published by We The People Living with AIDS/HIV of the Delaware Valley, Inc.
PWA threatened by Neumann AIDS program
COMHAR stonewalls on Kirk case
Many hemophiliacs accept deal from blood companies
Study says kissing linked to KS
PWA threatened by Neumann AIDS program
NuCore Health Management, Inc., which trades as NuVision Health Management, operator of an AIDS care facility at Neumann Medical Center in the Fishtown neighborhood of Kensington, has threatened to sue its former Director of HIV Services over his public statements criticizing the quality of nursing care in the unit.
NuCore also informed the former director that it would not pay him about $1000 in severance pay which he said he was promised by the Rev. George Anderson, the company's owner. "Please be advised, as you were terminated for willful misconduct from your position as Director of HIV Services, no severance payment will be paid to you," NuCore's attorney wrote.
Luther Weaver, III, Esq., an attorney for NuCore, sent a letter dated October 15th to the home of Robert Capone, a person living with HIV, "demanding" that Capone "cease and desist" from making public statements about his experiences at Neumann. Weaver called Capone's statements "false and defamatory."
Capone said that Weaver's letter also indicated that NuCore would allow him to keep a cellular phone which they had given him and a computer which he had purchased himself but for which NuCore had promised to reimburse him. Capone told fastfax that there are still about $2,000 in payments on the computer remaining.
Anderson, who contacted We The People executive director Joe Cronauer last week, said that he would send a letter to We The People for publication explaining NuCore's position in regard to Capone's complaints. No letter had been received by press time Thursday night.
Apparently in response to Capone's distribution of fastfax at several NuCore facilities this week, Weaver also threatened "swift legal action" if Capone visited "the offices of NHM or any entity therewith." In addition to its Neumann program, NuCore, trading as NuVision Health Management, operates drug detoxification programs at Parkview Hospital and John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital, also in Northeast Philadelphia.
Capone was terminated after he complained about the quality of nursing care at NuVision's AIDS unit at Neumann. Among the incidents he described included one in which nurses refused to clean a patient after he had defecated on himself, and another when a nurse refused to give a blanket to the patient when he complained of the cold. Capone said he had received numerous other complaints about patient care from the patient and his family.
The patient later died at the hospital, after a brief stay at a personal care home.
Dr. Darryl Jackson, the project's medical director, was also terminated from the Neumann program. He said last week that he became worried about the ability of the Neumann nurses to provide appropriate AIDS care when he noticed that several nurses entered a patient's room as though he were in isolation, in gloves and mask, even though such precautions were not necessary. Jackson also confirmed the incident about cleaning the patient who had defecated, saying that the nurse said that the staff at the personal care home the patient was being discharged to should have to perform the task.
It was unknown whether Jackson had also received a letter from NuCore's attorney.
In a related matter, David Fair, former executive director of We The People, told fastfax that he had resigned from his position as a board member of A New Way of Life (NWL), a residential recovery house in South Philadelphia, on which Anderson serves as an officer.
"Any individual who believes that making money on the suffering of people with AIDS is likely to take the same attitude towards people in recovery from addiction," Fair said in a letter to NWL executive director David Hunter. "I don't work for NuVision and I have no immediate information about Mr. Capone's complaints. But I do know Rob, and I trust him. I have no reason to trust George or those whose money means so much to him."
Fair, who, with Hunter, established A New Way of Life as a subsidiary of We The People two years ago and who has raised over $200,000 for the organization, said he was concerned that NuVision might be planning to include NWL as one of its programs in the future. "A New Way of Life is a not-for-profit, however," he said. "I don't think NuVision will like that much."
COMHAR stonewalls on Kirk case
Despite numerous contacts from We The People, health department officials and other advocates, COMHAR executive director Matthew Elavumkal has refused to negotiate on complaints that a former employee with AIDS has been unfairly denied his long-tem disability coverage.
Elavumkal had told two We The People representatives that he would discuss the complaints with his board of directors to determine whether the organization could afford to make any payments to Ted Kirk, who until last year was employed by Philadelphia AIDS Coordinated Therapy Services (PACTS), the agency's AIDS services department.
