Dr. Anthony Fauci became a household name during the coronavirus pandemic, but much of his life's work has been fighting HIV and AIDS.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has spent the past 40 years of his career fighting the AIDS epidemic, but he can still remember one of the first times he encountered data about the disease, in June 1981.
"It was a particularly transforming time," he told TODAY's Joe Fryer in a segment aired on Wednesday for."I can remember very distinctly sitting in my office outside my lab in the clinical center hospital where I saw the first describing the first five patients from Los Angeles with this curious new disease, with nobody knowing what was going on."
The patients were all"otherwise previously healthy gay men," Fauci said, which he found"rather curious," until the following month, when another report on 26 patients came out, indicating that young, gay men in San Francisco and New York City were also showing signs of the disease. Dr. Anthony Fauci at an August 1989 news conference detailing new researching findings for a drug for Americans infected with HIV. On the right is then-Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Luis Sullivan."I remember sitting at my desk looking at that and literally getting chills up and down my spine saying, 'Oh my God, this is a new disease. It has to be a new disease,'" he recalled."I had no idea what it was or where it came from.
"Everything was great, my career was going along well, and I said, 'Wow, I've got to study this new disease because it looks like it's an infection, and it looks like it's destroying the immune system.' So I made a decision right then that I would start and literally stop what I was doing."
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