Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

Faced with growing concern about her failure to inform authorities about illicit research being carried out through the Heimlich Institute, congressional candidate Victoria Wells Wulsin has finally released the report itself after weeks of promising it to this forum.

The report however has been changed by the insertion of an “after the fact” Executive Summary. The original report had no such summary. Normally an Executive Summary condenses the report into a précis for the busy reader. The purported Executive Summary put forward by Wulsin is a selected extract of the few parts of the report which are critical of “Malariotherapy” slanted in a way to make it appear that Wulsin was critical of Heimlich’s work in this area. Missing from the Executive Summary are examples of how Wulsin suggested that work continue, expand, and be renamed.

Wulsin’s changing of the report by seemingly adding the summary as if it were there all along is akin to a doctor modifying a medical record after the fact, an illegal and unethical act.

Robert Baratz, MD, PhD, DDS, President of the National Council Against Health Fraud, has written an overview of the Malariotherapy work at the Heimlich Institute and Wulsin’s role in it. His comments appear below, followed by a link to the Wulsin report. The Beacon has an unedited version of the original report which confirms these findings.

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The world of politics is quite different from the world of science. Science is driven by data, politics by the public’s opinions of a candidate. Real scientists rest their careers on a search for the truth—following rules of ethical conduct, and carefully drawn experiments. Politicians fill their sails, and their lungs, with the prevailing winds of public interest, fears, and opinion, hoping to ride these winds into office, and stay there.

We expect our scientists to be honest, accurate, and dedicated to finding the truth. Our expectations of politicians may start that way, but the reality is often different.

Enter the Heimlich Institute, now essentially a one-person show with a checkered history. Its head, body and tail is Henry Heimlich, former chief of surgery at the Jewish Hospital, having left there at the height of his career under cloudy circumstances. The Institute has been a platform for Heimlich for the past 30 years. After gaining notoriety in 1974 for promoting abdominal thrusting for those who aspirated solid objects, Heimlich has since relentlessly tried to push this method for treatment of drowning and asthma, where it is inappropriate and dangerous. The Heimlich Institute was his pulpit and a filter for fund-raising.

Stripped of homey talk, a presence, and the gift for gab, the essence of what has come from the Heimlich Institute for the past 30 years has been Henry Heimlich’s opinion. When asked repeatedly for data to support his claims there have been none, or merely a series of unsupported anecdotes, coupled with his strong personality.

While abdominal thrusting for choking has been Heimlich’s holy grail, even that has recently been found wanting by the American Heart Association and the Red Cross. More effective chest thrusts were demonstrated convincingly by Charles Guildner, an anesthesiologist, as early as 1976. Instead of embracing the data, and coalescing it with his method, Heimlich attacked Guildner, suggesting his work was unethical. Guildner was put under the gun for several years until vindicated by medical authorities. Guildner’s work has been confirmed by other medical scientists and fits the anatomy and physiology of choking. In contrast, Heimlich’s mantra seems to be: “My way is the only way.” Not quite the stuff of which science is made.

The Heimlich Institute has moved around. It was, for a time, headquartered at Xavier University, but departed under a cloud. For a time it was unaffiliated, but since 1998 has been a part of Deaconess Associations. Its fund-raising and money are murky. There are repeated rumors of off-shore accounts, double sets of books and other clandestine activities. But they are not the subject of this piece, and so will be left for discussion on another day.

Beyond abdominal thrusting Henry Heimlich’s other holy grail has been “Malariotherapy” - injecting malaria into people deliberately to “treat” cancer, Lyme disease, and, most recently, HIV infection. Malaria is caused by a small, single-celled animal called a protozoan. Amoebae are also protozoans. The malarial parasite lives within red blood cells and circulates around the body. Red cells last 100 days and when they are worn out the parasites may be released. Also, when it is time to replicate, the organisms do so in concert in multiple cells, bursting the cells and releasing a “bloom” of parasites into the blood stream. When this happens high fevers occur and the infected individual becomes quite ill. Malaria is spread when a mosquito ingests a “blood meal” and then passes the parasites on to another individual. Standard antibiotics do not work with protozoans. There are highly effective medications to treat malaria in all of its varieties, quickly and at low cost.

