Christopher Haliskoe, Online Managing Editor
Christopher HowellAIDS/HIV1-1-1-1 Dr. William Schwartzman spoke Wednesday to an audience of students and non-students at a seminar entitled “HIV/AIDS: Progress and Challenges,” speaking about the continuing struggles of battling the deadly disease. Armed with a Powerpoint presentation and an MD’s vocabulary, Dr. Schwartzman, who works at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, chronicled the history of the STD, its methods of infection, its symptoms, mortality rate, treatments, and hope for the future. Schwartzman started with the history of HIV and AIDS. He spoke of how HIV was a primate affliction, passed to humans through contact of meat and blood of primates killed for food. He explained that AIDS was once considered the “gay plague” because the first cases were reported in several homosexual men living in Los Angeles. He made clear, however, that AIDS does not discriminate, citing examples of how it spread to all races and sexual orientations. He went on to elaborate on how HIV infects T Cells, beginning a chain reaction that devastates the body’s ability to fight disease. He also discussed the history of AIDS treatments, and how AIDS has evolved and become resistant to all but a few treatments. He ended by talking about the treatments that have worked and showing how AIDS cases have leveled off. 2-2-2-2 “It was a very good presentation,” said Professor Bernardine Pregerson, professor of Life Sciences. “You never know what approach each speaker will take, and I liked his method.” Pregerson, who teaches microbiology, began studying AIDS in the early 80s when the first cases were reported. She began inviting professionals in the field of medicine to speak at Pierce about HIV and AIDS about five years ago. Her Microbiology 20 class was present at the seminar. She and her students, however, did think the seminar was a little too professional. “As much as I liked the material, it could have been a little simpler,” she said. “It was a good experience, but some of it went over my head,” said Yolanda C., one of Pregerson’s students. “It was a little hard to understand how HIV infects T Cells.”
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