Kirk says he was promised long-term disability coverage when he joined the agency's staff in the summer of 1993.
Elavumkal has denied that COMHAR was at fault for the denial. He says that CNA, COMHAR's insurance company, turned down Kirk's disability application because his AIDS diagnosis was a "pre-existing condition."
Kirk is a member of We The People's board of directors, and until this week was co-chairperson of the Philadelphia HIV Commission, the Title I Ryan White Planning Council for southeastern Pennsylvania. After two recent hospitalizations, Kirk decided not to seek a second term on the Commission because his illness has progressed.
fastfax has learned that city health department officials have contacted Elavumkal to offer their assistance in helping COMHAR to meet the financial obligation of paying directly for Kirk's disability insurance. It was not known whether Elavumkal had shared the content of those discussions with his board of directors.
Kirk had originally applied for his long-term disability benefit after consistent bouts of illness forced him to retire from his practice in the spring of 1995.
Kirk was hired as a clinician for PACTS -- the only HIV-specific mental health service in the Philadelphia area, which also operates the Community Living Room -- in July, 1993, and was promoted to the position of Director of Education in September, 1994.
A credentialed expert in the field of counseling those with terminal illnesses, Kirk said he was hired not only because of his professional background but because his own AIDS diagnosis was seen as an enhancement to his ability to counsel PACTS' HIV+ clientele.
Under the CNA long-term disability plan he says he was promised when he joined COMHAR, Kirk would receive $1,549 per month in disability payments -- 60% of his monthly income at the time of his disability -- for the rest of his life.
Kirk has offered to accept a partial payment on his disability claim totaling $13,949 (back payments to November, 1995, when his claim would originally have gone into effect), as well as monthly payments of $1,549 for the next five years.
Kirk's attorneys are expected to file a legal claim for the disability payments against both COMHAR and CNA in the near future.
"I'm hoping that it won't come to a long legal battle," he said last week, noting that he has been hospitalized several times in the past few months. "I don't think I have the time."
WTP executive director Joe Cronauer said that We The People and other AIDS advocacy groups are planning several protests in the coming weeks to "highlight the urgency of getting for Ted what he needs to live."
Antibody may resist HIV
An antibody commonly used by the body to ward off the flu and other invaders may offer some protection from HIV infection, researchers have reported.
Dr. Jonathan Braun, of the University of California at Los Angeles, and colleagues found that a group of homosexual men with low levels of the VH3 antibody were very susceptible to HIV infection through sexual contact. The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, also showed that the number of sexual partners the men had did not effect their risk for infection, noting that some had only one sexual encounter.
Further research will try to determine if it is possible, or useful, to raise VH3 antibody levels in individuals at risk for HIV infection, they said.
Many hemophiliacs accept deal from blood companies
Thousands of hemophiliacs who were infected with HIV by tainted blood clotting products have accepted a settlement offer from manufacturers that would give each $100,000 in compensation.
Nonetheless, as the deadline approached for victims to file forms expressing their opinion on the deal, it was unclear whether enough would say yes to ensure its completion.
The four manufacturers who made the offer this May can back out if too many victims reject it and elect to pursue individual lawsuits. The companies won't say how many rejections they will tolerate.
By a day before the October 15th deadline, roughly 3,000 victims had responded to the offer and nearly 95 percent had accepted it, a person familiar with the tabulations said.
The acceptance rate was much lower for victims who have already filed lawsuits against the companies. Plaintiffs in just over 50 percent of the 800 pending lawsuits said yes, the person said.
Hundreds of responses were expected at the last minute. Roughly 6,000 to 10,000 people or their families are affected.
The settlement offer was made by Bayer AG on behalf of its Cutter and Miles laboratories divisions; Baxter International Inc., and its Travenol and Hyland divisions; Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc., and its Armour Pharmaceutical division; and Alpha Therapeutic Corp., a U.S. division of Green Cross of Japan.
Collectively these companies sell the bulk of the "clotting factors" in the United States -- chemicals that hemophiliacs must inject regularly to ensure their blood will clot.
Hemophiliacs contend that the companies put them at risk for AIDS in the early 1980s by failing to sterilize donated blood used to make the factors.
