Chrissy Williams
It has been 27 years since Dr. Michael Gottlieb stumbled across, and consequently discovered, the disease of AIDS. He has been active in the treatment and research of the disease ever since, and soon he will be speaking at Pierce College.
Gottlieb will be delivering his presentation, titled “HIV/AIDS In The World: New Insights,” in Physics Room 914 Wednesday from 12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m.
But let us first learn about Gottlieb’s “old insights” and how he discovered this disease.
In 1981, five young men were treated in three Los Angeles hospitals for pneumonia. What baffled their doctors was why two of them died – and why any of them even had the bug in the first place – because the virus that wreaked havoc on these men was usually benign.
Gottlieb, a doctor at the UCLA Medical Center at the time, was one of the physicians to treat these men.
“He was confronted with a mystery about these men,” said Bernadine Pregerson, professor of microbiology at Pierce who garnered Gottlieb to speak. “He had never seen that kind of respiratory illness in young men before.”
That illness was Pneumocystis carinii, which doesn’t usually sicken healthy people. In those weakened immune systems, however, it can cause lung infections and other symptoms.
Gottlieb came in contact with the two other Los Angeles physicians, Wayne Shandera and Joel Weisman, who also had patients with pneumocystis. What they noticed was a striking coincidence between the five patients: all of them were gay.
They documented their case files and together the doctors wrote up a report for the Centers for Disease Control in May 1981. This report was published June 5, 1981 in the CDC’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report to alert health professionals as soon as possible about the progressing situation. Reports of similar cases rushed in after that, mainly in the large cities of New York and California – and mainly among the gay male population.
The health world began communicating about what was happening, and in a September 1982 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC officially started using AIDS as the name of this new disease.
That was just the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and we haven’t yet been able to leash the beast, or even come close. Dr. Gottlieb’s upcoming presentation comes on the heels of an Oct. 3 CDC report which states that “more than 56,000 new HIV infections are estimated to occur annually.”
This statistic reflects just the United States.
“HIV/AIDS has been vastly underestimated in America,” Pregerson said. “We once thought about 40,000 new people became infected every year, and now it turns out to be 56,000. That is a great jump.”
Gottlieb will address this spike in his presentation, as well as the global epidemic of AIDS and the special circumstances of the disease in Africa.
With the rising number of cases of HIV/AIDS in the United States, however, Pregerson is concerned about college students.
“They have 10 times higher infection rate than in the general heterosexual population,” she said. “It isn’t that college students are ignorant, but it’s that age-old dilemma about information-versus-behavior. I think college students know what to do but they don’t do it,”
She hopes there will be “70, 80, maybe 90” students who choose to attend the hour-long free event.