Tag: AIDS

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

Oct 7, 2022

By MIKE MAGEE

“These are unprecedented times.”

This is a common refrain these days, from any citizen concerned about the American experiment’s democratic ideals.

Things like – welcoming shores, no one is above the law, stay out of people’s bedrooms, separation of church and state, play by the rules, fake news is just plain lying, don’t fall for the con job, stand up to bullies, treat everyone with the dignity they deserve, love one another, take reasonable risks, extend a helping hand, try to make your world a little bit better each day.

But I’ve been thinking, are we on a downward spiral really? Or has it always been this messy? Do we really think that we’ve suddenly bought a one-way ticket to “The Bad Place”, and there are no more good spots to land – places that would surprise us, with an unpredicted friendship, a moment of creative kindness, something to make you say, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming.”

I’m pretty sure I’m right that human societies, not the least of which, America, will never manage perfection. But is it (are we) still basically good. What does it mean to be human, and more specifically American?

Now Is Not the Time to Forget About the AIDS Epidemic

Sep 21, 2020• 2

By SOMA SEN

I keep hearing the voices of colleagues and friends that have been part of the AIDS epidemic compare it to the current COVID-19 pandemic. In fact Dr. Kathy Creticos, Director of Infectious Disease at Howard Brown Health spoke about the politicization of both the pandemics.

“Here we are in 2020 with this disease that kills people, that we don’t have any treatments for, that we really don’t understand the full manifestation and presentation biology of the virus,” Creticos said In the final segment of an interview with Contagion during International AIDS Society (IAS) AIDS 2020 Virtual Sessions. “We’re really dealing in the same situation as in the HIV epidemic.”

Her words make me reflect on the levity with which the Raegan administration treated the AIDS epidemic and it’s parallel to the Trump administration’s treatment of the current pandemic. However, she makes an important distinction between the two when she says, “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that COVID affects everybody, but HIV was certainly perceived as not affecting everybody.”

As an Asian American researcher with more than 15 years of experience in this area, whenever, I bring up the issue of the scourge of HIV/AIDS in our community, the common response both from inside and outside the community is “It’s not a problem in this community.”

Pandemic Fears: What the AIDS Battle Should Teach Us About COVID-19

Mar 12, 2020

By ANISH KOKA, MD

As the globe faces a novel, highly transmissible, lethal virus, I am most struck by a medicine cabinet that is embarrassingly empty for doctors in this battle. This means much of the debate centers on mitigation of spread of the virus. Tempers flare over discussions on travel bans, social distancing, and self quarantines, yet the inescapable fact remains that the medical community can do little more than support the varying fractions of patients who progress from mild to severe and life threatening disease. This isn’t meant to minimize the massive efforts brought to bear to keep patients alive by health care workers but those massive efforts to support failing organs in the severely ill are in large part because we lack any effective therapy to combat the virus. It is akin to taking care of patients with bacterial infections in an era before antibiotics, or HIV/AIDS in an era before anti-retroviral therapy.

It should be a familiar feeling for at least one of the leading physicians charged with managing the current crisis – Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci started as an immunologist at the NIH in the 1960s and quickly made breakthroughs in previously fatal diseases marked by an overactive immune response. Strange reports of a new disease that was sweeping through the gay community in the early 1980’s caused him to shift focus to join the great battle against the AIDS epidemic.

An AIDS-Free Future Requires More Than Medicine

Jul 31, 2014• 1

By RUTH MESSINGER

In 1985, during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City, I was elected to the New York City Council. Time and again, I felt heartbroken as my friends and constituents lost their lives to a deadly disease without a cure. Too frequently, they suffered the effects of ignorance, fear and hate.

Now, nearly 30 years later, advances in biomedical treatment have been stunning in their power to achieve an AIDS-free future. But the truth is that prejudice and fear are as persistent as HIV. Medicine alone cannot deliver the future we seek. Even as we celebrate the scientific discoveries and treatments that dramatically reduce HIV transmission and death, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that a biomedical solution can overcome the devastating effects of bigotry. If, as the United Nations agency UNAIDS urges, we wish to get to zero—zero discrimination, zero new infections, and zero deaths—we must take an integrated approach that combines biomedical treatment and an enduring commitment to human rights.

