{"id":2760,"date":"2018-05-05T11:53:15","date_gmt":"2018-05-05T15:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=2760"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:40","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:40","slug":"medicine-without-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2018\/05\/medicine-without-borders\/","title":{"rendered":"Medicine Without Borders"},"content":{"rendered":"
Dr. Arthur Ammann \u201962 won\u2019t rest until patients receive access to life-saving AIDS treatment no matter where they live.<\/div><\/div>\n

In 1983, Dr. Arthur Ammann \u201962 embarked on a strange late-night road trip. One of his young patients had died, and he suspected the 4-year-old might have had a new condition called AIDS. If he was right, the pediatrician and his colleagues would need blood and tissue samples to work out how a disease that seemed to mostly affect gay men had come to afflict a child.<\/p>\n

But the child\u2019s body had already been sent to a pathologist for an autopsy. So Ammann packed a cooler with dry ice, got in his car, and drove 35 miles from San Francisco to Sonoma County to find his patient\u2019s remains.<\/p>\n

Growing up the son of working-class German immigrants in Brooklyn, Ammann never expected to find himself at the front lines of a burgeoning epidemic. He wasn\u2019t even sure he would get into medical school. His acceptance to Seton Hall\u2019s College of Medicine and Dentistry (which was later absorbed into what became the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey) still seems hard for him to fathom decades later. \u201cEnthusiastic, very focused professors gave this kid from Brooklyn an opportunity to do research,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Seton Hall, Ammann grew interested in immunology, a relatively young field that seemed ripe with possibility for new discoveries. In 1971, he accepted a position at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, and wanting to study children with rare genetic immune disorders, he set up the first immunology lab in the northern part of the state.<\/p>\n

Soon after, Ammann and his colleagues ran a series of pivotal clinical trials that led to the 1976 approval of the pneumococcal vaccine, a shot that protects against bacterial pneumonia and meningitis. Since that time, the vaccine has saved millions of lives.<\/p>\n

But Ammann set that work aside after the AIDS epidemic hit. When gay men began to fall ill in San Francisco with what looked like an immune disorder, physicians turned to Ammann. \u201cWe were the only laboratory in Northern California that had the ability to look at the immune system and define it as either normal or abnormal,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Doctors soon realized the illness wasn\u2019t confined to gay men. In 1982, Ammann met two children who also seemed to have this mysterious new syndrome. The first was the toddler who inspired Ammann\u2019s late-night trip to Sonoma County. The other was a 2-year-old boy who had received more than 20 blood transfusions. One of those transfusions came from a donor who later developed AIDS. \u201cWe felt it had to be an infectious disease,\u201d he says. \u201cWe had a very uneasy feeling that this was going to be big.\u201d<\/p>\n

They were right. By 1991, about 180,000 Americans were living with AIDS, and many of those patients were children. \u201cI can\u2019t describe to you what pediatric hospital wards looked like in that period. They were filled with infants and young children who were dying of the disease,\u201d says Dr. Bonita Stanton, dean of the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine at Seton Hall University, which opens in July.<\/p>\n

But researchers began to make headway. They identified the virus that causes AIDS and found a drug that seemed to block its activity. They also found a drug that curbed transmission from mother to child. \u201cBy 1996 we had 30 different treatments,\u201d Ammann says. \u201cIt was an extraordinarily exciting time and discoveries were just being made continuously.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ammann soon realized, however, that great discoveries aren\u2019t enough \u2014 they have to reach the people who need them, and he is among those who have been fighting to make that happen. In 1999, Ammann founded Global Strategies for HIV Prevention (now Global Strategies), an organization that supplies HIV testing and drugs to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to their children, along with many other health services. The organization has done a lot of good, but to Ammann it never feels like enough.<\/p>\n

In September 2017, Ammann came back to Seton Hall to discuss his new book, Lethal Decisions: The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV\/AIDS, which addresses many of these issues. He also met with pre-med students, whom he hopes will eventually take up the fight for justice and equality in health care. He wants them to know that they can make a difference. That might sound trite, he says, but it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n

Stanton also is committed to making sure that happens, saying the new school of medicine will have a laser focus on reducing disparities in health care so that everyone can enjoy good health regardless of race or income.<\/p>\n

Ammann, who will turn 82 this year, doesn\u2019t see himself slowing down anytime soon. On a recent trip to Africa, he met a group of women with HIV. \u201cIf you listen to their medical histories it sounds like you\u2019re 20 years back in the AIDS epidemic,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re being neglected because of who they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

As long as this kind of inequality persists, Ammann can\u2019t imagine stopping. \u201cI\u2019m going to keep on battling,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Cassandra Willyard is a freelance writer in Madison, Wis.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Arthur Ammann \u201962 won\u2019t rest until patients receive access to life-saving AIDS treatment no matter where they live.<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingMedicine Without Borders<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":4073,"featured_media":2762,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,258,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-articles-2015-2019","category-features","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4073"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2760"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2835,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions\/2835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}