Three women infected with HIV after having ‘vampire facials’
Three women who had so-called “vampire facials” at an unlicensed spa in New Mexico have been infected with HIV, raising fears over the risks of unregulated beauty treatments.
The women are believed to be the first documented cases of people contracting the virus through a cosmetic procedure using needles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US federal health agency.
An investigation was triggered in 2018 when a customer of the clinic in Albuquerque found out she was HIV positive in her forties, having had the treatment known officially as a platelet-rich plasma microneedling facial.
The procedure involves drawing the patient’s blood, separating its components, and then using tiny needles to inject plasma into the face to rejuvenate the skin.
Kim Kardashian helped to popularise “vampire facials”
The procedure spiked in popularity after Kim Kardashian was shown undergoing the procedure in an episode of Kim and Kourtney Take Miami and is widely offered in the UK.
The CDC said it did not know the precise source of the contamination, but found that the clinic apparently reused disposable equipment that was intended for one-time use.
An inspection of the spa found unlabelled tubes of blood lying on a kitchen counter, others stored along with food in a refrigerator and unwrapped syringes in drawers and bins.
Despite HIV transmission from contaminated blood through injection being a well-known risk, the report stated that this was the first documented case of infections probably caused by cosmetic treatment.
“Evidence suggests that contamination from an undetermined source at the spa during spring and summer 2018 resulted in HIV-1 transmission to these three patients,” the agency wrote.
The three women were among a cluster of five people found to share highly similar HIV strains, four of whom had undergone the procedure at the spa. The fifth individual, a man, had had a sexual relationship with one of the women.
The spa closed in the autumn of 2018 after an investigation found “multiple unsafe infection control practices”.
The former owner of the spa, Maria Ramos de Ruiz, is serving a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence
The owner was prosecuted for practising medicine without a licence.
The report said the investigation showed how important it was to ensure infection control practices at businesses that offer cosmetic procedures involving needles.
“If people are concerned — and I’ve had friends ask me, ‘What would you do?’— the first step is to check that your provider is licensed to provide cosmetic injection services,” said Anna Stadelman-Behar, an epidemiologist with the CDC who is the lead author of the HIV report.
“If they’re licensed, then they have had infection-control training and know the correct procedures, and are bound by law to follow proper infection-control practices.”