The Cincinnati Beacon - PolitickerOH, TPM catch malariotherapy

Thursday, June 12, 2008

PolitickerOH, TPM catch malariotherapy

Photo courtesy of here.

Two major political sites—PolitickerOH and Talking Points Memo—have picked up on the Vic Wulsin malariotherapy stories. These publications have no history of exhibiting an “anti-Wulsin bias,” and they have no reputation of being right-winged and pro-Schimdt. So how does Dr. Vic come across on a state-wide and national stage concerning the little problem of the Heimlich Institute’s weird medical experiments?

David DeWitt, at PolickerOH, has an item entitled ”Schmidt hits Wulsin for ‘malariotherapy’ ties in fundraising letter.” DeWitt writes, “Wulsin hoped to put the matter to rest after meeting with the State Medical Board in April to discuss her connection to the institute. Wulsin had been hired by the institute in 2004 to analyze literature studying the malaria bacteria as a treatment for HIV/AIDS.”

DeWitt also hosts what amounts to a debate between Wulsin’s and Schmidt’s press secretaries.

Team Wulsin:

Franck pointed out to PolitickerOH.com that a complaint can be filed with the state medical board by anyone at any time. In this case, the board found no merit to the complaint itself.

“Anyone can file a complaint that is untrue, or false or fictitious with the medical board,” he said. “The medical board decides if the claim has any merit whatsoever they will look into it. And the medical board decided on the face of this complaint, there was no reason for them to take any action.”

Franck pointed out that the campaign had released a statement saying the board found that the anonymous complaint had no merit.

“Jean Schmidt knew that when she wrote this letter. She knew it when she mailed it to her constituents. She knew she was lying,” he said.

“She isn’t running the race like any incumbent I’ve ever seen. Most incumbents run for reelection on the strength of what they’ve done in office. Schmidt seems to be starting the general election campaign with nothing but false attacks on Vic.”

Team Schimdt:

Schmidt press secretary Barry Bennett said the letter wasn’t suggesting Wulsin participated in the experiments.

“We know that she wasn’t there when they got injected,” he said. “Our problem with her behavior is she was called in to review all this. And she wrote a nice report to the organization about how they could take this to the next step. Never once did she call the authorities. Never once did she say that it’s immoral. Never once did she say that it’s unjust. She wrote her report. They wrote her a check. And she cashed it.”

DeWitt chose to conclude his story with some excerpts from the report Wulsin wrote for the Heimlich Institute, “Immunotherapy and Beyond.” (Remember, it was Wulsin’s suggestion to rename “malariotherapy” to “immunotherapy” due to the former’s bad press.)

Wulsin concludes in her report,

“Immunotherapy claims a fascinating history of effectiveness for another largely sexually transmitted epidemic. Its safety was demonstrated over much of the twentieth century, precluding the necessity of Phase I clinical trials for replicating its use for HIV. Phase II clinical trials have resulted in positive, though discrepant, results in 20 Chinese and 8 East African HIV-positive individuals. Currently the Heimlich Institute has no formal association with either of these trials, although the sponsor of the East African work maintains contact with the Heimlich Institute and shares results regularly. No written protocol is available for this innovative work in which patients acquire malaria naturally and are followed thereafter.

Further field studies of Immunotherapy, including Phase III and IV clinical trials, require the verification of the encouraging results from East Africa, elaboration on discrepancies between them and the results from the Phase II trial in China, and professional dissemination and transparent discussion with scientists, physicians, and other stakeholders.”

One must wonder why DeWitt ended his article this way. This is Wulsin, in her own words. What does it mean?

Meanwhile, Eric Kleefeld over at TPM wrote a piece entitled ”House GOPer Accuses Dem Foe Of ... ‘Grotesque Medical Experiments’ On Human Guinea Pigs.” Check out this paragraph:

The “grotesque medical experiments” charge appears to be a reference to some 2004 work that Wulsin did with the Heimlich Institute in Ohio. She examined data that was supplied to her as part of a literature review, taken from pre-existing studies, of experimental AIDS therapies that Wulsin concluded didn’t work.

Kleefeld goes on to quote Kevin Franck, who claims Wulsin “never participated in any of the studies.” But the statement does not seem to respond directly to the previous passage by Kleefeld: “She examined data...”

