LOS ANGELES - Dr. Joel D. Weisman, one of the first physiciansto detect the AIDS epidemic, died Saturday at his home in LosAngeles. He was 66.
He had heart disease and had been ill for several months, saidBill 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 whenhe began to notice a troubling pattern: He had three seriously illpatients with the same constellation of symptoms, includingmysterious fevers, rashes, drastic weight loss, and swollen lymphnodes. All three were gay men, whose health problems seemed to stemfrom 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 LosAngeles who had a gay male patient with a similarly strange array ofafflictions. 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 andMortality Weekly Report.
That report signaled the official start of the epidemic that thefederal agency later named acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
'Joel was a very astute physician,' Gottlieb said in an interviewWednesday. 'In his practice, he was alert to unusual symptoms in hispatients. He had a sense that something out of the ordinary washappening.'
Gottlieb received most of the credit for identifying the disease,but Dr. Weisman 'contributed his open eyes,' said Mathilde Krim, aresearch scientist with whom Gottlieb founded the New York-basednonprofit amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. 'He felt rightaway he was observing something that was never seen before.'
A native of Newark, N.J., Dr. Weisman graduated in 1970 from theKansas City College of Osteopathy and practiced in New Jersey for afew years.
In 1975 he acknowledged his homosexuality and ended a three-yearmarriage to start a new life in Los Angeles.
He joined a medical group where in 1978 he was presented withsome puzzling cases: a gay Anglo man in his 30s who had Kaposi'ssarcoma, a cancer usually seen in old Mediterranean men, and severalmen with shingles, another affliction normally seen in much olderpatients. Dr. Weisman also had a number of patients with swollenlymph glands, often an indication of lymphoma, a type of cancer thatoriginates in the immune system. But in these cases, no lymphoma wasdetected.
In 1980, he opened his own practice in the Sherman Oaksneighborhood of Los Angeles with Dr. Eugene Rogolsky. Dr. Weisman'ssense of foreboding deepened with the arrival of two patients whohad 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 hisdefinitive AIDS chronicle 'And the Band Played On' (1987), 'another20 men had appeared at Dr. Weisman's office that year with strangeabnormalities of their lymph nodes,' the very condition that hadtriggered the spiral of ailments besetting Dr. Weisman andRogolsky's other two, very sick patients.
'It was dreadful,' Rogolsky recalled. 'We didn't know what wewere dealing with.'
In early 1981, a colleague put Dr. Weisman in touch withGottlieb. Two decades later, Dr. Weisman recalled that he 'had afeeling going into the meeting that what this represented was thetip of the iceberg.'
'My sense was that these people were sick,' he told TheWashington Post in 2001, 'and we had a lot of people that werepotentially right behind them.'
Dr. Weisman sent his patients to the UCLA Medical Center, whereGottlieb found that they had pneumocystis pneumonia. Gottlieb hadearlier found the same pneumonia in his own patient. He laterdiagnosed it in two gay men referred by other doctors.
A few months after their initial meeting, Dr. Weisman andGottlieb wrote a report that sounded an alarm heard around theworld. AIDS deaths in the US rose exponentially, from 618 in 1982 toalmost 90,000 by the end of the decade. By 2002 the death tollsurpassed 500,000 and was still climbing.
Dr. Weisman began to press for services for people with HIV andAIDS as founding chairman of AIDS Project Los Angeles in 1983. Healso helped organize the first dedicated AIDS unit in SouthernCalifornia at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital. He advocated forresearch dollars as an original board member of amfAR, which wasformed in 1985, and served as chairman from 1988 to 1992.
He continued to see patients, building his partnership withRogolsky into the Pacific Oaks Medical Group, which became one ofthe largest private practices focused on the treatment of AIDS andHIV.
Among the casualties was his partner of 10 years, Timothy Bogue,who died of AIDS in 1991.