Without a doubt, medicine is working. As of September 30, 2013, the United States’ program, PEPFAR, is currently supporting life-saving antiretroviral treatment for 6.7 million men, women, and children worldwide. This exceeds President Obama’s 2011 World AIDS Day goal of 6 million people on treatment—a four-fold increase (from 1.7 million in 2008) since he took office. But, unfortunately, the World Health Organization predicts that 50 million people will need treatment for HIV by 2030. This means we face a tremendous uphill climb and must somehow identify between $22 and $24 billion—a truly ambitious financial target.

The New Doctor’s Desk Reference: How to Break Bad News (For Doctors)

Jul 22, 2012• 7

By Doc Gurley

News organizations used Dr. Judah Folkman’s death to report on his decades-long cancer research career. Given his status as a distant, non-celebrity, non-Nobel surgeon, you may be asking yourself why you, personally, should care about his death. Here’s why.

We were in our second year of medical school, feeling the growing pressure of clinical years just around the corner, when we would be thrown into the hospital system. For now, we had lectures in a large hall with 130 students sitting in chairs that sloped down to a stage. Professors came with presentations and handouts and complex diagrams. The immunology lectures were continuous strings of letters and numbers, with only the occasional verb, impossible to decode as human speech without months of training. Every tissue, every disease, every human physiologic function was discussed, down to the sub-molecular level. After hours of these lectures, the air would get stale and backs would ache and the squeak of weight shifting in chairs would become a metronomic beat marking out time that seemed to pass endlessly.

Then, one day, Dr. Folkman walked on stage. He asked us to put down our pens. He said he was going to teach us something that no one else would ever discuss, much less teach. I can’t imagine what he was thinking as he looked out on the sea of our faces. Give or take a few years, almost all of us were twenty-four years old. Almost all of us were single, ambitious, untouched by any of the major human experiences—no children, tragedies, severe illnesses or grief. The youth, the arrogance, the lack of world experience, all of it had to be a daunting, uninspiring sight. Dr. Folkman knew that in mere months, we would be keepers of information that would profoundly change lives. Pathology reports, cancer diagnoses, even the death of a loved one, those were all things we would be telling vulnerable people. Our actions and our words would be often unsupervised, particularly when disaster struck in the middle of the night.

A Look Back – 30 Years Later – At The Impact Of AIDS On Residency Training

Jun 14, 2011• 2

By BOB WACHTER, MD

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the first reports of a cluster of cases of pneumocystis pneumonia in gay men in Los Angeles. While I’ve recently heard a number of reflections on these early years, I’ll focus on a topic that I haven’t seen covered: how AIDS transformed training – including my own – and what the emergence of AIDS taught me about innovation and, yes, opportunism.

In early 1982, I was a 3rd year student at Penn on my first medicine ward rotation. One night, my team admitted a young gay man with a bizarre story: progressive wasting, spiking fevers, profound dyspnea, and diffuse infiltrates on his chest x-ray. The next morning, I presented the case to my attending, David Goldmann. Having just read reports of a similar illness galloping through urban gay communities, at the end of my presentation David said gravely, “This thing” – the disease didn’t yet have a name – “is changing the way we practice medicine.”

When I arrived at UCSF in 1983 to begin my internal medicine residency, it didn’t cross my mind that this decision would guarantee that my training would be dominated by this new scourge. In 1985, as a third year resident, I jotted down some of my reflections in an essay. It began:

Like many of today’s interns and residents training in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, I have cared for many more patients with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia than pneumococcal pneumonia, more patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma than breast cancer, and more patients with cryptocococcal meninigitis than meningococcal meningitis… This realization has prompted me to consider the impact of AIDS on medical residency training.

I sent this paper, entitled “The Impact of AIDS on Medical Residency Training,” off to the New England Journal of Medicine. Of course, this was a naïve and hubristic thing for a resident to do, but I really didn’t know any better. A few weeks later, while on the wards at the VA, I received a page for an outside call. “Hi, this is Dr. Marcia Angell,” said the voice on the other end. “I’m an editor at the New England Journal. We really liked your article but we’ll need a few changes before we publish it.”

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