Is examining raw data the same as “participating”?

Frank is quoted further: “She was never in a position to stop any of them while they were in progress ... Jean Schmidt knew that those complaints and those allegations had no merit when she mailed the letter.”

This quote indicates that the Heimlich Institute experiments are no longer in progress. One must wonder how Team Wulsin would change their story if it were discovered that the experiments are ongoing!

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Is Kevin Franck being frank? says:
12 Jun 2008 at 09:24 am | #

From the PolitickerOH.com article by David DeWitt: http://www.shrunkin.com/4992/

(Wulsin spokesman Kevin) Franck pointed out to PolitickerOH.com that a complaint can be filed with the state medical board by anyone at any time. In this case, the board found no merit to the complaint itself.

“Anyone can file a complaint that is untrue, or false or fictitious with the medical board,” he said. “The medical board decides if the claim has any merit whatsoever they will look into it. And the medical board decided on the face of this complaint, there was no reason for them to take any action.”

Did the State Medical Board of Ohio find the complaint had no merit as reported by Mr. DeWitt? Or did the board conclude no further action was required?

The Board investigated the complaint for more than a year, interviewed various people, and then met with Dr. Wulsin. Hardly a “no merit” response.

The Wulsin for Congress Campaign must produce a letter showing that the board used the term “no merit.” If that language is not accurate, they may be asked to issue a correction.

Likewise, Mr. DeWitt should be asked to substantiate this sentence: In this case, the board found no merit to the complaint itself. If this information did not originate from the medical board, PolitickerOH.com should identify the source of the information and should publish a correction.

Dean, will you please follow-up on the above suggestions? Please reply below.

By the way, was Dr. Robert Baratz or another representative of the National Council Against Health Fraud, which filed the complaint, invited to attend the medical board hearing with Dr. Wulsin? If not, why not? Ask the OH medical board executive director Richard A. Whitehouse for a comment. Here’s contact info and a list of all current board members: http://www.med.ohio.gov/pdf/contact_info/contact_info.pdf

Further, since Team Wulsin contends “there’s nothing to see here, folks,” they should have no problem producing the minutes of the medical board meeting for public inspection. Ask Kevin Franck.

NtotheC says:
12 Jun 2008 at 10:30 am | #

and i’ll still vote for her because she’s better than Schmidt.

says:
13 Jun 2008 at 06:49 am | #

Democrats would act like Hitler shits gold if his opponent were the Devil. I’d vote for neither, and try to make the Democrats understand that they endorsed Hitler.

Freedom Fighters says:
13 Jun 2008 at 09:34 am | #

Dean;

Actually, it was Germans who supported Hitler !

If a democratic society has decided to self-govern with all citizens having the right to participate, then, in the instance where two are left standing that society is willingly giving control, then our choice would have to be the lesser of two evils, Else, anarchy ?

It would be Republicans supporting Hitler, regardless. As long as, there was a market for gold with society built on that man-made illution of value we call the DOLLAR !

NtotheC says:
13 Jun 2008 at 11:08 am | #

Quite frankly, given the choice between the Devil and Hitler, i’d probably support Hitler. i mean, he was an evil man but, damn, the Devil?

besides, neither Schmidt nor Wulsin are as bad as hitler or the devil. i would have preferred to see Black take on Schmidt...but that didn’t happen.

make53 says:
14 Jun 2008 at 09:55 am | #

So how many people suffered from malaria because of the Heimlich studies vs. how many people suffer from malaria due to the United States refusing to give aid to countries that use DDT?

Do you care about people who suffer from malaria or do you care about making political points? If you truly care about relieving the suffering of malaria you are on the wrong bandwagon

Claire Voyant says:
14 Jun 2008 at 12:29 pm | #

make53 is right! Heimlich didn’t kill enough AIDS patients to qualify for you or anyone else to care.

Let’s see evidence of some major body counts, not just the dozen or so patients Wulsin wrote about in her fund raising prospectus, oops, I mean literature review or the measly four who croaked, per p17: http://tinyurl.com/2nke6a

The East African Phase II trial has lost approximately 4 patients to follow-up during its first 9 months. Using this rate, I extrapolate requiring a minimum of 75 patients for an adequate follow-up sample of 50. More conservatively, because loss to follow-up will continue through the final 15 months of the study, we should recruit 100 patients at the beginning.

