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AIDS FOCUS
AIDS: Words From The Front
Part II of a Ill-part series
Part I of AIDS: Words From the Front introduced medical technologist Salvatore
Catapano and his use of the typhoid vaccine to combat AIDS, which he believes is
actually "extraordinarily entrenched late-staging syphilis".
Granted a U.S. patent for his discovery that" a complete immunization and
remission of a person afflicted with AIDS may be achieved by the administration with
typhoid vaccine", Catapano has begun the slow process of convincing the medical
establishment of the validity of his research.
In Part Hof the series, Catapano discusses the details of the typhoid vaccine
protocol and the results of his work to date.
The protocol must be followed closely. Details matter,
including the precise location of the injection, the vigorous
shaking of the bottle before each injection so that the potency of
the vaccine will be uniform. In general, the patient starts out with
injections twice a week, eventually going down to one injection a
week and then one a month. Periodically, the weekly treatment
will consist of two smaller shots given 30 minutes apart rather
than (xie large injectioa Recently a physician in Los Angeles
took it upon himself to experiment with the dosaging and two
patients had to be hospitalized. The prescribed doses are
miniscule and staggered; more is not better. Catapano stresses
that the vaccine works most effectively when it is used alone and
should definitely not be combined with chemotherapy-including
AZT-or radiation. A representative of Burroughs-Wellcome, the
producer of AZT, contacted Catapano last year and expressed
interest in using typhoid vaccine as an immune modulator in
conjunction with AZT. Catapano wasn't interested. "Why would
anybody give daily chemotherapy to patients who are already
severely immune suppressed? It's crazy,” he says.
Catapano has had several patients begin the vaccine treatment,
show improvement, but decide to switch to AZT at their
physicians insistence. One such patient recently returned to
Catapano. So incapacitated by AZT that he needed oxygen and
could no longer walk. He had to be carried into Catapano's house.
Catapano regards AZT as a death sentence and its use a double
tragedy, because he is convinced that AIDS is really syphilis,
which is treatable, and for which an anti-viral drug, like AZT, can
do nothing.
Not all the physicians using the protocol share Catapano's
views about syphilis. Some consider the disease simply a co
factor in AIDS. Two of than, however, are reporting a
fascinating discovery, which Catapano has also made: After
about 15 shots of the typhoid vaccine, a number of AIDS patients
who had tested negative for syphilis began to manifest classic symptoms of the disease, usually
the distinctive roseola rash, and their syphilis tests became positive. Dr. Valentine Birds of
North Hollywood, California, has witnessed this phenomenon in six patients. When patients are
then treated with penicillin, the syphilitic symptoms clear up and the tests become negative.
While physicians around the country are taking up Catapano's techniques, he continues to
treat patients in Long Island and New York City, collaborating with physicians there. Twenty-
six of his patients have finished the treatment, including penicillin therapy, and are receiving
maintenance shots of typhoid vaccine every few weeks. Depending on a patient's condition, he
may begin maintenance therapy anywhere from five to 18 months after treatment, although
Catapano makes no guarantees if someone has a long history of AZT therapy or is taking other
treatments concurrently with typhoid vaccine. One patient recently telephoned Catapano and
elatedly announced that after getting his penicillin shots, his AIDS test (HTV-Elisa-test) had
become negative. Of approximately 75,000 reported cases of AIDS to date in America, there
have only been three published cases of patients becoming HIV negative. "I asked the woman
at the testing center to repeat what she'd said three times," the patient recalls. Catapano was
skeptical but quickly ordered five patients to go get tested.
Catapano's four decades of training and clinical experience were primarily concerned with
venereal disease. Yet it was a lifelong interest in cancer that indirectly led him to become
involved in the AIDS story. By the time he left the Navy in 1945 he had lost a brother, sister
and father to cancer and was determined to conduct research on the disease. It was 15 years,
however, before the bridal shop he fan with his wife was successful enough that Catapano could
afford to construct a laboratory in the basement of their home. He began experiments in which
he induced tumors in lab hamsters by injecting them with steroids.
Although chemotherapy was the treatment of the hour, Catapano was intrigued with the
possibility of using immunostimulating therapy, allowing the body to fight off cancer with its
own defense system. He fastened on to the concept of vaccines, hypothesizing that if they were
used preventively against certain diseases, perhaps they could
stimulate the immune system in a general way.
