page_title: Joseph Sonnabend
section_title: Role in founding AIDS organisations
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Sonnabend / Early AIDS work / Role in founding AIDS organisations
caption_attribution_description: Summary http://www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/Pneumocystis.asp?body=Frames/M-R/Pneumocystis/body_Pneumocystis_mic1.htm CDC website Pneumocystis jiroveci 05:25, 30 October 2005 InvictaHOG 600x364 (69360 bytes) (http://www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/Pneumocystis.asp?body=Frames/M-R/Pneumocystis/body_Pneumocy stis_mic1.htm CDC website)
context_page_description: Joseph Adolph Sonnabend is an Afrikaans physician, scientist and HIV/AIDS researcher, notable for pioneering community-based research, the propagation of safe sex to prevent infection, and an early multifactorial model of AIDS.
  As one of the first physicians to notice among his gay male patients the immune deficiency that would later be named AIDS, during the 1980s and 1990s he treated many hundreds of HIV-positive people. During the height of the AIDS crisis, Sonnabend helped create several AIDS organisations, including the AIDS Medical Foundation, the nonprofit Community Research Initiative, which pioneered community-based research, and the PWA Health Group, the first and largest formally recognised buyers' club.
  Sonnabend became controversial for advocating that gay men change their sexual behaviors to avoid sexually-transmitted infections, rather than to just have fewer sexual partners, as advocated by Gay Men's Health Crisis and other gay community organizations and for hypothesizing a multi-factorial model of causation, including for a period of time after discovery of HIV. He is widely respected as a pioneering and compassionate clinician and researcher.
context_section_description: To help fund his research and that of other scientists — and because the CDC were dismissive of his expertise and uninterested in his assistance — Sonnabend contacted his friend Mathilde Krim to ask for help to fund his research.  With Krim and others they established the AIDS Medical Foundation (AMF) in 1983. This organisation would later become amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, one of the world's leading nonprofit supporters of HIV/AIDS research, prevention and advocacy.
  A pioneer of community-based research in the absence of effective government efforts, Sonnabend also helped to establish the nonprofit Community Research Initiative (CRI, later renamed CRIA, then ACRIA) in New York in 1987. One of CRI's early achievements was a trial that contributed to the approval of inhaled pentamidine for preventing Pneumocystis pneumonia, a common AIDS-related infection. Sonnabend served as Medical Director of CRI/CRIA until 1996.
  Sonnabend was particularly concerned by the ethical issues around the AIDS crisis, winning the Nellie Westerman Prize for Research in Ethics with his co-authors in 1983 for the article "Confidentiality, Informed Consent and Untoward Social Consequences in Research on a 'New Killer Disease' (AIDS)" in the journal Clinical Research. He has written about how the AIDS crisis required a "more intimate" kind of practice; Dr Krim described that "he's the only doctor I know who goes to every funeral".
  This concern led him to found the PWA Health Group with Michael Callen and Thomas Hannan in 1986. This non-profit organisation was the first and largest formally recognised AIDS buyers' club, which aimed to widen access to promising AIDS therapies not yet approved by the FDA; the PWA Health Group went on to become an important source of AIDS treatment education and advocacy. In 2000, DAAIR, Direct Aids Alternative Information Resources, merged with the PWA Health Group, but the organisations have since been superseded by the New York Buyers' Club.
caption: Pneumocystis jirovecii cysts from bronchoalveolar lavage, stained with Toluidin blue O stain
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "FromVish.  BAL in GA patient..  Silver stain", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "1012", "Image YResolution": "1012", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2005:10:30 01:28:43", "Image ExifOffset": "212", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "350", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3293", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "600", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "364"}