See that last sentence? Dr. Vic had the right idea - recruit 100 more patients! Then you’d have some numbers worth caring about, Dean, instead of your obvious attempt to make “political points” as make53 so shrewdly observed.

So cut out the grandstanding and show us more corpses, Dean. Then we’ll talk.

plans34 says:
14 Jun 2008 at 03:32 pm | #

he East African Phase II trial has lost approximately 4 patients to follow-up during its first 9 months.

Nice guessing on your part as far as what happened to the patient. There are many reasons that someone would be lost to follow up that don’t include their death. Do you have any proof that these people died from malaria as opposed to moving, seeking treatment elsewhere, seeking traditional care of their malaria, suffered death from another cause just to name a few?

Denver gold grouper in a stupor says:
15 Jun 2008 at 01:52 pm | #

Do you have any proof that these people died from malaria as opposed to moving, seeking treatment elsewhere, seeking traditional care of their malaria, suffered death from another cause just to name a few?

Good questions! If you want to know the answers, I suggest contacting Mekbib Wondewassen. He’s in the Daly City, CA phone book: http://tinyurl.com/4b6wn8

From the 11/05 Radar article by Thomas Francis (which also includes more on Dr. Vic): http://winston7.true.ws/

Mekbib Wondewossen is an Ethiopian immigrant who makes his living renting out cars in the San Francisco area, but in his spare time he works for Dr. Heimlich, doing everything from “recruiting the patients to working with the doctors here and there and everywhere,” Wondewossen says. The two countries he names are Ethiopia and the small equatorial nation of Gabon, on Africa’s west coast.

“The Heimlich Institute is part of the work there - the main people, actually, in the research,” Wondewossen says. “They’re the ones who consult with us on everything. They tell us what to do.”

Wondewossen says that the project does not involve syringes full of malaria parasites. “We never induce the malaria,” he says. “We go to an epidemic area where there is a lot of malaria, and then we look for patients that have HIV too. We find commercial sex workers or people who play around in that area.” Such people are high-risk for HIV, and numerous studies show the virus makes its victims more vulnerable to malaria.

A key to containing malaria is speedy treatment. In the most resource-poor areas, clinicians who lack the equipment necessary for diagnosing malaria will engage in presumptive treatment at the first signs of fever. This, says Wondewossen, runs contrary to Heimlich’s interests. What physicians in Africa usually do “is terminate the malaria quickly when someone gets sick,” he says. “But now we ask them to prolong it, and when we ask them to do that, the difference is very, very big.”

Untreated malaria is horrible and includes periods of 105-degree fever, excessive sweating followed by chills and uncontrollable shivering, blinding headaches, vomiting, body aches, anemia, and even dementia. Heimlich’s malariotherapy literature recommends the patient go two to four weeks without treatment. Delay in treatment, warns the CDC, is a leading cause of death.

Wondewossen say that the researchers involved in the study are not doctors. He refuses to name members of the research team, because he says it would get them into trouble with the local authorities. “The government over there is a bad government,” he says. “They can make you disappear.”

Wondewossen won’t reveal the source of funding for this malariotherapy research. “There are private funders,” he says. But as to their identity? “I can’t tell you that, because that’s the deal we make with them, you know?” He scoffs at the question of whether his team got approval to conduct this research from a local ethics review board. Bribery on that scale, he says, is much too expensive: “If you want the government to get involved there, you have to give them a few million - and then they don’t care what you do.”

Heimlich claims to believe in the importance of evaluating patients through every stage of malariotherapy, but without being present for the onset of malaria his researchers would have a difficult time tracking the disease’s effect on the patient’s viral load. That doesn’t deter him from looking to the future. Wulsin’s report contains a forecast for a clinical trial in Africa that would begin by enrolling 75 patients in 2007, then another 20 to 30 in 2008. These projections are based, however, on the premise that current trials will bear out Heimlich’s theory.

In particular Heimlich targeted South African gold mines....

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Thursday, June 12, 2008