Cancer is a disease of abnormal cells growing abnormally. There are many types of cancer, each different. Cancer can be a fatal disease and the word raises fear among those with this diagnosis. Prevention, or in its place, early detection and proper treatment, often leads to successful outcomes. As with many unwanted and serious diseases victims are often desperate, and prey for quacks. A consistent method of cancer quacks has been “elevated temperature treatments.” In some test-tube settings cancer-like cells are heat sensitive. The quacks generalized this to all cancers claiming that high-heat therapy can kill off the cancer. What better way to do this than by inducing a fever? From this leap-frog logic, “Malariotherapy” was born.

[I note that very recent cancer treatment experiments with hyperthermia are quite different and involve specific agents and specific types of cancer.]

There are references to cancer treatments sponsored by Heimlich, some abroad. Not to be dissuaded by negative outcomes, and intense criticism, Heimlich switched his emphasis to Lyme disease, a bacterial illness easily treated by common antibiotics. Here too “Malariotherapy” was promoted and used. When this was also put under scrutiny by authorities and medical groups, Heimlich switched to using “Malariotherapy” for HIV infection. More recently the idea of hyperthermia was discarded and now “immune” boosting, another tenant of quackery, was put forward to justify the “Malariotherapy”.

Good science builds on prior discoveries. Good science starts with known facts, and then shows, via a pilot experiment with an animal or cell culture model that the idea might work. Thereafter a number of animal and other preliminary studies are done before any notion of human experiments is entertained. These precepts seem foreign to the Heimlich Institute where “fire, ready, aim” seems to be the sequence. We’re asked to accept this approach since Henry Heimlich is a maverick and has been “right before.” “Right about what?” seems a reasonable question.

As previously reported on these pages, in the mid 1990s Heimlich was told in no uncertain terms that his ideas about “Malariotherapy” were unsupported by science by various government health officials, scientists and others. Instead of collecting data in animal and similar experiments to prove his speculations, Heimlich continued to work clandestinely on humans. See CIRCARE’s website for a lengthy and annotated review on this topic.

Heimlich has contended that his work was endorsed and approved by Institutional Review Boards for Human Experimentation (IRB’s). No quite so. The IRB which allegedly approved Heimlich’s work was told to suspend operations in 2000 and shut down a year later. Heimlich’s work was singled out as non-conforming to rules and regulations. Claims were later made that the work was “foreign” (done in China) and not subject to US FDA scrutiny. Initial denials were made of involvement of US institutions, or work on US soil. Not so again. Heimlich’s spokesperson Robert Kraft of Dan Pinger’s PR Agency claimed that Heimlich had stopped this work. Not so again according to a recent article in Radar Magazine (also reported here). While the FDA was investigating Heimlich in 1999 and 2000, and claims of no US involvement were being made, Heimlich had penned the following to comedienne Phyllis Diller, one of his financial suppoters, showing that UCLA involvement went back to 1996, and that UCLA personnel were active participants, placing the matter under FDA aegis.

From a handwritten letter to actress Phyllis Diller, July 13, 1999, offered for sale on EBay.

Enter Victoria Wells Wulsin, MD, epidemiologist, and present congressional candidate, who began work in the second half of 2004 for the Heimlich Institute. As reported here Dr. Wulsin was courted as a potential successor to Dr. Heimlich for the leadership of the Heimlich Institute. She was apparently paid tens of thousands of dollars as a consultant to write a report on “Malariotherapy” for the “board” of the Institute. Mind you this was after all of the reports and correspondence on “Malariotherapy” with the CDC, FDA, and others. This was after all of the press on this subject in the LA Times, NY Times, UCLA Bruin, and other newspapers, including the Cincinnati Enquirer. See the CIRCARE compilation.

