.

“She wasn’t listening to anybody,” Serrano said. “When we found out, we told her, her brothers told her. I don’t know if she’s still in her delusional world. But she’s always looking for the solution.”

Serrano currently has custody of his daughter, now 3. It took a few months for a full-body rash, the only side effect he saw from the chlorine dioxide, to go away, he said.

“She has autism. But it is going to get better,” Serrano said. “She’s improved a lot. She says some words here and there. But I know it’s going to take a long time.”

When reached by phone, Serrano’s ex-wife, who has not been charged with a crime and spoke on the condition that she not be named out of concern for her privacy, said she regretted trying to cure her daughter’s autism with chlorine dioxide. “I love my daughter and having her with me is the most important thing,” she said.

Emma Dalmayne was among the first and remains one of the loudest disability rights advocates to fight against harmful autism “cures.” A London mother to autistic children and autistic herself, Dalmayne has railed against dangerous treatments like chlorine dioxide since 2015. It was Dalmayne who inspired Eaton and Seigler by first infiltrating Rivera’s groups and making videos exposing parents who treated their children with chlorine dioxide.

In 2018, prompted by a series of articles in the British tabloid Daily Mirror that were informed by Dalmayne, Facebook closed several of Rivera’s pages and groups with thousands of followers. But administrators for the banned groups, including Rivera, simply created new private groups, and more carefully vetted would-be members.

“The problem is if you manage to get one knocked down, it reopens the next day but it goes secret,” Dalmayne said. “So unless you’ve got a good fake profile, which I have, and you’re friends with people in these groups who will tell you where the next secret group has opened, you can’t report them. A lot of them I’m not in and we’ll never know about.”

A more serious round of purges started in March, when Amazon took the unusual step of banning Rivera’s book and an autism “cure” book by another author. Amazon declined to elaborate on the ban, which came one day after a Wired article criticized Amazon for selling autism cure books. Rivera said in an email to NBC News that the removal of her book would “decrease public awareness” of her message and that Amazon was “responding to media-generated hysteria.”

Days later, YouTube began deleting dozens of Rivera’s videos and channels, which featured interviews with parents and explainers for mixing and administering chlorine dioxide. A representative for Google, which owns YouTube, said the chlorine dioxide content, which also included a channel not run by Rivera, had been removed because it violated standards against “content intended to encourage dangerous activities that have an inherent risk of physical harm.”

Yahoo followed in April, canceling Rivera’s longtime email account. Eaton had emailed and called the company’s press, legal and law enforcement departments to inform them that Rivera was using the account for her chlorine dioxide business. Yahoo did not respond to a request for comment.

The biggest blow came in April, when Facebook deleted Rivera’s public profile, a page for her books with over 3,600 followers and a secret group with about 550 members. “Facebook wants to destroy our autism self-help community,” Rivera wrote in a newsletter to her followers after the crackdown. “Now 31,000 families that came to this page for advice, questions and solace have in essence been kicked off Facebook.”

A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News that Rivera’s groups were removed for violating Facebook’s rules on “nonmedical drugs,” which forbid content that promotes drug sales or describes personal drug use outside of recovery.

“We believe in giving people a voice, but we also want everyone using Facebook to feel safe,” the company spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News.

Because of Facebook and YouTube’s whack-a-mole style of enforcement, in which users are rarely banned even if their groups are closed, Rivera’s content is still easy to find on the platforms. Rivera still has a personal Facebook account, a professional page and other groups dedicated to a separate diet brand, which she uses to sell supplements and promote her autism cure website. Rivera also still has a YouTube account and numerous conspiracy channels have featured interviews with her in the last month.

Rivera tried to move her chlorine dioxide groups from Facebook to MeWe, a less user-friendly group chat service billed by fringe groupsand some conservatives as the answer to censorship from tech companies. But the 100 or so members of Rivera’s MeWe group miss the community they made on Facebook, which had five times as many members.

When a MeWe moderator asked what Rivera thought of the new setup, Rivera replied, “Insane.”

Meanwhile, Eaton and Seigler are watching MeWe, as well as Rivera’s Facebook pages, for signs of new groups targeting parents of autistic kids.

“Her profile needs to go and they need to ban her IP address,” Eaton said, adding that Rivera’s remaining accounts have allowed her to warn followers about upcoming bans and tell them how to skirt them.

“I’m also trying to work and take care of my family,” Eaton said. “It shouldn’t be on the public to try and handle this.”

BallisticHabit on May 26th, 2019 at 06:08 UTC »

Some parents: " I absolutely will not expose my child to the CHEMICALS in vaccines." Child dies of preventable disease.

Other parents: "Autism? Whee, industrial strength bleach! " Child dies slow painful preventable death.

Wtf?

ptapobane on May 26th, 2019 at 05:21 UTC »

I mean you can’t be autistic if you’re dead so it technically works very well

poisonkat on May 26th, 2019 at 04:13 UTC »

This has been going on for so long now and somehow its not illegal. They are allowed to stick a tube up their kids ass, use a bleach enema on the daily. They end up shedding huge chunks of stomach lining and these lunatics say they are the autism "parasites"...