Woman Dies After Drinking 'Cure' That's Basically Clorox

It's promoted by a fringe church whose founder says he's from another galaxy
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 27, 2016 3:47 PM CDT

An institution calling itself the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing is anything but, according to a man who says an elixir promoted by the church as a "miracle cure" is the same concoction that killed her, ABC News reports. Doug Nash says he and his wife, Sylvia Nash (or Sylvia Fink, per a March Washington Post article), were on a sailing trip around the world in 2009 when they stopped in the Vanuatu Islands. It was there they ran into other travelers hawking an anti-malaria concoction, and after purchasing a sample of Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS, Sylvia tried it. Right away, things went wrong. "She said, 'Oh my God, that's awful," Doug says, recalling that about 15 minutes after her negative taste test, Sylvia started complaining about not feeling well. By evening, her symptoms—diarrhea, vomiting, nausea—had become so bad, Doug suspected she'd been poisoned.

His 56-year-old wife died before help could arrive. The autopsy noted she had ingested sodium chlorite (MMS' main ingredient), which is basically industrial bleach, federal prosecutors say. "They might as well be selling Clorox," the DOJ's Ben Mizer tells ABC. The "healing" medicine was traced back to a firm called Project GreenLife, and in 2015, operator Louis Daniel Smith was convicted and sentenced to four-plus years in prison for hawking the product as a cure for a variety of maladies. But the Genesis church founded by Jim Humble—an elderly man who says he came from another galaxy, per the Post—has built up its following around MMS and claims thousands of success stories. Making things harder for the feds: Supplements like this aren't FDA-regulated. Meanwhile, its promoters keep pushing it. "If they do lock me up, I know how to do out-of-body travel. I can go anywhere, see anything I want to see," one of the church's "bishops" told the Post. (An "Elixir of Long Life"?)

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