Henry Heimlich - Malariotherapy

Malariotherapy

See also: Victoria Wells Wulsin#Malariotherapy controversy

From the early 1980s, Heimlich advocated malariotherapy, the deliberate infection of a person with malaria in order to treat ailments such as cancer, Lyme disease and (more recently) HIV. As of 2009 the treatments have proven unsuccessful, and have attracted criticism as both scientifically unsound and dangerous. The United States Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have rejected malariotherapy and, along with health professionals and advocates for human rights, consider the practice "atrocious". Sources have disclosed that the Heimlich Institute, a subsidiary of Deaconess Associations of Cincinnati, is conducting malariotherapy trials in Ethiopia, though the Ethiopian Ministry of Health was unaware of any such trials. Reportedly the trials were supervised by Mekbib Wondewassen, an Ethiopian immigrant who works as a car rental agent in the San Francisco area. Heimlich claims that his initial trials with seven subjects produced positive results, but he has refused to provide details. The experiments have no institutional review board oversight.

Studies in Africa, where both HIV and malaria occur commonly, indicate that malaria/HIV co-infection increases viral load and that malaria could increase the rate of spread of HIV as well as accelerate disease progression. Based on such studies, Paul Farmer at Harvard Medical School described the idea of treating HIV with malaria by stating “it seems improbable. The places where malaria takes its biggest toll are precisely those in which HIV reaps its grim harvest”.