“CDC, Hollywood and the Early Days of AIDS in the U.S.” will be the topic of the next Voices from the Vanguard lecture Jan. 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Chapel.
The lecture will feature Harold Jaffe, associate director of science at the Centers for Disease Control. He will give a personal account of the dawn of the AIDS epidemic and share his perspective as a CDC scientist investigating the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Jaffe was a young doctor training to be a disease detective when the first cases of the mysterious new disease showed up in the U.S. He will compare what he saw with what Hollywood captured in the HBO film And the Band Played On.
An epidemic intelligence officer at the CDC, Jaffe led the first national case control study to determine risk factors for the disease and the first natural history study of HIV. He served in leadership positions in the CDC’s expanding HIV/AIDS programs and in 2001 became director of the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention.