Miami Herald - Friday, July 19, 1985
Steve Sternberg, Herald Medical Writer

The Freeport clinic is run by experimental zoologist Lawrence Burton, who claims to have developed a secret blood serum that can combat cancer. The serum relies on "immunotherapy" -- using components of blood that naturally combat disease. Burton could not be reached Thursday for comment, said June Austin, the clinic's patient coordinator. But Dr. John Clement, the medical director, conceded that tainted blood has posed a problem -- though not yet AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome. "We have had one confirmed case of hepatitis, but we have not had reports of contamination with the AIDS virus," Clement said. "We have had a problem, but we hope we have corrected it." Burton took his serum to the Bahamas in 1976 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration failed to approve it for human use. He opened a clinic near Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport. One year later, an inspection team from the Pan American Health Organization recommended to the Bahamian government that the clinic be "immediately closed," Curt said. For a decade, medical critics of Burton's therapy have said the serum has never been proven effective. They say it also deters critically ill cancer patients from seeking tested methods of therapy. But the Bahamian government allows the clinic to remain open. Curt says the reason is money: "I have seen Burton say on tape that the government will support him because he has brought $40 million into the economy in the last five years." Since the clinic opened, Burton has treated more than 3,000 patients, Curt said. Many new arrivals are AIDS patients, he added. The treatment that all clinic patients receive is made from the blood of "healthy persons" or is pooled from the blood of clinic patients, Curt said.

Therein, Katterhagen said, lies the danger: Patients who fly the 110 miles from South Florida to the Freeport clinic may be injected with a serum that carried deadly, infectious AIDS. Three weeks ago, Dr. Samuel Insalaco, a pathologist at Tacoma General Hospital, discovered the infectious serum after two of the patients asked him to test vials they had obtained in Freeport. The patients were worried about rumors that the serum carried hepatitis. They wanted to make sure they would not catch liver infections that sometimes prove fatal. They were not reassured by laboratory results, Katterhagen said. All 18 vials of Burton's mysterious serum proved positive for hepatitis B, he said. eight had antibodies to HTLV-III, indicating the serum was taken from someone infected with AIDS, a fatal illness that destroys the body's ability to fight off infection. "We were rather startled at this," Katterhagen said. The researchers checked their findings three times, and then sent the vials to a state laboratory and to the federal Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, for further study. Their results were the same, he said. The two patients already had injected themselves with the preparation, Katterhagen said. No one knows whether they will develop AIDS; they would not submit to HTLV-III testing themselves. Clement, the clinic's medical director, conceded the serum is made from blood, not of the clinic's cancer patients but of healthy people. The blood is not screened for AIDS or other diseases, he said. "At this point," Clement said, "we have to rely on the laboratory we buy blood from."

He likened the threat of AIDS infection during Burton's treatment to the danger of infection during treatment for hemophilia. But the hemophilia therapy, unlike "immune therapy," has been proven effective. "Many people are hemophiliacs who have AIDS from their treatment," Clement said. "Without treatment they would be dead. There are people who have AIDS from blood transfusions; without the transfusions they'd be dead. "It is a problem you have at any normal laboratory." Curt, of the National Cancer Institute, said the problem is nothing like those confronted by typical laboratories. One year ago, he said, cancer institute tests of Burton's serum disclosed that every sample tested was tainted with hepatitis B. And a recent CDC study of some of Burton's patients disclosed something else, Curt said -- an epidemic of abscesses from a soil and animal bacteria called Nocardia.

They traced the bacteria, Curt said, to an "animal-holding facility right near where they make these treatments."

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