30 Years of AIDS: Ambassador Eric Goosby
by Michelle Samplin-Salgado, New Media Strategist, AIDS.gov
In the sixth and final video of our 30 Years of AIDS series, Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, talks about his experiences spanning from when he was a resident at the San Francisco General Hospital and saw what we now know were some of the first AIDS cases as far back as 1979. Dr. Goosby speaks very candidly about his experiences losing 15-20 patients a week to AIDS and the toll that it had on him and his colleagues.
He tells us, “I had my first child, which was ’90, ’91,and realized that all of the hundreds of patients that I’d followed in that role were somebody’s child. And that bond and the intensity of the kind of parent-child relationship — as a young physician, I intellectually understood it, but didn’t emotionally get kind of the depth of the loss. And it put it on a much more acute level for me.”
Dr. Goosby has since gone on to help write the Ryan White CARE Act, helped to establish the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, served as the Acting National AIDS Policy Director under President Clinton. He currently serves as the director of PEPFAR “a remarkable contribution,” he says, “that the American people should feel very proud of.”
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