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Jaffe Provides on-the-Ground View of the Beginning of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

Harold Jaffe, M.D., Director of the National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention (NCHSTP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), wove clips from the movie “And the Band Played On,” based on Randy Shilts’ book of the same name, into to his April 16 Yale AIDS Center lecture entitled “The Early Days of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic: Views from Hollywood and Atlanta.” The lecture both corrected some of the film’s inaccuracies and used it to illustrate certain of Jaffe’s points.

Jaffe, an epidemiologist on the CDC task force assigned in the early 1980’s to investigate outbreaks of the unusual illnesses Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma primarily among gay men, recalled the gradual development of the task force’s understanding of the new, serious illness that later became known as AIDS. Jaffe helped develop the case definition of what the task force then called KS/OI (Kaposi’s sarcoma/opportunistic infections) so that it could begin to do surveillance, which ultimately led to the findings that the disease was transmitted sexually and through contaminated blood.

The experience of investigating the earliest cases of AIDS highlighted and reinforced the importance of public health for Jaffe, who told the audience that “you’re making decisions that affect a lot of lives.”

Looking at the present and towards the future, Jaffe noted that HIV infection rates are increasing, which he attributed to changed attitudes about AIDS. He said that many people have come to view AIDS as a treatable rather than terminal disease, and that many are willing to engage in risky behavior because they believe that people being treated for HIV/AIDS are less infectious. Jaffe emphasized the importance for prevention that people understand that AIDS is, despite vastly improved treatment, a very serious disease, and that they understand that even people being treated for HIV/AIDS who have low viral loads can transmit the virus.

Jaffe will leave his position as Director of NCHSTP, which he has held since October 2002, later this month to become chair of the Department of Public Health at Oxford University. Jaffe received his M.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined CDC as a clinical research investigator in 1974. In 1981, he became a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer and joined the task force studying the earliest AIDS cases. Prior to becoming Acting Director of NCHSTP in September 2001, Jaffe was Director of the Division of AIDS, STD and TB Laboratory Research, and Associate Director for HIV/AIDS for CDC’s National Center for Infectious Diseases.

-Story by Christy Gordon.