Report undercuts AIDS treatment > Blood-heating approach `dead,’ researcher says

ATLANTA — One month ago, Dr. William Logan told Georgia’s AIDS Task Force that two medical schools wanted to duplicate his blood-heating approach to fighting the disease and said 50 patients could be treated by year’s end.

Now, Logan admits bluntly, his research is almost certainly finished, because of a scathing report by federal investigators.

“As far as I can tell, at this point in time, it’s dead,” Logan said.

Logan and another Atlanta physician, Dr. Kenneth Alonso, announced earlier this year that they had treated two AIDS patients with hyperthermia — heating a patient’s blood to raise his body temperature.

The first patient, Carl Crawford, 33, disclosed the treatment to reporters, pointing to visible improvements and pronouncing himself cured of the deadly and so far incurable disease. A second patient, who kept his identity confidential, was largely unchanged.

Skepticism was widespread.

But Logan, a heart surgeon, felt confident in his research when he appeared by invitation before the Georgia AIDS Task Force in August. He and Alonso had dissolved their collaboration — Alonso went on to Mexico and treated a third patient, who died — but Logan promised to press on with careful work at U.S. research institutions.

Critics wanted someone else to duplicate the experiments, and Logan told the task force that two university medical centers were in negotiation to do just that. Regulatory problems unrelated to the hyperthermia treatments had cropped up at Atlanta Hospital, the small medical center where the experiments were performed, but Logan said another hospital would soon take on the project.

Several investigators from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases — a leading government AIDS research agency — then visited Atlanta at Alonso’s invitation to check out hyperthermia.

On Aug. 4, the institute’s report came out.

The investigators said hyperthermia “appears to have offered no clinical, immunologic or virologic benefits.” They said Crawford’s skin lesions weren’t the rare AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma; they were cat scratch fever.

There was no reason “for further human experimentation in this area at this time,” they concluded.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the institute, accused the hyperthermia team of having “led to a lot of confusion, frustration and false hope on the part of HIV-infected individuals.”