November 24, 2008
HIV/AIDS Pioneer Dr. Catherine Wilfert at UW on World AIDS Day
Dr. Catherine Wilfert, the scientific director of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and a trailblazer in preventing HIV transmission from mother to child, will be speaking at the University of Washington Monday, Dec. 1, on World AIDS Day.
“Wilfert’s contributions to preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS are enormous,” said Dr. King Holmes, the William H. Foege chair of UW’s Department of Global Health.
In the United States, implementation of Wilfert’s concept of interrupting maternal transmission of HIV has reduced infant infections by more than 80 percent. Today, Wilfert oversees 1,700 projects worldwide in countries where women have little access to clinical care.
More than 3 million pregnant women have now participated in Wilfert’s projects of counseling, testing and intrapartum antiretrovirals to interrupt HIV transmission. HIV-infected pregnant women in resource-poor nations are given a single dose of anti-retroviral drug (Nevirapine) to take when they go into labor, plus a single dose to be administered to their newborn infant in the first day of life. This system is literally saving millions of lives — a concept she developed more than 20 years ago.
“The successful prevention of transmission of HIV from a mother to her baby is possible now,” said Wilfert. “We have the knowledge to accomplish this in the developing world when this proven prevention is established as an appriopriate priority by ministries of health.”
Wilfert will be speaking on “Global Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV-1” at 5:30 p.m. in UW’s Foege Auditorium, S-060, at the Foege Building, 1705 N.E. Pacific St. Her lecture is part of the Washington Global Health Alliance Discovery Series.
Wilfert is an honors graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School who joined Duke University Medical School in 1969 and became chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases.
In 1986, she lead a team at Duke University that administered antiretrovirals to a newborn for the first time.
Wilfert took early retirement in 1996 from Duke to become scientific director of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the worldwide leader in the fight against pediatric AIDS.
The foundation was named after Elizabeth Glaser, who was infected with HIV in 1981 through a blood transfusion, and unknowingly passed the virus on to her daughter, Ariel, and subsequently to her son, Jake. At the time, it was not widely known that HIV/AIDS could be passed from mother to child in utero or through breast milk. Few people understood that HIV affected children differently than adults.
Following Ariel’s death in 1988, Elizabeth and her two best friends, Susan DeLaurentis and Susie Zeegen, created a foundation to bring hope to children and families affected by AIDS. The foundation now works on pediatric AIDS in 18 countries through funding critical research and training, launching and supporting global health initiatives that prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV and provide care and treatment, and advocating for children’s health.
For more global health events, go to the Calendar of Events for global health.
