Doug Nash, pictured in Russell, Bay of Islands, has been fighting against the Genesis Church of Health and Healing who promote MMS as a 'miracle cure'. Photo / Facebook
Doug Nash, pictured in Russell, Bay of Islands, has been fighting against the Genesis Church of Health and Healing who promote MMS as a 'miracle cure'. Photo / Facebook
What began as a sail around the world and turned into a love story ended in tragedy when one man's crewmate-turned-wife suddenly died in his arms one night.
Sylvia Fink's autopsy was inconclusive, but her husband Doug says it was a "miracle cure" that suddenly took her life.
Doug saidhis wife consumed Miracle Mineral Solutions (MMS), a remedy that claims it can be used to overcome "most diseases known to mankind" including cancer and HIV, just 12 hours before she died.
It is also advertised as a preventative for malaria, which Sylvia had wanted to protect herself from when she and Doug arrived at the Vanuatu Islands in 2009.
Sylvia, 56, had wanted to avoid the malaria pills she took once before and met fellow sailors who sold her the MMS mixture.
"There's no point," the nurse told Doug. "She's gone."
It was a devastating end to a magical love story.
Sylvia had been Doug's crewmate when he first set sail for his trip around the world in 2004.
Within six months into the trip, the two knew they had something special.
Doug was sailing with his wife Sylvia when she fell fatally ill in Vanuatu.
They eventually got married, living happily as husband and wife as they travelled through South America and spent two years in New Zealand before stopping in the Vanuatu islands.
The night before she died, Sylvia was dancing with the local children in the village. Doug said she was as healthy as could be at the time.
"There's no doubt in my mind," he said. "MMS did kill my wife."
A local hospital later found that Sylvia had a "concentrated solution" of sodium chlorite in her system at the time of her death.
The chemical compound, which is generally used for bleaching purposes, is also the main ingredient in MMS.
MMS is said to be nothing more than bleach.
"They might as well be selling Clorox," said Ben Mizer of the US Department of Justice.
"You don't drink Clorox, so there is no reason you should drink MMS."
Doug filed a report against Project Greenlife, a Nevada-based company that sold the MMS bottles Sylvia had bought, with the US FDA in 2011.
Four years later, Project Greenlife manager Louis Daniel Smith was sentenced to more than four years in prison for "marketing a toxic chemical as a miracle cure".
"The verdict demonstrates that the Department of Justice will prosecute those who sell dangerous chemicals as miracle cures to sick people and their desperate loved ones," said Mizer.
New Zealand's medical regulatory body, Medsafe, says the product is nothing more than industrial bleach that can cause "serious harm to health".
But the MMS industry continues to this day, thanks to the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which is working hard to dispute negative publicity about its product.