Night after night, month after month, he tested different
vaccines on the hamsters and studied the effect on their tumors;
he tried the vaccines for tetanus, diphtheria, typhus,
pheumococcys, polio and smallpox. After several years,
Catapano concluded that even though some of the
vaccines-like the Salk polio vaccine-had a temporary, minor
immunostimulating effect, they were effective only against the
organism from which they were derived. Still he persisted, and
in 1970 he took up work with the typhoid vaccine. From the
beginning, he knew he was onto something big: The immune
stimulation it produced was extraordinary. In matched
experiments he discovered that staggered miniscule doses of
vaccine effectively dissolved the tumors; conversely it was
impossible to induce tumors in hamsters that had been injected
regularly with the vaccine in a
prophylactic-preventive-regimen.
Catapano began searching medical libraries for everything
he could find about the typhoid vaccine and learned that, prior
to the introduction of penicillin, the vaccine, like malaria, had
been used to induce thaapeutic fevers in the treatment of a
number of diseases, including syphilis. Both agents were
injected to induce extremely high tempaatures-104 degrees
and above-in order to kill off the syphilitic organisms. Such
fever-therapy was considered essential, although it was only
erratically effective.
Yet no one had fully explored the properties of the typhoid
vaccine that made it such a powerful stimulant of the body's
immune system. Only gradually did Catapano come to
understand why his protocol worked, boosting both the body's
known immune responses, the cellular and the humoral (related
to bodily fluids). The vaccine is highly antigenic; it contains
proteins and carbohydrates, or polysaccharides,which have
on their surface distinctive sequences of atoms, called recurring prosthetic radicals. The vaccine
is injected just under the skin, by a short-needled syringe so that it reaches the lymphatic system.
This stimulates lymphocytes, in particular T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes. T-lymphocytes
are responsible for the body's cellular immune response; once stimulated they produce
lymphokines, soluble proteins which in turn activate macrophages, those cells that attach to and
destroy foreign agents. B-lymphocytes govern the body’s humoral immune response; they
stimulate circulating antibodies, proteins that attack invading agents.
In 1978 Catapano managed to have researchos at National Cancer Institute perform
experiments with lab animals, which confirmed the vaccine's special immune-stimulating
properties. Catapano insists that, as a lone investigator, he would never have obtained the
cooperation of the NCI, if its then director, Dr. Arthur Upton, now a department chairman at the
New York University School of Medicine, had not granted him an audience. Upton recently
recalled of that meeting: "People thought I was wasting my time talking to someone without an
M.D. or other scientific credentials. But it’s easy to forget, now that science is such a well
organized profession, that a century ago, it was conducted by amateurs." Upton was impressed
enough with Catapano's work to order that the animal studies with the vaccine be conducted.
Despite the promising results of the studies, chemotherapy was still the favored treatment for
cancer and, although Catapano began seeking a patent for his discoveries, he was unable to
interest the government or two major pharmaceutical companies that had little to gain
financially.
In 1982 when Catapano learned of the acquired immune deficioicy syndrome emerging in
the gay community, he saw a new therapeutic application for the vaccine. Three years later,
when the government had come up with no effective AIDS therapy, Catapano filed a new
application for a patent, covering the use of typhoid vaccine in the treatment of AIDS. Before
the application could be reviewed, Catapano treated a dozen AIDS patients. Then, in the
rigorous so-called "prosecution" of the patent application, four medical examiners scrutinized
the bloodwork and clinical history of each patient, as well as photographs of symptoms before
treatment and several months later. By Deconber the patent was granted; excerpts from the
body of evidence approved by the medical examiners are included in the granting document.
The full response of the medical community to Catapano and his typhoid vaccine protocol
remains to be seea "It is intersting that many physicians who were oithusiastic about trying the
Salk vaccine in patients dismiss the typhoid vaccine, although they know nothing about it," says
Dr. Maisonet.
-Katie Leishman
This article originally appeared in the November, 1988 issue o/Spin magazine. The article was
accompanied by a condom with explicit instructions on safer sex usage which prompted a
nationwide controversy (See Southern Voice, Vol. 1, #21).
"AIDS-Words from the Front" is reprinted courtesy (/Spin Magazine.
Living with AIDS, which regularly appears in this space, will resume after Part II of
"AIDS-Wordsfrom the Front."
Original Art by Shelton Bryant
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