Tag: medicine

Frontiers: vanquishers of Beall, publishers of bunk

Frontiers: vanquishers of Beall, publishers of bunk

It is now quasi official: do not mess with Frontiers. My earlier reporting made it a credible possibility that this Swiss publisher was behind the January 2017 shut-down and removal of Jeffrey Beall’s list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”, and it was now indeed verified by an article in Chronicle of Higher Education. The librarian Beall used to be constantly under attack from Open Access (OA) publishers who were unhappy about his personal opinions and his private decisions to place them on his blog list. With those, his University of Colorado in Denver supported Beall. But the trouble started when he placed in October 2015 the Swiss publisher Frontiers onto his list, thus effectively declaring this Holtzbrinck-owned outlet a predatory publisher, after hearing of scientists’ complaints and reading my reports. To be fair, Frontiers are still defended by a much bigger number of scientists who see the advantage of having a reliable business partner who will publish certain manuscripts which hardly any respectable journal might consider.  Especially certain kinds of psychologists figured out that with the life-science-oriented Frontiers they can easily get merited as proper neuroscientists, or even biomedical polymaths (e.g., here). Regardless of the bunk they place there for $2500 a pop.

Frontiers first tried it nicely with Beall, when the Chief Executive Officer Frederick Fenter and journal manager Mirjam Curno (who is also trustee at Committee for Publication Ethics, COPE, read here) visited the librarian before Christmas 2016 in Denver (see my report here). Since Beall still did not remove Frontiers from his list, Fenter rallied its loyal journal editors and started together with them in August 2016 a campaign against Beall, demanding that his university punishes the librarian or at least forces him to remove Frontiers from his private list (read here). That information on my site served as (utterly uncredited) template for the aforementioned Chronicle of Higher Education article (as its author Paul Basken admitted to me, but his editor Brock Read denied). Basken then contacted Beall, who then also revealed to him that in January 2016 the University of Colorado Denver caved in to Frontiers demands and opened a misconduct case against its librarian. At this point, Beall decided to delete his list and save his job. An academic disagreement was resolved in a honed and cherished academic tradition: with a call to the employer and a threat of sacking.

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Berlin court grants Jungebluth new injunction against my reporting

Berlin court grants Jungebluth new injunction against my reporting

The Kafkaesque farce of court injunction trials from German trachea transplanters against me continues. The Landesgericht court in Berlin issued a second injunction against me, as requested by the angel of innocence Philipp Jungebluth, the former right hand man and acolyte of Paolo Macchiarini. The target of the injunction is this article, concerning an unpublished Macchiarini paper Haag et al. As it practice in German law, this legally binding verdict, the breach of which is punishable by a fine of up to €250,000, was passed without allowing me to present my evidence. In fact, Jungebluth also was not asked to present any evidence, his word that I wronged him sufficed. The legal idea behind such injunctions “the element of surprise”, that is, to present the other party with a binding court verdict, a huge bill for it, followed by a huge fine for any alleged breach of the injunction, the pretext for which is always easy to conjure, all of which should discourage any attempts to fight back. You are expected to lose your court case without even knowing there was one going on. Germans think this is a great and just way to keep internet and other media at bay.

So this is obviously a financially heavily mismatched war of Macchiarini and his partners against me, with all the media who used to celebrate their (now known as lethal) human experiments suddenly very silent. I am however grateful for the past and current support of my readers, and ask you to keep donating. Because nobody in Germany cares about these dead and mutilated patients, who were all foreigners experimented upon abroad anyway.  Continue reading “Berlin court grants Jungebluth new injunction against my reporting” →

Hannover Medical School MHH: where doctor careers matter more than patient lives?

Hannover Medical School MHH: where doctor careers matter more than patient lives?

Philipp Jungebluth, formerly right-hand man and student of the lethal trachea transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, is threatening another lawsuit against me. This time, he is unhappy about being associated with the 5 trachea transplant operations Macchiarini performed in Italy (only one of these five might still be alive, with a permanent brain damage). Jungebluth freely admits through his lawyer to have been part in the two operations in Barcelona: the very first trachea transplant on Claudia Castillo in 2008, and another one, performed in secret against an explicit ban issued by the Hospital Clinic Barcelona, in a neighbouring hospital on the Argentinian patient DD. Both patients Castillo and DD were previously unsuccessfully operated on their airways by Macchiarini, both were eventually offered a bronchus or trachea transplant, respectively.  I was informed how the 55-year old  DD fared after the operation, and it was a total disaster (it is all but clear if she is still alive, in fact even survivor Claudia Castillo can’t be found anymore).

