REMEMBRANCE
Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, AIDS Trailblazer, Dies at 88
Renowned doctor, researcher used innovative treatment approach to help gay patients
BY ANDY HUMM
When what would become
AIDS started
showing up in New
York in the late
1970s, only a handful of doctors
did something as simple as putting
two and two together and spotting
a pattern. Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a
medical researcher with a practice
of mostly gay men in Greenwich
Village, was the fi rst in 1979 to try
to sound the alarm and get health
authorities to pay attention.
Neither the City Department of
Health, to whom he reported the
phenomenon — and where he had
worked as Director of Continuing
Medical Education at the Bureau
of VD Control with an emphasis on
gay sexual health — nor the CDC
took any action until mid-1981, by
which time the syndrome had become
an epidemic, eventually blossoming
into a worldwide pandemic
that has killed 35 million people
and infected an additional 35 million.
Many, however, were saved from
death by the early actions that Dr.
Sonnabend and a few of his colleagues
took at the outset, fi ghting
off the double whammy of an unresponsive
public health establishment
and a bigoted society content
with the illness and death of those
in the initial “risk groups” — gay
men, and then injecting drug users,
most of whom were people of
color.
Dr. Sonnabend, a native of South
Africa who grew up in what is now
Zimbabwe, trained in London, and
did most of his work in New York
City, died on January 24 following
a heart attack earlier that month
in London — where he had moved
in 2005. He was 88.
“He saved hundreds of thousands
of lives by treating opportunistic
infections, especially
PCP the pneumonia hitting most
early cases, with prophylaxis of
Bactrim,” said David Kirschenbaum,
his close friend and co-executor.
For several years, the CDC
resisted making this standard
treatment for people with the syndrome
Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and Dr. Mathilde Krim.
— initially called “GRID” for
gay-related immunodefi ciency —
for lack of clinical trials. The pneumonia
abided as the number one
killer of those diagnosed.
Dr. Sonnabend, who was openly
gay, was working with Dr. Alvin
Friedman-Kien at NYU as the fi rst
cluster of cases in New York and
Los Angeles were being tracked.
Dr. Larry Mass, who went on to become
a co-founder of the Gay Men’s
Health Crisis in 1981, was the fi rst
to write about what was headlined
“Cancer in the Gay Community”
for the New York Native, a gay
newspaper, in May 1981 referring
to the skin cancer, Kaposi’s Sarcoma,
that was felling gay men along
with PCP. The CDC included the
early reports in its Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly on June 5, 1981
and the New York Times ran a brief
story on July 3 that shook the gay
community even though the cause
remained unknown.
Before the emergence of AIDS,
Dr. Sonnabend had been a volunteer
AMFAR.ORG
at the Gay Men’s Health Project
— a clinic in Sheridan Square
where gay men (including this reporter)
got routine screenings for
sexually-transmitted infections.
There and in his private practice,
he saw STI rates skyrocketing in
the newly-liberated community
just a little over a decade after the
Stonewall Rebellion.
Government response to the
syndrome was non-existent to
slow at fi rst under Mayor Ed Koch
in New York City and, of course,
under President Ronald Reagan.
Despite the fact that he had access
to patients and expertise in virology,
Dr. Sonnabend was sidelined
by the initial researchers. Dr. Sonnabend
— along with Dr. Mathilde
Krim, a friend he knew from earlier
work on Interferon, and his AIDS
patient Michael Callen — took initiative
and co-founded the AIDS
Medical Foundation in 1983. That
eventually merged with National
AIDS Research Foundation in San
Francisco to form AmFAR, the
American Foundation for AIDS Research,
in 1985, with the pioneering
advocate Elizabeth Taylor serving
as its national chair.
Dr. Sonnabend left AmFAR’s
Scientifi c Advisory Committee in
1985 over his objections to their
over-emphasis on female-to-male
transmission, which he felt they
were doing for fundraising purposes
rather than grounding it in
science.
He faced — and overcame — adversity
for his willingness to treat
people living with AIDS. His offi ce’s
co-op sought to evict him, but on
behalf of fi ve of his patients, he
brought a landmark discrimination
suit in 1984 that protected
them and those who served people
living with AIDS.
Dr. Sonnabend was a pioneer
in community-based research,
founding the Community Research
Initiative (now ACRIA) in
1987 and editing the journal “AIDS
Research” from 1983-86.
Before HIV had been identifi ed
as central to the syndrome, Callen,
who died in 1993, and Richard
Berkowitz, who is still with us at
65, wrote “How to Have Sex in an
Epidemic: One Approach” in 1983.
Writing in the foreword, Dr. Sonnabend
noted, “Perhaps the most
important message contained in
this pamphlet is the authors’ premise
that when affection informs a
sexual relationship, the motivation
exists to fi nd ways to protect others
from disease.”
They favored a “multifactorial
theory” of what caused AIDS. In
the absence of the discovery of a
new agent, they emphasized limiting
exposure to CMV (cytomegalovirus)
or the Epstein-Barr virus
— which were common among
people living with AIDS. Through
this work, the campaign for safer
sex was born.
Once HIV was discovered, Dr.
Sonnabend remained skeptical
that it alone caused AIDS, but he
was no HIV denialist. When combination
antiretroviral treatments
became available, he prescribed
➤ SONNABEND, continued on p.23
February 11 - February 24, 2 22 021 | GayCityNews.com
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