The person who owns the spa is in jail.
People who went to a now-closed spa in New Mexico that gave so-called “vampire facials” are now said to have gotten HIV from that salon.
The New Mexico Department of Health is contacting former VIP Beauty Salon and Spa clients in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who got “any type of injection-related service,” such as a vampire facial or Botox injections. The department says that clients who get injection-based services are at risk of getting HIV, hepatitis B, or hepatitis C.
A “vampire facial,” according to the American Academy of Dermatology Association, is a procedure where blood is drawn from the arm, placed into a machine that “separates the platelets from the rest of your blood,” then is “Re-injected into you (only the part of your blood that contains a high concentration of platelets).”
The name for this method is also “platelet-rich plasma.”
The department’s infectious disease office got a report in 2023 about a “newly diagnosed case of HIV whose only self-reported HIV risk exposure was a vampire facial at VIP Spa in Albuquerque, N.M. in 2018.”
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The health department then looked into the spa again and found “additional HIV infections with direct or indirect connections to services provided at the VIP Spa.”
The spa closed on September 7, 2018, after a multi-state agency found “practices that could put clients at risk of getting blood-borne diseases like HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C.”
According to KRQE, the spa owner, Maria Ramos De Ruiz, pleaded guilty to five felonies in June 2022 for performing medicine without a license.
In a news statement on Wednesday, Dr. Laura Parajon, the deputy secretary of the state Department of Health, said that people who used the injection-based service should be checked.
“It’s very important that we get the word out and remind anyone who got an injection as part of a service at the VIP Spa to come in for free and private testing,” Parajon said.
