Dominican police
shut down the laboratory of a prominent psychiatrist and
former Santo Domingo mayor who claims he cured more than 50
people of AIDS by injecting them with an unknown
substance, prosecutors said Thursday.
Police raided the
lab of Jose Ramon Baez Acosta on Wednesday
after receiving complaints from former patients, said
Luisa Matos, a spokeswoman for the Santo Domingo
province district attorney.
Investigators
seized samples of the formula dubbed ''Uman TS,'' medical
equipment, and two pigs and a donkey that Baez Acosta was
apparently using for tests, Matos said.
Baez Acosta,
who served as mayor of the Dominican capital in the mid
1960s, did not return phone calls to his office seeking
comment. Last week he told the newspaper El
Caribe he had cured 52 people of AIDS and that God
revealed the treatment to him in a dream.
Pan American
Health Organization representative Ana Cristina Nogueira
said Thursday that public health officials should track down
AIDS patients who may have been hurt by the serum or
who stopped other treatments because they believed
they were cured.
''Every now and
then these people appear saying there is a cure,'' she
told the Associated Press. ''It is difficult to control that
when it goes out in a newspaper.''
Baez Acosta
was not arrested or charged, but prosecutors are
investigating with the aim of bringing him to trial, Matos
said. Health officials ordered an immediate stop to
the treatment.
At least 70,000
of the Dominican Republic's 9.2 million people have HIV,
the virus that causes AIDS. The Caribbean has the
second-highest infection rate of the disease outside
of sub-Saharan Africa. (AP)