AIDS Patients Call ‘Miracle’ a Medical Hoax : Lawsuit: Plaintiffs, including nine HIV-infected men, say they were human guinea pigs in an experiment with a useless drug.

Helen MacEachron lay on her bed, blinking back tears as she made another entry in her videotaped diary. With her camcorder whirring, she talked quietly about trying a new drug, Viroxan, that she hoped would stop the lymph cancer that was slowly killing her.

“This experimental treatment is a godsend,” said MacEachron, a former legal secretary and aspiring writer in Santa Monica. “If this doesn’t get any better--this is just a nightmare, you know?”

But things quickly went wrong with Viroxan.

In a later, more jarring video segment, MacEachron unbuttoned her shirt to examine the plastic catheter that had been surgically implanted between her breasts so she could take the drug intravenously. What she saw panicked her.

“I can’t believe--oh God! This thing has blood. . . . Oh God! This wasn’t here before,” she said. “I somehow accepted the idea that I’m doing this. But I’ve not accepted the idea that it could feel or be bad.”

When a serious infection later landed her in the hospital, and her catheter had to be removed, MacEachron decided that Viroxan indeed was bad. In late 1991, she sued two San Fernando Valley doctors who installed the catheter and another physician who invented Viroxan. Joining the lawsuit were nine Los Angeles men infected with the AIDS virus who also had taken Viroxan.

MacEachron and one other plaintiff have since died, but the first phase of their suit has recently gone to trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Attorneys for both sides and outside legal experts say they believe it is the first civil trial in the United States involving allegations of AIDS fraud.

But noticeably absent from the proceedings in Department 41 is the central figure in the Viroxan saga: Stephen D. Herman, the articulate, handball-playing former radiologist who formulated the drug in a guest house behind his $700,000 Orange County home.

In January, Herman, who has since moved to Florida, declared bankruptcy, automatically halting all litigation against him.

Five people are known to have died after taking Viroxan, but each had been seriously ill, and state medical investigators could not directly link Viroxan to the deaths. But investigators insisted that the demise of two men with acquired immune deficiency syndrome was hastened by their involvement with Viroxan and negligent treatment they received from Herman and a North Hollywood doctor, Valentine Birds, who helped him.

Although Viroxan was never approved for human testing or consumption, Herman claimed it was a miracle drug that could halt the progression of AIDS and cure cancer, warts, sunburn, psoriasis, arthritis and athlete’s foot. He injected it in at least one patient even before he knew if it was toxic to animals.

He was arrested in 1990 and later convicted of false advertising related to Viroxan sales. After state medical officials charged him with incompetence and negligence in 1991, Herman surrendered his doctor’s license rather than face a trial. Birds was tried on similar charges and lost; his license was revoked.

State authorities said the disciplinary actions were the first in California against AIDS quackery.

*

The lawsuit brought by the late MacEachron and her co-plaintiffs charges that Viroxan--a citrus derivative infused with ozone--has no medical value. By being put on it, they argue, they were deprived of crucial time in which to take legitimate drugs such as AZT, the first AIDS drug approved by the federal government.

The lawsuit also alleges that the doctors and another defendant, the Medical Center of North Hollywood, where catheters were installed, conspired to use the plaintiffs as human guinea pigs in an unethical “experiment” designed to generate test data that could help market Viroxan. The plaintiffs want $10 million apiece in damages.

The defendants deny the charges. They say those who took Viroxan suffered no serious harm and are not entitled to damages. They also claim that recent studies indicate that AZT is more toxic and less likely to extend the life span of people with AIDS than originally believed.

Herman injected Viroxan in dozens of patients, saying it caused dramatic increases in their T-cell counts, a measure of immune-system health. Some of those who took it have claimed the drug saved their lives.

But independent AIDS experts said Herman’s limited data proved nothing, since T-cell counts often rise and fall sharply, even with no medication.

Moreover, shots of the syrup-like drug were excruciatingly painful--so much so that even patients who believed it was keeping them alive went off it. To get around that problem, Herman hit on the idea of having catheters implanted in patients’ chests, so they could take Viroxan intravenously.

The physician who arranged for catheter implants was Birds, a pleasant, gray-haired osteopath who advocated holistic treatments and had unconventional ideas about treating AIDS.

In 1989, when Birds was recommending Viroxan, only one drug--AZT--had been approved by the federal government for use against AIDS. But Birds urged patients not to take AZT, saying it was “poison” due to its toxic side effects.

Instead, he recommended Vitamin C and typhoid vaccine--substances that are not standard treatments for AIDS. In an interview with The Times, Birds said he learned about typhoid vaccine from an article in a rock ‘n’ roll magazine.

By late 1989, Birds had referred about 10 people for catheter implants, he said. A number of those who received the tubes soon developed infections that led to blood poisoning and dangerously high fevers. One, a Beverly Hills floral designer suffering from AIDS, died after being found in a bathtub where he had lain for three days, in shock and suffering from pneumonia, blood poisoning and a bad staph infection. State authorities said the infection was related to his catheter.

