Joel Weisman, 66; physician who detected AIDS epidemic
LOS ANGELES - Dr. Joel D. Weisman, one of the first physicians to detect the AIDS epidemic, died Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 66.
He had heart disease and had been ill for several months, said Bill Hutton, his partner of 17 years.
Dr. Weisman - who became a national advocate for AIDS research, treatment, and prevention - 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 referred two of the patients to Dr. Michael S. Gottlieb, an immunologist at the University of California at Los Angeles 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 that the federal agency later named acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
“Joel was a very astute physician,’’ Gottlieb said in an interview Wednesday. “In his practice, he was alert to unusual symptoms in his patients. 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,’’ said Mathilde Krim, a research scientist with whom Gottlieb founded the New York-based nonprofit amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. “He felt right away he was observing something that was never seen before.’’
A native of Newark, N.J., Dr. Weisman graduated in 1970 from the Kansas City College of Osteopathy and practiced in New Jersey for a few years.
In 1975 he acknowledged his homosexuality and ended a three-year marriage to start a new life in Los Angeles.
He joined a medical group where in 1978 he was presented with some puzzling cases: a gay Anglo man in his 30s who had Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer usually seen in old Mediterranean men, and several men with shingles, another affliction normally seen in much older patients. Dr. Weisman also had a number of patients with swollen lymph glands, often an indication of lymphoma, a type of cancer that originates in the immune system. But in these cases, no lymphoma was detected.
In 1980, he opened his own practice in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles with Dr. Eugene Rogolsky. Dr. Weisman’s sense of foreboding deepened with the arrival of two patients who had a panoply of confounding problems: persistent diarrhea, eczema, fungal infections, low white blood cell counts.
“On top of these two cases,’’ journalist Randy Shilts wrote in his definitive AIDS chronicle “And the Band Played On’’ (1987), “another 20 men had appeared at Dr. Weisman’s office that year with strange abnormalities of their lymph nodes,’’ the very condition that had triggered the spiral of ailments besetting Dr. Weisman and Rogolsky’s other two, very sick patients.
“It was dreadful,’’ Rogolsky recalled. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with.’’
In early 1981, a colleague put Dr. Weisman in touch with Gottlieb. Two decades later, Dr. Weisman recalled that he “had a feeling going into the meeting that what this represented was the tip of the iceberg.’’
“My sense was that these people were sick,’’ he told The
Dr. Weisman sent his patients to the UCLA Medical Center, where Gottlieb found that they had pneumocystis pneumonia. Gottlieb had earlier found the same pneumonia in his own patient. He later diagnosed it in two gay men referred by other doctors.
A few months after their initial meeting, Dr. Weisman and Gottlieb wrote a report that sounded an alarm heard around the world. AIDS deaths in the US rose exponentially, from 618 in 1982 to almost 90,000 by the end of the decade. By 2002 the death toll surpassed 500,000 and was still climbing.
Dr. Weisman began to press for services for people with HIV and AIDS as founding chairman of AIDS Project Los Angeles in 1983. He also helped organize the first dedicated AIDS unit in Southern California at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital. He advocated for research dollars as an original board member of amfAR, which was formed in 1985, and served as chairman from 1988 to 1992.
He continued to see patients, building his partnership with Rogolsky into the Pacific Oaks Medical Group, which became one of the largest private practices focused on the treatment of AIDS and HIV.
Among the casualties was his partner of 10 years, Timothy Bogue, who died of AIDS in 1991.