These two operations were however according to Jungebluth part of his German medical education, the so-called “practical year”, as student of the Hannover Medical School (MHH). It seems that a past MHH professor, Heike Kielstein (nee Nave) was involved in the histological analyses of these trachea transplants. In 2010, Kielstein as part of award ceremony presented Jungebluth with a €2500 prize for his Macchiarini-supervised medical dissertation, which described only the first trachea transplant patient, but kept the second transplant operation on DD as a total secret. But MHH apparently knew about that highly unethical act, and did not mind at all.

Hence, MHH did not cease all trachea transplant research in 2006, as they once told to me untruthfully. The technology was simply outsourced in a good MHH tradition to poorer parts of Europe. To escape tough German regulations or legal responsibilities? Or maybe because the non-German patients abroad were seen as more suitable for medical experiments? MHH, whose rector just recently ordered its own university not to investigate Jungebluth’s dissertation, remains deadly silent. Herr Professor Macchiarini, whose German is near-native (the Italian grew up in Switzerland) and is much better than his English, remains adjunct professor at MHH, against state law.  Continue reading “Hannover Medical School MHH: where doctor careers matter more than patient lives?” →

The one who asked questions: interview with Johannes Wahlström, by Alla Astakhova

The one who asked questions: interview with Johannes Wahlström, by Alla Astakhova

Below I am re-publishing an interview which the Russian health journalist Alla Astakhova conducted with the Swedish journalist Johannes Wahlström. Wahlström’s work for the Swedish television SVT, together with Bosse Lindquist, was decisive in uncovering the patient abuse by the fallen star surgeon Paolo Macchiarini (see here the full list of trachea transplant patients). Without the dedicated work of the Swedish journalists, Macchiarini would probably still be experimenting on humans with his cadaveric and plastic tracheas, generating even more death and suffering in the process. In the interview with Astakhova, Wahlström tells about his research for the famous SVT film Experimenten, and how the SVT team found out about the four Karolinska Institutet whistleblowers Oscar Simonson, Karl-Henrik Grinnemo, Matthias Corbascio and Thomas Fux (see my reports about them here, here and here).

For Wahlström, the scandal is not just about Macchiarini. The central figures here are the abused patients, most, if not almost all of them no longer alive. And Macchiarini is not the only one guilty. Wahlström explains how everyone else orbiting that grandiose thorax surgeon was co-responsible, by looking away, covering things up or contributing their small share to the grand horror. The multilingual Swedish journalist specifically criticises the irresponsible dishonesty of Macchiarini’s Russian surgeon partners Vladimir Parshin and Igor Polyakov in the face of the catastrophe they participated in, or the bizarre attitude of Macchiarini’s biographer and Megagrant-manager Elena Kokurina, who seems to have been deliberately avoiding learning the real fate of his patients. Wahlström also questions the ethics of German TV producers who decided to air their Macchiarini-extolling documentary Supercells! in Germany and France despite knowing that its protagonist, Yulia Tuulik, was not cured at all. She was miserably dying. Continue reading “The one who asked questions: interview with Johannes Wahlström, by Alla Astakhova” →

Unpublished Macchiarini manuscript confirms 5 forgotten trachea transplant patients

Unpublished Macchiarini manuscript confirms 5 forgotten trachea transplant patients

7.09.2017 This article was slapped with an injunction by Berlin court (here), on behalf of Jungebluth. Sentences forbidden by injunction are replaced to show the legal truth. 