In October, 1991, 10 ex-patients sued Herman, Birds, the Medical Center of North Hollywood and a Sherman Oaks doctor, Rajindra Sethi, who performed the catheter surgery. In February, five of the plaintiffs went to trial (the others were sent to another courtroom for trial later).

But after 2 1/2 years of preparation and pretrial arguments, the legal battle has taken a toll on many of those involved.

Like Herman, Birds and Sethi have declared bankruptcy. Although the state took no disciplinary action against him, Sethi voluntarily closed his practice last year, his attorney said.

The main plaintiff lawyer, Raymond Henke, is so caught up in the Viroxan case that he often seems obsessed with it. A medical malpractice specialist, he quit a handsomely paid job at a Los Angeles law firm to pursue the case full time.

With no salary since 1992, the tall, 40-year-old attorney, with collar-length hair, is so deeply in debt that he stopped paying the mortgage on his small West Hollywood home, which now serves as his office. Visitors find it difficult to avoid tripping over the heaps of legal briefs, depositions and medical textbooks that fill nearly every available surface in Henke’s living room.

To pay for day-to-day trial expenses, not to mention groceries, he depends on a $5,000 monthly loan from his parents. Preparing for the trial took so much of his time that he often brought along his 8-year-old son when he interviewed witnesses on weekends.

With the trial in full swing, Henke dispatched his wife to be with her family in Costa Rica so he could concentrate better. He has so little cash, he cannot afford to pay the man who services his rented copying machine. At one point, police seized his car--and booted Henke and his son out of it--because Henke had failed to pay his registration fees for the past two years.

*

Assisting him in court is Sterling Wolfe, 30, a UC Berkeley law school graduate who has not been paid in two years and recently had to declare bankruptcy himself. On top of that, his fiance dumped him, upset that he was “working for a cause” instead of having a job with a regular salary.

“I’m nowhere near as idealistic as Ray,” said Wolfe, who, along with his boss often seems exhausted in court, the result of regular 100-hour workweeks and little sleep. “If the clients were not the best people I ever met, I’d be gone.”

Henke, however, insists he has no regrets about what he is doing.

“It’s very liberating to know that the richest man is the man who needs the least,” he said. “I really believe that that kind of humility is something I could have learned only in this case.”

Henke has carried his crusade against Viroxan far beyond the courtroom. He testified against Herman and Viroxan before a congressional subcommittee in Washington. When Herman was trying to get a Kenya medical institute to test and manufacture Viroxan, Henke tried to undercut him by sending letters to the institute and the World Health Organization detailing Herman’s legal problems at home.

But defense lawyers have mostly harsh words for Henke.

“I have never seen anyone so obsessed with a case,” said Andrew Lloyd, an Orange County attorney who formerly represented Herman.

“He is so self-righteous about it. Oh, you’re evil if you disagree with him. This is just a case, Ray. It isn’t Hitler against the world. I tell him, ‘I’m a lawyer, you’re a lawyer.’ I tell him the other lawyers are nice. He says: ‘No. They’re wicked, despicable, evil.’ But no, they’re not.”

Henke said he is going after the doctors and the hospital with such a vengeance in order to send a message that defrauding desperate people with terminal illnesses is unacceptable and will be punished.

“I think these guys are extremely cynical physicians whose object clearly was to take advantage of AIDS patients for their own gain,” he said.

Henke charged that the doctors’ bankruptcies were deliberate efforts to delay the trial until his clients died. Defense lawyers scoff at that contention, saying the doctors filed because they have no medical income and heavy debts. (Henke was able to persuade federal bankruptcy judges to let him pursue Birds and Sethi in Superior Court.)

In contending that his clients were subjected to medical experimentation by the defendants, Henke repeatedly has compared them to Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed depraved medical “tests” on concentration camp inmates--an analogy the defense rejects as ridiculous and unfair.

And as the trial has unfolded, defense lawyers have poked a number of holes in Henke’s case.

For instance, Henke said that plaintiff Rod Garcia developed a catheter infection so bad he had to be hospitalized and later was bedridden at home for six months. So shaken was Garcia by the experience, said Henke, that he swore off any further contact with doctors and thus has gone without AZT or other treatment for his AIDS since 1990.

But on cross-examination, defense lawyer David O’Keefe, who represents Birds, produced records that he said indicated Garcia refused other doctors’ advice to take AZT, before and after meeting Birds. In 1992, according to one record, Garcia told a West Hollywood physician he was “a macrobiotic” who did not use conventional drugs.

O’Keefe also challenged Garcia’s contention that he and his mother had given Birds more than $25,000 for typhoid vaccine shots and other unapproved AIDS treatments. O’Keefe displayed billing records that he said showed Garcia had paid Birds less than $3,900.

Henke has pledged to file separate lawsuits later against Herman. But with Viroxan’s creator absent from the courtroom, the trial has focused on Birds.

Birds and his lawyers argue that none of the plaintiffs was injured by being steered away from AZT. Indeed, they say, the passage of time has proven Birds right about AZT, as recent studies have concluded that it is less effective and more toxic than at first believed.

But Henke insists Birds is misreading the studies. He said they do not question the overall effectiveness of AZT, but only whether it is as effective when used late in the disease as in the early stages of AIDS.