Lawyer: 6 Austrians were injected with malaria
Feb 9, 2012, 7:23 PM
VIENNA (AP) – The number of people who claim that a Vienna psychiatric ward injected them with a parasite that causes malaria while treating them as teenagers has increased to seven.
Most _ but not all _ of the alleged victims say they were wards of Vienna foster homes at the time. Lawyer Johannes Oehlboeck, who represents six of them, says their separately given accounts are credible.
Oehlbock said Thursday his six clients described receiving the so-called “malaria treatments” while juvenile psychiatric patients at Vienna’s University Clinic in the 1960s.
Such injections were an accepted method in the early 20th century to treat syphilis, and Austrian Dr. Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the 1927 Nobel prize for Medicine for developing this treatment.
Municipal and federal officials are investigating the seven claims.
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