Big Country Brokeback: Living Lies & Destroying Lives !
Abilene doctor was in forefront of AIDS discovery
By Sidney Levesque / levesques@reporternews.com
June 5, 2006
June 5, 1981 - Federal health authorities found that five gay men in California had contracted a rare kind of pneumonia, the first recognized cases of what would later be known as AIDS.
Dr. John Gullett was an infectious disease specialist in San Francisco 25 years ago when he began noticing gay patients ravaged by bizarre ailments.
They had swollen glands and rare illnesses like parasitic encephalitis or fungal meningitis. He talked to other specialists like dermatologists, who were also seeing unusual forms of cancer not only in California, but also in New York.
It would be another year before experts gave the disease a name - acquired-immune deficiency syndrome.
Since then, AIDS has killed 25 million people worldwide and millions more are expected to die even though new drugs are helping infected people live longer. There is no cure for AIDS or any other viral infection, said Gullett, who now works in Abilene.
But there is hope, he added, that advances in AIDS drugs will make it as manageable as diabetes or other disorders that decades ago would have meant certain death for patients. Plus, research into a cure for AIDS has led to treatments for many AIDS-related diseases.
Gullett became one of the nation's first experts on AIDS. He said doctors were mystified by gay patients who began coming to them with odd ailments.
''All of these things were not the cause. They were the effect and the cause was the loss of immunity,'' Gullett said.
He learned two things - the patients were losing their immunity and their disease was somehow tied to their homosexual lifestyle, which usually involved drugs and multiple sexual partners.
As he corresponded with more doctors whose patients had similar symptoms, he contacted the Centers for Disease Control in Georgia and said something strange was killing gay people.
''They thought I was a crackpot. They really didn't believe it,'' he said.
The CDC would later deny Gullett had contacted them at all, but he said he still has his phone bill.
The CDC caught on there was a problem soon enough, he said, because the center began receiving more calls for medicines it dispenses for rare diseases - rare diseases that Gullett's patients were coming down with.
Gullett said doctors who were treating these patients didn't publicize the problem at first because many were saving their research to publish in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. But that changed, Gullett said, after he talked to the editor who agreed to change the policy to only allow unpublished work because it was a public health emergency.
As Gullett continued researching odd viruses, he came across studies in France from the 1970s on people with similar symptoms who had come from Africa.
''Looking back, it was AIDS before anyone had any clue,'' he said.
His research made him a sought-after expert. He was interviewed by newspapers and was in National Public Radio's first report on the then-unnamed disease in July 1981. Gullett was cited in two books on AIDS - ''And the Band Played On'' and ''The Coming Plague.''
''It was like Andy Warhol said - everyone gets 15 minutes of fame,'' he said.
As AIDS gained national attention, fear and ignorance spread. People would withdraw, Gullett said, not realizing they had already been infected by it because of their risky behavior years earlier.
And there was controversy surrounding the disease because it was first discovered in gay men. People at the time thought it was only gay men who could contract it.
''It's a virus. It doesn't know if you're gay or straight. It just knows how to transmit itself,'' Gullett said.
The life expectancy of AIDS patients grew longer after doctors discovered in the early 1990s that a mixture of drugs - the ''AIDS cocktail'' - worked better than a single drug, Gullett said.
But treating the disease took its toll on the doctor. He lost hundreds of patients to AIDS before he left San Francisco eight years ago.
''Infectious disease for me changed from being a happy job to a really depressing job,'' he said.
He still treats AIDS patients in Abilene occasionally. He said people are now educated about the disease, but it's still growing in segments of society that suffer from drug or mental problems.
And it's still mainly contracted by gay men, but he's treated three or four Abilene women who didn't know their husbands were carrying on a secret gay lifestyle.
It's a disease that has touched many lives, Gullett said, and will continue to do so.
source: http://www.reporternews.com/abil/nw_local/article/0,1874,ABIL_7959_4751013,00.html
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