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Maui man’s
faith in ‘cure’
for cancer ends
in tragedy

Doctors believe a compound
he found on the Internet led
to his liver failure and death

---

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

The death of a 55-year-old Maui man who bought an alleged cancer cure over the Internet has attracted national attention.

CNN reported the case on its Web site after it was published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Naoky Tsai, medical director of St. Francis Medical Center's Liver Center, was lead editor of the article.

There have been reports of people who became ill with liver and kidney problems after working with hydrazine sulfate, a spinoff of rocket fuel propellant, Tsai said.

But the Hawaii case is the first documented death, he said.

Tsai saw the Maui man at St. Francis about eight or nine days before he died in mid-1999 with bleeding from the stomach caused by liver failure.

He said the Maui resident, a retired highway patrolman from California, was diagnosed in October 1998 with sinus cancer. He went to an ear, nose and throat specialist in Honolulu and got a second opinion at the University of California-Los Angeles.

"Both experts, here and at UCLA, recommended that he undergo surgery followed by radiation treatment, and he didn't like it," Tsai said.

"He decided to try something different, and, being Internet savvy, he turned on the Net, started to surf and came on this site (promoting hydrazine sulfate)."

The site was produced by Kathy Keaton, who has since died of ovarian cancer, Tsai said. The wife of Penthouse magazine's publisher, she was instrumental in getting Congress to ask the National Cancer Institute to perform trials to see if hydrazine sulfate is beneficial, he said.

A NASA scientist who had worked with the compound found it had certain effects and was the first to promote it as a cancer therapy, Tsai said.

Dr. Joseph Gold, who has a cancer research clinic in New York, found in pilot studies in the 1970s that the compound inhibited tumor growth by depriving the cancer of glucose.

However, two trials performed by Mayo Clinic for the National Cancer Institute failed to demonstrate any benefits, Tsai said.

Charges of a "government conspiracy" against use of the drug have appeared in Penthouse magazine and in advertisements in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Gold claims the government is "out to get hydrazine sulfate."

The unidentified Maui man bought the compound cheaply over the Internet and started taking it about December 1998, Tsai said. "It seems to be in cycles -- once a month for so many days, and again and again," he said.

"He took it all the way to Mother's Day, 1999, when he got very sick. He first started a few days before that with a skin rash, then he got stomach pain, then nausea and vomiting."

These are typical changes in a patient with liver disease, Tsai said. "It took him almost four weeks to come to see us."

He went to a doctor, who found he was jaundiced with bad liver functions, and he was admitted to Maui Memorial Hospital.

When his condition worsened, he was transferred to St. Francis Medical Center where "his liver continued to fail, and his kidney followed," Tsai said.

An autopsy showed both the liver and kidney had significant cell death, caused by a toxic substance, Tsai said.

A drug called Isoniazid, commonly used to treat tuberculosis, has a similar molecular structure, he said. "When a patient develops severe liver failure from this agent, that's what we see in those autopsies."

Tsai said hydrazine sulfate is believed responsible for the Maui man's death because of the course of his illness -- when he took the medicine, when he got sick and when he had liver failure and died.

Tsai said Isoniazid has been used many years for tuberculosis because it is easy to administer, effective and does not cause liver damage on everyone. While it is similar to hydrazine sulfate, there is a big difference, he said.

Tuberculosis patients are warned about possible liver problems and are carefully monitored. "If there are any symptoms of stomach pain, nausea or vomiting, we stop treatment."

There was no warning or monitoring for the Maui man using hydrazine sulfate, Tsai said. "He just took it. He didn't know (of the dangers). The Web site will tell you there are no side effects. This is very characteristic of an alternative medicine."

Other St. Francis doctors involved in the case were pathologist Steven Komura, who performed an autopsy, and pharmacologist Charles Chiu, who did research on hydrazine sulfate.

In an editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr. Martin Black, chief of liver disease at the Temple University School of Medicine, said hydrazine sulfate "is one of the hundreds if not thousands of compounds that are sold, and for which there is precious little evidence of efficacy."

Black said he hopes the compound will attract "Operation Cure," an effort of the Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to end false health claims on the Internet.

Tsai said he and other doctors have checked with the FDA, which cites freedom of speech and other problems involved in regulating health products on the Internet.

"We're not saying all alternative medicines are bad," Tsai said. "There may be some effectiveness, but you have to use your common sense."

Safety measures are built into prescribed medications, he said. Physicians using any drug that causes side effects or damage to patients must report to the FDA, so there is constant surveillance.

Medicines, agents or drugs advertised on the Net do not have such surveillance, and buyers do not know if the products are as claimed, he said, citing problems of different dosages and contamination.

Patients should always talk to their doctors about alternative remedies. "I always encourage them to talk to me, and I say, 'If I don't know (if it's safe), I will try to find out for you.'"