03/02/2021
Wikipedia reports on the sad passing of one of the early heroes of the AIDS pandemic amongst the medical community, Doctor Joseph A Sonnabend, who has died in London at the age of eighty eight. Doctor Sonnabend will be remembered as a compassionate man, one of the first to notice the syndrome of immune deficiency in some of his gay male patients in the very early eighties, before AIDS had even been assigned its name. Sonnabend helped create several AIDS organisations, including the AIDS Medical Foundation (now amfAR). In the early years of the pandemic, competing theories of AIDS development and causation abounded and for a while Doctor Sonnabend believed that repeated exposure to cytomegalovirus might be responsible for compromised immune systems. Doctor Sonnabend later revised his opinion as research homed in on HIV as the viral cause of the syndrome, but his recommendation that gay men use condoms to frustrate the transmission of bodily fluids, which was initially resisted by some gay community groups, would be taken on as the main educational tool of safer sex. Two patients of Doctor Sonnabend collaborated with him to write the booklet “How to Have Sex in An Epidemic”, now considered a classic of gay healthcare. In 2005, he retired from medical practice and moved to London. On World AIDS Day that year, he was awarded a Red Ribbon Leadership Award from the National HIV/AIDS Partnership.
