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Photo by BOZA IVANOVIC
Student AIDS activists at UCLA show teen AIDS ambassadors examples of photographs and graphic art that incorporate AIDS education messages. |
Looking back and ahead at the AIDS pandemic
BY AJAY SINGH
Today Staff Writer
In January 1981, immunologist Michael S. Gottlieb dispatched a researcher into the wards of the UCLA Medical Center to look for compelling teaching cases. The researcher returned with word of a 31-year-old gay man hospitalized with complaints of mysterious fevers and severe weight loss.
The man was the world’s first known victim of AIDS. Within a few months, four other gay men were admitted with identical symptoms, prompting Gottlieb to alert the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His report, on June 5, 1981, contained the first description of a new disease whose cause wouldn’t be known for another two years.
“In those days, the worlds of gay men and doctors in white coats were … not very cordial,” Gottlieb reminisced at a gathering of doctors, researchers and media at Covel Commons on the 25th anniversary of the first cases of AIDS at UCLA. The June 5 event, titled “25 Years of Caring,” was organized by the UCLA AIDS Institute, a multidisciplinary think tank that draws on the skills of more than 160 leading researchers in the global battle against AIDS.
Twenty-five years into the pandemic that has claimed some 25 million lives, including more than 500,000 in the United States, orally administered cocktail drugs have transformed AIDS from an invariably fatal disease to one that can be effectively managed, Gottlieb said.
HIV spreads disproportionately among African Americans and other low-income communities, noted Gottlieb, who, along with his colleagues, was influential in spreading awareness about AIDS during the epidemic’s early years. Some 40 million people are infected worldwide, but “a large number of them are unaware of it because they haven’t had a test,” he explained.
As a global leader in AIDS research, UCLA has been “at the cusp of all the major clinical trials as well as policy initiatives,” said Gerald S. Levey, vice chancellor of medical sciences and dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine. The first prospective epidemiological study of a group of high-risk men was performed at UCLA, for example, and one of the first mouse models of HIV was established here, helping expand the understanding of the virus’ pathology.
In hindsight, what would researchers have done differently 25 years ago? Instead of initially focusing on particular groups such as gays, HIV testing should have been more widespread, said Judith S. Currier, associate director of the AIDS Research and Education Center. “We’re doing that now.”
Because peer-to-peer AIDS education is instrumental in preventing the spread of HIV, especially among youth, the AIDS Institute, in collaboration with the Magic Johnson Foundation, launched a program last year to train teenage “AIDS ambassadors” from different ethnicities and neighborhoods in Los Angeles. A similar program to train UCLA undergraduates produced 32 AIDS ambassadors last year — four times as many as in 2004. UCLA researchers are also making efforts to develop “rectal microbicides,” which contain anti-HIV lubricants and would be valuable in societies where people tend not to use condoms, said Peter Anton, a professor of medicine.
The AIDS virus is so prolific that as many as 10 million viruses a day can be produced in an untreated patient, said AIDS Institute Director Irvin S.Y. Chen. “But I’m fairly confident we can deal with the AIDS virus,” he added. “We just need to work a lot harder.”
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