By Ellina Chulpaeff
Time Magazine’s 1996 "Man of the Year" David Ho urged students to "bang on the door" about the AIDS pandemic in an all-school assembly on Monday, Feb. 1. Ho was honored with this title for establishing the use of a protease inhibitor to stunt the progression of HIV viruses in patients.
Ninth graders were bused over from the Middle School to hear Ho as a part of a Science, Technology, Entineering and Mathematics initiative.
STEM is meant to educate students about work in the sciences and mathematics. Hearing Ho speak at the assembly gave students an opportunity to understand what engineers and scientists do and the significance of their work, Head of School Jeanne Huybrechts said.
Ho was first introduced to the HIV retrovirus in the 1980s while doing his residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he came into contact with some of the first reported cases of AIDS. At the time, Ho had no idea that AIDS would become, as he told students, "the worst plague in human history."
"I went into infectious diseases thinking that all the diseases I would deal with are treatable," he said.
Over 25 million people have already died from the virus and 35 million are currently living with it. One out of four pregnant women in South Africa has HIV and teens in Botswana have a 50 percent chance of catching the virus, Ho said. He described the technicalities of the virus and explained that although HIV only has nine genes and humans have upwards of 25,000, 10 million new variants of the virus can be created every day.
"The virus is very stupid. It is like a kid who types and makes a lot of mistakes and doesn’t spell check," he said of the various strains of HIV.
Ho pointed out that although there are more than 20 drugs available to fight HIV, the virus is still incurable, even though Ho and his colleagues have been attempting to create a vaccine for the last 10 years. Without a vaccine, Ho believes that education is vital for virus prevention.
"As I see it, there will be no vaccine available in the next decade, unfortunately," he said.
Ho explained that his group of doctors and researchers are trying to stop the virus by inducing immune responses to block HIV transmission.
Ho has also studied monkeys and chimpanzees in West Africa which carry "cousin viruses" of HIV. He explained that HIV is a zoonotic virus; like SARS and swine flu, it was originally transmitted to humans from another species.
Despite the scientific advancements made, Ho explained that AIDS is still an epidemic in Africa because of a lack of political leadership in combatting the disease. In the United States, however, it is rare for patients to die while in treatment, Ho said.
Although the current treatment for AIDS includes a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs that Ho pioneered, he is hopeful that studying "long term survivors" of HIV will advance the scientific community’s treatment of HIV and AIDS.
Ho also explained that although pharmaceutical companies dropped the $10,000 price of AIDS treatment by 85 percent for patients in developing countries, the drugs are still unaffordable to the masses. Only donations by charities like the Gates Foundation can make the treatment affordable.
Ho urged students to get involved by raising awareness about the virus.
"Why aren’t we doing something about it?" he asked.