Yet, despite all of this, Dr. Wulsin, who was shown fresh data that indicated “Malariotherapy” experiments were still going on as she did her review, and even remarked on those data, never blew the whistle on Heimlich or the Institute that experiments were still going on. Henry Heimlich was “uninvited” from the Pan Africa AIDS Conference over this very issue on October 30, 2004 at the height of Wulsin’s consultancy. Yet this too seemed to escape her notice.

She told one reporter that she did not find “Malariotherapy” effective, yet in her report to the Heimlich Institute she laid out plans to rename it, promote it, and do further research on it. She claimed that she was “fired” the day after the draft of her report was submitted. If the report was positive, as it was, then why was she fired?

My read of the report is, of course, my opinion, and you should read it and judge for yourself what she says.

Space and focus does not permit a full analysis of the flaws of the Wulsin report.  What I see is an uncritical naive review, leaving out much of the science on this subject, especially the science that shows that co-infection with HIV and Malaria can make things significantly worse. Infection with malaria of someone with a compromised immune system with deficient T cells (needed to fight parasitic, protozoan infections) can make the malaria even worse than it normally would be, and also cause the HIV to accelerate as more T cells are generated and can thus get infected by the HIV. Heimlich (and Wulsin) have made notice that T cell counts rise slightly after infection with malaria. Maybe so, but the small numbers of subjects are not enough to be convincing. But, even if the rise is real, it is temporary, may represent normal variation, and does not affect the progression or intensity of HIV.

What I found most peculiar and troubling about Dr. Wulsin’s report for the Heimlich Institute was her apparent endorsement of what they were doing, continuing the “Malariotherapy” experiments. (Read the whole report and see for yourself.) The mysterious “sponsors” of the current African research and the details thereof should have absolutely been part of her review.

Dr. Wulsin now seeks the office of congresswoman, representing the citizens of Ohio. While we all can make small errors of judgment and may disagree from time to time, Wulsin’s activities at the Heimlich Institute go beyond simple mistakes. She knew exactly what she was doing, worked for a period of months, had access to records and resources, and was paid for it. How she was paid should be the subject of further investigation. In my opinion, her failure to stop the “Malariotherapy” by exposing it is reprehensible. If she claims she didn’t know then she is inept. Heimlich’s own spokesperson, Kraft, had proclaimed the work had stopped. It clearly had not. “Was Kraft lying?” is also a question to ask.

Any way you slice it Wulsin’s actions or lack of actions are not endorsements for a seat in Congress. If she wants to do some good for the citizens of Ohio she should reveal all she knows.

Enter Phil Heimlich, local politician as Hamilton County Commissioner, and Board Member of the Heimlich Institute. Money for “Malariotherapy” was listed for years, and even recent years, in the tax returns of the Heimlich Institute. Dr. Wulsin’s consultancy was to give a report to the Board and regular updates were given. Where was the Board of the Heimlich Institute for the past decade while the “Malariotherapy” was being done, largely on prisoners in China and poor Africans, both of which were deprived of effective HIV therapy for a unsupported, inane, unjustified trial of a dangerous and ineffective treatment on Third World Subjects.

The Heimlich Institute is quite a place, as are its associates.

Phil Heimlich and Victoria Wells Wulsin are both running for elective office this November. The voters should determine what kinds of people they want to represent them. The above does not ring well for either.

The Heimlich Institute should be closed. My mother, who has a few years on Henry Heimlich, is constantly taking courses to continue to learn and renew herself. Perhaps Henry would consider some in medical ethics and research methodology as the doors shut behind him and he reflects on his life and what he has done.

Robert S. Baratz, MD, PhD, DDS
President, National Council Against Health Fraud
Peabody, Massachusetts

Immunotherapy and Beyond by Victoria Wells Wulsin MD, PhD, December 2004. Note: the undated first page entitled “Executive Summary” was not part of Wulsin’s original report, but appears to have been written recently.

Thank you for reading (and printing from) The Cincinnati Beacon.