I have been forwarded a manuscript by the scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, which was originally intended to present in detail all of his known 9 cadaveric trachea recipients (only 4 are recorded officially). The compilation follows exactly all the patients who are already listed on my site, with the small difference that the paper (allegedly rejected at Nature Communications) presents their clinical evolutions quite differently from reality. One of these now fully confirmed victims of Macchiarini’s research was his second patient from Barcelona, whom Macchiarini transplanted in secret; five were operated in Italy (including Keziah Shorten and the Czech patient MK). The manuscript also confirms that Macchiarini’s acolyte Philipp Jungebluth [is an angel of innocence and never did anything bad in his life. Every patient ever treated by him is in fact eternally grateful]. The German doctor is currently suing me in court for alleged libel, insisting that all these patient deaths and his proven research misconduct in Sweden would never ever disqualify him from developing trachea transplants and training as thorax surgeon at the University Clinic Heidelberg, where he however doesn’t work anymore.

The first author of this lost and now found unpublished paper is Johannes Haag, Macchiarini’s other acolyte and former MD student from Hannover Medical School (MHH) in Germany. Haag is apparently still employed at the Thoraxklinik at the University of Heidelberg, where Jungebluth used to be. The manuscript, which was supposed to be Haag’s big paper, was written to deal with the fact that too many of Macchiarini’s cadaveric trachea recipients died or developed very severe complications. To this end, the team hatched an idea to do “reverse translational experiments“, where rat experiments would follow those on 9 humans, prove that the cadaveric trachea technology works in principle and it was the human patients who were making problems. This notion was to be supported also by their earlier pig study Go et al, Biomaterials 2010, where Macchiarini and Jungebluth claim, without a shred of evidence, that the large animal testing was performed before the first patient, Claudia Castillo, received a cadaveric trachea in 2008 (details here, here and here). Update 7.09.2017: Go et al  2010 paper was criticised on PubPeer for its heavy scientific and technical deficits.

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Walles court trial against me ends with “amicable settlement”

Walles court trial against me ends with “amicable settlement”

The court trial against me by German trachea transplanters Heike and Thorsten Walles ended with the settlement in the appeal court in Bamberg. A costly one, which I had to accept, giving the danger of seeing me and my family driven to bankruptcy before the next very costly court instance can even be invoked for my defence, what with the two impending court fines for the alleged breach of the injunction Walles passed against me with the help of a certain evidence-allergic judge in Würzburg. My legal costs tally up to at least €12,000 and I am now stuck with those. On the plus side, none of my own and my generous donors’ money goes to Walles, they have to pay their own lawyers and half of the court fees, which made them very fuming and livid indeed, as their behaviour in the court room showcased. There the married trachea transplanters also made clear that they saw the operation on their 3 patients (described here and here) as successful research. This Walles stance is unblemished by the undisputed fact that their patients received no actual health benefits from those pig-intestine-based tracheal grafts whatsoever, in fact it looks quite the opposite. Thing is, those 3 operations were all performed in 2003, 2007 and 2009 as compassionate use, without any previous animal experiments, appropriate safety tests or in fact any ethics approvals. A question rises if, or rather how far Walles breached the Nuremberg Code of 1947 and the German medicinal product law, which forbid exactly that kind of research on patients.   Continue reading “Walles court trial against me ends with “amicable settlement”” →

Paul-Ehrlich Institute admits to have approved Walles tracheal transplant over phone, without questions

Paul-Ehrlich Institute admits to have approved Walles tracheal transplant over phone, without questions

The German trachea transplanters Heike and Thorsten Walles treated the 3 patients with their pig-intestine-based tracheal transplants (one of them performed with Paolo Macchiarini). They are currently suing me in court for reporting about those, while their employer, the University of Würzburg, investigates these tracheal transplants together with the evidence for blatant data manipulations in several Walles publications on suspicion of misconduct. None of those 3 patients is alive today, yet Walles insist that neither of their transplant operations was in any way related to the patients deaths or that it might have reduced their quality of life. They keep declaring those operations as resounding successes, free from any evidence, though the last transplant was performed in 2009 and never again. A corresponding clinical trial, financed by the German Ministry of Education and Research with €1.5 Million between 2009 and 2015 (and briefly mentioned at the beginning of the PEI letter), did not achieve even a single milestone. Not even animal experiments were permitted by the responsible watchdog institution, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI). For almost 7 months, PEI refused to answer my Freedom of Information inquiry. It seems however, my complaints to authorities and the Federal Ministry of Health, finally had an effect.

Continue reading “Paul-Ehrlich Institute admits to have approved Walles tracheal transplant over phone, without questions” →