Dr. Joel Weisman, key figure in AIDS care, dies
Saturday, July 25th, 2009Dr. Joel Weisman, one of the first physicians to detect the AIDS epidemic, who became a national advocate for AIDS research, treatment and prevention, died Saturday at his Los Angeles home. He was 66. He had heart disease and had been ill for several months, said Bill Hutton, his domestic partner of 17 years.
Dr. Joel Weisman
Dr. Weisman was a general practitioner in 1980 when he began to notice a troubling pattern: He had three seriously ill patients with the same constellation of symptoms, including mysterious fevers, rashes, drastic weight loss and swollen lymph nodes. All three were gay men, whose health problems seemed to stem from defects in their immune systems.
The physician wound up referring two of the patients to UCLA immunologist Michael Gottlieb, who had a gay male patient with a similarly strange array of afflictions. Recognizing that these were not isolated cases, Dr. Weisman and Gottlieb wrote a report that appeared in the June 5, 1981, issue of the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
That report signaled the official start of the epidemic of the disease that the federal agency later named acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
“Joel was a very astute physician,” Gottlieb said in an interview Wednesday. “He had a sense that something out of the ordinary was happening.”
Gottlieb received most of the credit for identifying the disease, but Dr. Weisman “contributed his open eyes. He felt right away he was observing something that was never seen before,” said Mathilde Krim, a research scientist who with Gottlieb founded the New York-based nonprofit Foundation for AIDS Research.
Born on Feb. 20, 1943, in Newark, N.J., Dr. Weisman graduated in 1970 from the Kansas City College of Osteopathy and practiced in New Jersey for a few years.
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