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1st appeared
29
March 2000
International Group to Honor AIDS Heroes UCSF doctors, who were leaders in the fight against AIDS in the early 1980s, are among an international group of physicians who will be honored for their pioneering work. Donald Abrams, Marcus Conant and Paul Volberding – who were instrumental in the battle for more effective treatment, better patient care, research funding and more public education – were named recently by the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care (IAPAC) to receive the group’s Heroes in Medicine Award. They are among 40 pioneers selected for the award, which will be presented at a benefit event in Toronto in September. In announcing the recipients of this year's Heroes in Medicine Award, IAPAC Executive Director José M. Zuniga said selection of the physicians, who were nominated by their peers, is "recognition of the leadership and compassion with which the honorees met the extraordinary challenges of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s, and serves to memorialize how their example in meeting these challenges has added dignity and honor to the profession of medicine." Established in February 1995, IAPAC is a not-for-profit association of more than 6,800 physicians and other healthcare professionals in 43 countries. Abrams, professor of medicine and member of the UCSF Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center, directs the Community Consortium, an association of more than 200 Bay Area HIV health care providers who care for the majority of persons with HIV in the Bay Area. He was the first to propose the community consortium concept that involves local physicians in drug trials formerly based solely in hospitals. Conant, a longtime clinical professor of dermatology, has been active in the fight against AIDS since the first case of Kaposi’s sarcoma showed up in the Dermatology Clinic in 1981. He chaired the State Department of Health AIDS Task Force during the height of the epidemic in the 1980s, was instrumental in starting the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation in 1982, and worked closely with local and national AIDS groups. Volberding -- professor of medicine, director of the UCSF Positive Health Program, and deputy director of the UCSF California AIDS Research Center – has become one of the world’s most prominent AIDS clinicians and researchers. He was instrumental in establishing at SFGHMC the first AIDS outpatient clinic and inpatient unit, which became models for AIDS care. Also among this year’s IAPAC’s Heroes in Medicine are Arthur Ammann, former professor of pediatrics who was part of a UCSF group to first recognize and warn the CDC that blood transfusions could transmit the disease; and Mervyn Silverman, former San Francisco public health director who later served as a member of the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies. Links: |
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