Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
A new story from The Decatur Daily News once again pits Bob Kraft against the world as defender of Henry Heimlich’s weird medical theories. What’s noteworthy is how Kraft will even defend known Nazis in his presumably paid quest to defend all things related to the crumbling Heimlich medical empire.
The following excerpt is about malariotherapy experiments:
“These experiments have been censured by the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and leading bioethicists,” Peter Heimlich said.
Malariatherapy was a popular practice through much of the 20th century, said Bob Kraft, spokesman for Henry Heimlich.
Before the discovery of penicillin, it was used as a cure for syphilis. In 1927, Julius Wagner von Jauregg won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work with malariatherapy.
When asked about Henry Heimlich’s humanitarianism, Kraft listed a number of achievements, including the doctor’s decision to volunteer for hazardous duties in World War II.
“Dr. Heimlich has lived a life full of innovative medicine and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” said Kraft.
In this article from The Huntsville Times earlier this week, Kraft again comes to focus on this nobel prize from last century:
Peter Heimlich, who lives in suburban Atlanta, says his famous father does not deserve to be the namesake of a Spirit of America humanitarian award because he conducted “outrageous experiments” on Chinese AIDS patients several years ago.
“How do you justify naming a humanitarian award after a doctor doing medical atrocity experiments on vulnerable Third World patients, deliberately infecting them with malaria?” Peter Heimlich told The Times last week.
(...)
Bob Kraft, a spokesman for Henry Heimlich, said the doctor’s malariatherapy work was based on a similar treatment for syphilis that won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927. The experiment in China was abandoned in the late 1990s after Heimlich had a falling out with the Chinese government, he said. During his 50-year career, Heimlich also developed or helped develop a chest drain valve and an esophagus surgery that bear his name.
“It’s a life full of innovative medicine,” Kraft said Wednesday. “Peter’s charge is that every word his father has ever spoken is a lie. That’s not credible.”
Kraft said Henry Heimlich’s three other children continue to support him. Oldest son Phil Heimlich, a former Cincinnati city councilman, is running for Congress in 2008.
So how significant is it that a future Nazi won the Nobel prize in 1927 for treatments similar to malariotherapy? And who would be more qualified to make determinations about such significance: Bob Kraft, a paid public relations representative for Henry Heimlich, or Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a leading global expert on AIDS?
Here’s what Fauci said about the 1927 Nobel prize so often cited by Kraft:
“It is scientifically unsound, and I think it would be ethically questionable,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who has been seeking a cure for AIDS since it was first identified in the 1980s.
Dr. Fauci says there is no evidence, even in countries where malaria is prevalent, that the “malariotherapy” has any effect on AIDS.
“And it does have the fundamental potential of actually killing you,” Dr. Fauci says. “It can cause organ system damage; it can elevate your temperatures to the point that it can do tissue damage to you.”
(...)
Dr. Heimlich’s theory to use malaria to cure AIDS, [Phil Heimlich] said, simply builds on the work of a doctor who won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for using malaria to treat syphilis.
“There are some Nobel prizes they would like to take back, and I believe that’s one of them,” said Dr. Fauci. “It’s a dangerous thing to do. It just seems inexplicable to me that he is doing this.”
In addition to a globally respected AIDS expert claiming that the nobel prize in question is one “they would like to take back,” the recipient who Kraft keeps talking about—Julius Wagner von Jauregg—was a Nazi!
Read more here:
In later years it has come to light that Wagner-Jauregg was a national socialist (Nazi) and backed Hitler’s program of racial hygiene. This has shocked Austria, where schools, roads and hospitals have been named in his honour.
In his obituary on September 29, 1940, the most extreme of the Nazi newspapers, Völkischer Beobachter, called him an ”upright German”, stating that ”Without his genetics the stock of ideas constituting the national socialist view of society is no longer conceivable” ("Seine Erbforschungen sind heute nicht mehr aus dem Gedankengebäude der nationalsozialistischen Gesellschaftslehre fortzudenken"). On April 21, 1940, shortly before the sterilization law came into force in Austria, Wagner-Jauregg applied a second time for membership in the NSDAP (Nationalsosialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the Nazi party). His first application had been in 1939 after calling for a ban on “people with mental diseases and people with criminal genes” from reproducing. His first application probably failed because his first wife, Balbine Frumkin, was Jewish.
While Bob Kraft keeps throwing bones to the memory of a discredited Nazi, he also refuses to answer simple and straightforward questions regarding claims he pushes into print. (Hey Bob, are you still getting paid to read this website?)
I recently emailed Kraft some questions based on information from the recent Huntsville Times article. No response. Here is my unanswered email, with quotes from the article and simple follow-up questions:
Bob,
I’m still working on the Heimlich article I mentioned in my previous e-mail. I’d appreciate your answers to the following:
From an article by reporter Steve Doyle in today’s Huntsville Times:
http://tinyurl.com/yp8nc5
“Since 2002, Peter Heimlich...has made ‘many, many outrageous charges, most of which are clearly false or easily disprovable.’”
1) Please name the charges to which you were referring.
From the same article: “Introduced in 1974, Heimlich’s abdominal thrust procedure is credited with saving more than 50,000 choking victims....”
2) I’m aware Dr. Heimlich and others have made this claim. Can you tell me what that 50,000 number is based on?
If I were a Marine getting honored for bringing toys to some toddlers, the last thing I’d want is the stink of the crumbling Bob Kraft/Henry Heimlich, Nazi touting empire of discredited medical schemes ruining the memory of a good deed.
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