Procedure Led to HIV-Infected Birth, Asch Colleague Testifies

Former UC Irvine physician Ricardo H. Asch failed to have a homosexual man or his wife tested for AIDS before performing a fertility procedure that led to the birth of an HIV-infected child, a former clinic employee testified Tuesday.

The infant and father died of AIDS within days of one another in 1990, said former office supervisor Toula Batshoun, who frequently teared up during the first day of a sworn deposition related to the UCI fertility scandal.

After their joint funeral, Batshoun recalled, Asch returned very depressed and confided to her that he felt he could have prevented the child’s death.

“He said that he felt responsible,” Batshoun said in an interview after the day’s proceedings, which were closed to the public but recapped by attorneys in attendance. “Asch said [the father] told him in the first consult [about the fertility procedure] that he was homosexual.”

The testimony of Batshoun added still more dimensions to a fertility scandal involving Asch and his two partners, who operated UCI-affiliated clinics in Garden Grove and Orange between 1986 and 1994. The trio already have been accused by the university of stealing patients’ eggs and embryos and implanting them in other women, as well as financial and research misconduct. They face more than 40 lawsuits by former patients.

The doctors deny any intentional wrongdoing.

Batshoun, who worked in Garden Grove and Orange between 1986 and 1993, testified that she became suspicious of Asch in mid-1991 and confronted him twice about allegedly improper egg transfers, generating nothing but denials and threats. She also said outside the deposition that she tried to provide mid-level administrators and auditors at the university with documentary evidence of the thefts before she left the university in 1993, but her efforts were rebuffed.

Toula Batshoun

The office assistant said she conducted her “own investigation” between February and June of 1992, collecting documents suggesting as many as 35 patients may have been victimized by improper transfers. Last summer, those same documents provided the basis for the university’s assertion that the scandal’s scope had magnified significantly.

But a university attorney said Tuesday that Batshoun, who resigned in early 1993 after admitting to medical insurance fraud, was not considered a credible source of information in 1992. And in spite of the university’s reliance on her records to build its case, her credibility is still in question, said the attorney, Kermit Marsh.

Asch’s attorney, Lloyd Charton, though not often inclined to side with the university, provided a similar assessment, calling Batshoun a “liar.”

According to lawyers who attended Batshoun’s deposition, the former supervisor’s most riveting testimony involved her recollections of two sad cases: that of the baby who died and that of another patient, who Batshoun said almost died in 1988 because Asch pumped her so full of fertility drugs.

The patient, who was sensitive to the medications, was prescribed a huge dose of a fertility hormone against the vehement objections of Asch’s partner Jose P. Balmaceda and another clinic physician in Garden Grove, Batshoun said. Both concluded the dosage was dangerous, she said.

Balmaceda was so concerned with the dosage that he vocally disavowed any responsibility for the case and asked Asch, “Do you have anything personal against this woman?” Batshoun said.

The woman produced so many egg follicles that her abdomen swelled up and she needed to be hospitalized at the former AMI/Garden Grove Medical Center, where she nearly died, Batshoun said in an interview.

“She looked like death,” said Batshoun, who visited the woman in the hospital, as did several other clinic employees. “She was blown up like an inflated balloon.”

Batshoun said the case of the HIV-infected baby caused Asch to panic and also deeply affected his staff. The doctor learned in 1990 from a UCLA specialist that the baby had what appeared to be an HIV-caused pneumonia. The pregnancy had resulted from a donor-approved egg transfer, fertilized by the sperm of the recipient’s husband.

Asch hurriedly tested a serum sample from the donor, learning to his relief that she was not HIV-infected. But he learned about 1 1/2 weeks later from the egg recipient that she and her husband both were infected with HIV.

The pair, Los Angeles screenwriters, both died of the disease, according to Batshoun and attorneys who attended the deposition.

The wife, who died just a few years ago, sold the rights to a television movie that was based on the pair’s story, although the plot was altered to indicate that her husband acquired HIV through a transfusion, attorneys said.

Batshoun said she did not report problems at the clinic to UCI officials until 1992 because she was afraid of losing her job--which she needed to support two children--and because she felt physically threatened by Asch.

At one point, she said, when she confronted Asch with evidence of an alleged improper transfer, he tore up her document and made a cutting motion across his throat.