The hemophiliacs also say they have documents proving that the companies, to save money, intentionally recruited donors from groups thought to be at high risk for AIDS including gay men, illegal intravenous drug users and prison inmates.
Nearly 5,000 AIDS-infected hemophiliacs have died. Since hemophilia is common among siblings and is usually present in males, some families have been decimated by the deaths of three or more brothers. Deaths are now occurring at a rate of two per day, activists say.
The companies insist they had no way of knowing how AIDS was transmitted at the time and so they are not at fault. All donors were screened for diseases and those thought at high risk for AIDS were excluded as early as 1982, the companies say.
Tragically, by that time, most of the infections had already occurred.
While refusing to admit wrongdoing, the companies proposed a $640 million settlement of all claims, hoping to put a decade of litigation behind them.
Hemophiliac activists grudgingly endorsed the deal, calling it inadequate, but acknowledging that many victims would want it.
"Some people are in serious financial trouble and they need money. Other people have a good lawsuit, but they're dying and they want money now, and the industry knows this," said activist Corey Dubin, a hemophiliac and AIDS patient from Goleta, Calif., who leads the activist group The Committee of 10,000.
Dubin wouldn't speculate on whether the deal will be completed.
So far, the court system has sided with the defendants. Many state laws prohibit product liability suits involving blood products, while the statute of limitations for filing has run out in others.
While a handful of cases have gone to trial, the defendants have always prevailed.
"We did everything we believed we could to prevent infections by anything, but nobody knew what HIV was," at the time, said Guy Esnouf, spokesman for Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, a French-owned drugmaker.
Plaintiffs say that tide may turn as more incriminating documents have turned up describing the questionable donors used for blood products.
Study says kissing linked to KS
by Charles Bankhead
Medical Tribune News Service
There is a chance that an AIDS-related cancer may be spread through deep, intimate kissing, suggests new research that found that the virus associated with the cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma is frequently present in saliva.
In a new study, Kaposi's sarcoma herpes virus (KSHV) was identified in saliva samples from 17 of 23 HIV-infected patients with the cancer, Dr. David Koelle reported at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
KSHV particles also appeared in the saliva of a non-HIV-infected patient with Kaposi's sarcoma, said Koelle, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.
A small group of the patients were retested over five days to determine whether evidence of the virus persisted in saliva samples. In several patients, viral shedding - evidence that the virus was not only present, but also contagious - continued throughout the period, said Koelle.
While this points to "a possible role for saliva in the person-to-person transmission of KSHV, further studies are needed to confirm this," he stressed.
Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that afflicts as many as 20 percent of HIV-infected gay and bisexual men, produces dark-colored nodules on the skin.
For reasons that aren't clear, KS occurs more often in gay and bisexual men infected with HIV than in other people infected with the AIDS virus.
"The relationship between KSHV infection and Kaposi's sarcoma has not been formally proven, but it's highly likely that infection with the virus is required for the development of the cancer," said Koelle. "The virus occurs in more than 95 percent of KS tissues."
KSHV is genetically related to Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which causes mononucleosis and is known to be spread through saliva, Koelle said. The link between the KS virus and EBV and the fact that other herpes viruses can be transmitted via saliva led Koelle and colleagues to speculate that KSHV also might be present in saliva.
The results conflict somewhat with epidemiological studies of KS, which indicate the condition is related to sexual activity, commented Dr. Alfred Saah, an infectious disease researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
"Studies of gay men with HIV infection and KS have shown a higher level of sexual activity, indicating this condition is more of a sexually transmitted disease, rather than a condition transmitted by saliva," said Saah.
The new study involved 23 HIV-positive patients, 21 of whom had current KS and two who had gone into remission. Another patient had KS, but tested negative for HIV. The patients had various types of KS lesions, including those of the skin, mouth, throat and esophagus, and a combination of skin and oral lesions.
The investigators analyzed the saliva samples by use of a DNA-based test known as a polymerase chain reaction assay. The tests detected the virus in 17 of the 23 HIV-positive patients and in the one HIV-negative patient.
The virus was detected in saliva samples from both patients with the cancer and those whose KS had gone into remission.