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As claimed on page 33 of this MMS book:

  • All pathogens (poison producers) have a negative ORP.

  • All beneficial bacteria have a positive ORP.

    In other words:

    The beneficial bacteria are positively charged.

  • Human tissue cells also have a weak positive charge.

Are these valid claims?

Additional clarification of the terminology:

  • ORP

    All organisms and body cells and even liquids have an ORP (Oxidation Reduction Potential) that can be either positive or negative. The ORP is the electrical charge that cells exert on other things in their immediate environment. Oxidizers also have an ORP, mostly called Oxidation Potential, and all oxidizers have a positive potential.

  • Pathogens

    Pathogens create a waste material that is poisonous to the body.

  • Beneficial bacteria

    Beneficial bacteria do not generate any poisonous material.

kenorb
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    It's worth to note that the meanings "negative" and "positive" as we use on physics are purely arbitrary and have no meaning as "good" or "bad". – T. Sar Sep 26 '16 at 20:41
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    Unlikely: strictly aerobic microbes generally have positive ORP and strictly anaerobic microbes generally have negative ORP. Given that there are pathogens among both aerobic and anaerobic microbes, that leads me to believe that the claim is pseudoscience. – called2voyage Sep 26 '16 at 21:00
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    That it might be pseudoscience is unsurprising, given the source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement – called2voyage Sep 26 '16 at 21:01
  • @called2voyage The wiki page is not credible, indeed FDA published the warning, but the rest is the wikipedist imagination. The article has a lot of issues, it claim that MMS is a sodium chlorite (which is toxic), but ignoring the fact that after acid activation you've completely different solution. This page is basically trying to scare people out, nothing more. Secondly mentioned claim isn't much related to the linked wiki page. – kenorb Sep 27 '16 at 17:35
  • @kenorb That was mostly a side note in any case. You've completely side-stepped my first comment about microbes' ORP: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC98907/ – called2voyage Sep 27 '16 at 17:42
  • On [reduction potential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_potential) page we can read that pathogens have shorter survival times for ORP above 665 mV. This [study](http://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8149.pdf) tell that oxidation-reduction occurs at the cathode (negative) which destroying the ingerity of cell membranes and pathogenic bacteria can be killed by different ORP levels (see: Table 1). Also different ORP means different pH, so more acidic water may leads to higher pathogens. I'm not an expert, but I can clearly see correlation between ORP and destroying the pathogens. – kenorb Sep 27 '16 at 18:00
  • In [here](http://www.ozoneapplications.com/info/orp.htm) we can read that 'ORP level can also be viewed as the level of bacterial activity of the water because a direct link occurs between ORP level and Coliform count in water.', 'The higher the ORP level, the more ability the water has to destroy foreign contaminants such as microbes, or carbon based contaminants.'. So in my understanding beneficial bacteria can be positively charged. – kenorb Sep 27 '16 at 18:06
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    Of course, raise the ORP enough and you'll kill *everything*, but you're asking about it somehow distinguishing between pathogens and beneficial organisms, which there is no evidence for. – called2voyage Sep 27 '16 at 18:19
  • So that means it's possible, but there is no evidence for it. – kenorb Sep 27 '16 at 18:29
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    @kenorb No, it is not possible. See my answer. – called2voyage Sep 27 '16 at 21:17
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    Whether a bacteria is "beneficial" or not can largely depend where about it is in your body. The same bacteria that live in your gut and help you digest food would cause fatal infections if they got into your bloodstream. – GordonM Nov 30 '18 at 11:12

2 Answers2

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The beneficial strain of E. coli K-12 has a negative ORP. Therefore, the original claim cannot be universally true.

Furthermore, E. coli is a facultative anaerobe, which means it can survive in both oxygenated and oxygen-free environments. Since some strains of E. coli are pathogens, this means that the claims elsewhere in that document that oxygen kills pathogens but preserves beneficial organisms are also false.

Source:

called2voyage
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Pathogens create a waste material that is poisonous to the body.

The more common definition of pathogen is that it does harm to its host - see abstract of this interesting looking paper "What is a pathogen?" which notes that "pathogen" is mutually defined with "host" - a pathogen for one organism may be innocuous or even beneficial to another. Similarly the location within the host matters: most strains of E. coli are beneficial in the human large intestine e.g. through vitamin K production but are a cause of urinary tract infections. So ORP by itself does not classify the bacteria.

The beneficial bacteria are positively charged.

This seemingly conflates the reduction potential with the electrostatic charge. This extensive table of electrode potentials shows that the reduction of positively charged ions can have either a positive or a negative electrode potential.

human tissue cells have a weak positive charge

Actually the cell membrane surface charge is reported to be negative. However since the context of this claim in the linked MMS book is that the positive charge repels oxygen which "is positively charged" it is probably safe to ignore it since this reasoning would apparently prevent oxygen interacting with cells too, i.e. preventing respiration.

Tom Goodfellow
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