DARROW, WILLIAM

Video

Date

November 21, 2016

Description

Go back for the other video

Bill Darrow's career in public health stretches back to the early 1960s. He worked as a CDC assignee to the New York City Department of Health before moving to Atlanta in 1963, at a time when the acronym CDC stood for the Communicable Disease Center. He stayed for over thirty years, working in the areas of sexually transmitted diseases and [acquired immune deficiency syndrome] AIDS. He was one of the earliest members of the task force that CDC established following the June 1981 publication of the first MMWR [Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report] report on Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among homosexual men. He led one of the seminal early AIDS investigations, assessing a cluster of homosexual men with AIDS who were linked through sexual contact. This study pointed to sexual transmission of an infectious agent before the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV was identified as the cause of this mysterious new disease. He left CDC in 1994 to take on the position of Professor of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at Florida International University in Miami.

Source

Interviewed by Dr. Mary Chamberland