Doctor Says AIDS Drug ‘Not a Scam’ : Medicine: Physician claims his treatment is a breakthrough, although experts scoff at the assertion and fear that it has already led to the death of one man and harmed two others.

Dr. Stephen David Herman, a physician arrested this week on charges of selling a phony AIDS cure that may be linked to one death and two injuries, insisted Friday that his activities are legitimate.

“This is not a scam,” Herman said angrily in a brief interview outside his Villa Park home. “This is an important, meaningful way to help the people with AIDS today.”

Herman, 53, a radiologist, insisted that his “viroxan” drug, which is injected intravenously and through the muscles, was a breakthrough in the fight against acquired immune deficiency syndrome. He developed the drug, he said, after his stepson died three years ago after contracting AIDS.

Herman also said that his drug had been successfully tested at UC Irvine.

But Stuart M. Krassner, a UC Irvine biology professor, said the university tested the drug at Herman’s request only to determine its toxicity on animals.

“The test had nothing to do with AIDS,” Krassner said, adding that the test was performed as a routine contract and that Herman had no affiliation with the university.

Investigators said Herman had treated hundreds of patients from all across California in the nearly two years he has been selling the drug out of his home.

State and national medical experts scoffed at the claim of a breakthrough, reasserting that there is no known cure for the disease.

“From the experts we’ve talked to, the claims he is making are absolutely impossible,” said Kathleen L. Schmidt, a senior investigator for the Medical Board of California, which is heading the case against Herman.

Herman was freed from Orange County Jail on Friday on his own recognizance. He said he is innocent of felony charges of manufacturing and selling “an unapproved, adulterated, dangerous drug” to AIDS victims, with the intent to “defraud or mislead.”

Herman made his brief comments Friday morning and initially agreed to a more in-depth interview later in the day, but failed to show up for one appointment and left his telephone off the hook during the evening.

Investigators from the Medical Board of California and state Department of Health Services say Herman’s drug treatment is possibly linked to the death of one patient and injuries to two others.

Investigators raided the two-story residence on Thursday, arrested the doctor and confiscated his stockpile of the drug. State health officials are still analyzing its contents. Patients said Herman’s drug was an anti-virus treatment designed to simulate white blood cells.

After his release from custody, friends and patients of the physician gathered at his home to give comfort and offer support. They all expressed outrage at Herman’s arrest.

“Sometimes he comes off as a little off-the-wall, but he cares about the people he is treating,” said Tom McLean, an Orange business owner whose mother has been undergoing Herman’s drug treatment for inoperable cancer. “I know the stuff is not a snake oil. This is a treatment and it gives people life.”

A patient who would give his name only as Bill, 41, a businessman from South Orange County, added that he has been taking Herman’s drug injections since June and that he believes the treatment has stopped the deterioration of his body from AIDS.

“I believe it is saving my life,” the patient said. “I haven’t been sick. I haven’t had any infections. I have had no side effects.”

Dr. John Renner, a Kansas City, Mo., physician and board member of the National Council on Health Fraud, a doctors’ watchdog group, said AIDS patients resort to all kinds of experimental remedies because they feel they have little to lose.

“There are a lot of desperate people who would like to hear that there is a substance that will help them,” said Renner, who added that his council has documented more than 200 examples of fraudulent AIDS remedies nationwide in the past three years.

Death Reported

Herman’s activities came to light after patient Mark D. Snider, 36, a floral designer from Los Angeles, died of blood poisoning at a Hollywood hospital on Nov. 12 and two other patients had to have painful abscesses surgically removed in December at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, state investigators said.

State officials said Snider’s fatal blood poisoning could have been caused by contamination of the drug remedy he had begun taking two weeks earlier. Henry Shapiro, 46, a friend of Snider’s from Honolulu, said Snider complained of painful side effects immediately after beginning the treatments.

“He was basically weak and tender in all parts of his body,” Shapiro said Friday. “He was told there would be discomfort (associated with the drug) and there was.”

Shapiro added that while Snider was deteriorating from a three-year bout with AIDS, “I have had friends who have died of AIDS and it has been step by step. His death was a reaction to the drugs he was taking.”

The abscesses on the thighs of two men focused scrutiny on Herman because the inflammations were both caused by an organism normally found in the stomach area, not near the skin, said Dr. Richard Thorsen, chief of disease control for Riverside County. One man was hospitalized Dec. 7, and the other Dec. 15, Thorsen said.

“To have two people with an abscess by that organism would certainly raise the suspicion that either the preparation itself or some common needle contamination was related,” Thorsen said Friday.

Thorsen said there was no way to know for sure whether Herman’s drug was to blame, however, because neither of the patients--whose names he declined to release--had any more of the substance to submit for testing.