Medical Monster

[Thaising]

Quack who served two jail terms in US lured Western cancer patients to Chiang Mai for bogus cures, police say

Chiang Mai police have arrested an Austrian national who allegedly killed at least one desperate Australian patient with a bogus cancer treatment he had advertised on a website.

Hellfried Sartori, 67, was arrested on Sunday in a Chiang Mai hotel and charged with fraud as well as practising medicine without a licence, police said.

Sartori will likely be extradited to Australia soon to face a murder charge, they said.

Sartori may be responsible for the deaths of several Australian cancer patients, who flew to Chiang Mai to receive the treatment in hotel rooms and later died at city hospitals, Lt-General Phanuphong Singhara na Ayutthaya told a press conference yesterday.

Sartori has served two prison terms in the United States - in New York state in May 1992 and in Washington DC in July 1998 - after administering his so-called "ozone treatments", Phanuphong said.

Websites claim the treatment cures everything from Aids and cancer to allergies and hardening of the arteries. It consists of injections of "liquid ozone", usually into a vein.

Australian police contacted their Thai counterparts over an investigation into the death of Kathleen Preston, an Australian cancer patient. Preston died at Maharaj Nakhon Chiang Mai Hospital on July 26 last year. An autopsy report found an excessive amount of potassium in her blood.

Police suspect Sartori injected Preston before she died. Sartori has been seen with other Western cancer patients in Chiang Mai, police say. He accompanied Melissa Judith Taylor, a New Zealander with lung cancer, to the intensive-care unit of Chiang Mai-Ram Hospital on June 22. She fell unconscious after he injected a liquid into her chest and neck.

Taylor's relatives later told police that they flew with her from New Zealand to Chiang Mai after reading an online advertisement in which Sartori was portrayed as a qualified practitioner of the "liquid ozone" treatment. Sartori charged Taylor Bt900,000 for his "alternative medicine".

Taylor's relatives, who witnessed the treatment, said Sartori used a syringe to withdraw liquid from a small metal cylinder, then injected three doses into Taylor, in veins in her chest and neck. She passed out after the injections and had to be rushed to hospital, Taylor's relatives said.

Phanuphong said a gas cylinder and a number of VCDs showing Sartori giving the treatment to a Western man were found in his hotel room. Phanuphong said his officers were working with foreign police representatives based in Thailand to locate other victims of Sartori.

Dr Phattharawin Attasara, a senior physician with the National Cancer Institute of Thailand, dismissed Sartori's cure as preposterous. Injecting a large amount of a foreign or inorganic substance into a vein would only cause the patient to faint or possibly die, the doctor said.

Citing information provided by Interpol, police said Sartori graduated from Graz University in Vienna and was a member of Austria's medical council until October 1, 1974.

He is in police custody.