San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
UCSF doctor discovered HIV in infants
Before AIDS had a name and was still thought to be a disease primarily affecting gay men, Dr. Arthur Ammann at UCSF Parnassus discovered the same condition in a newborn who had undergone a blood transfusion.
Further research by Ammann led to what he described as a “terrible discovery”: The illness could also be transmitted from mother to baby during pregnancy. That finding put maternity wards, pediatric units and the entire blood donor industry on alert.
“Art was absolutely one of the first pediatricians to be involved in responding to AIDS,” said Dr. Paul Volberding, a frontline physician in the earliest battles against the virus and co-founder of the world’s first AIDS clinic at San Francisco General Hospital.
“From my standpoint, his observation of a baby that died of AIDS from a blood transfusion in 1982 was earth-shattering. It was a moment of real fear. It opened the door to the possibility that AIDS was caused by a new virus.”
That virus turned out to be HIV, first isolated in 1983. By then, Ammann had a head start toward 40 years of study and treatment of HIV/AIDS in women and children.
He turned 85 at his home in San Rafael on Aug. 12, and that same day was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. He died three days later of kidney failure, said his daughter, Kim Ammann Howard of Albany. He was 85.
Still working on his behalf in the global fight against HIV/ AIDS is Global Strategies, an Albany nonprofit he founded to improve maternal and child health care in underserved countries in Africa. Global Strategies has HIV programs that reach more than 100,000 people a year and has pioneered new methods to prevent transmission of HIV in conflict settings.
Ammann frequently traveled to Northern Nigeria, Eastern Congo and Liberia, wherever the danger of AIDS in women and infants was the greatest.
“Art’s discovery moved the field significantly forward,” said Dr. Michael Gottlieb, who was the first person to identify a new condition that became known as AIDS, while at UCLA in 1981. “He stayed with the pandemic from the very beginning to where we are now. He had an intense and enduring commitment to it.” Arthur J. Ammann was born Aug. 12, 1936, in Brooklyn, where he grew up on Avenue H in Flatbush. His parents were German immigrants who came through Ellis Island. His father, Hans, found work as a baker, and his mother, Marie, was a homemaker. Educated in the public school system, Arthur was admitted to Brooklyn Tech. He graduated in 1954 and left Brooklyn for the first time by train to attend Wheaton College in Illinois, and went on to medical school at the New Jersey College of Medicine in Jersey City.
By then he was married to Marilyn Mihm, who was in his class at Wheaton. According to his daughter, Ammann chose pediatrics as his field of specialty for the simple reason that he noticed that fellow medical students coming off of rotations in pediatric wards seemed happier than the others. He chose to start his residency at UCSF in 1963 on a similar whim: He and his wife thought California would be an exciting place to try living.
He became a specialist in pediatric immunology and was
also part of a UCSF faculty cohort that met weekly at the Parnassus campus to discuss the new illness being seen by UCSF doctors staffing San Francisco General Hospital.
On March 3, 1982, six months before the term AIDS, for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, was first used by the Centers for Disease Control, a baby was born prematurely. Blood transfusions were required, through which the baby developed symptoms similar to those exhibited by patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma. That led to Ammann’s discovery that the disease could be transmitted through blood transfusions, in utero, and through contaminated blood products.
“It was very controversial,” he told the Stanford Journal of Public Health in a 2012 interview. “The blood bank people were afraid that it would keep people from donating blood.”
It was not until 1985 that it became widely accepted that blood transfusions could be the source of HIV/AIDS, and by then Ammann had left UCSF for private industry, at Genentech.
“I was frustrated that things were just moving too slowly on the pediatric side,” he later said. “The children were being left out.”
While a research scientist in private industry, he was still very much a pediatrician in that he cared deeply about the patients he met in clinical studies, and once you were a patient of Dr. Ammann you were always a patient, his daughter said.
“He developed relationships that lasted decades,” Ammann Howard said. “I remember meeting people in their 20s and 30s who had been his patients as young children.” Ammann left Genentech in 1992 to start the Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Novato. It was later renamed the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and relocated to Washington, D.C.
In 1997, Ammann was named president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and returned part time to New
York City. He traveled widely in that capacity and, during a visit to a hospital in Uganda, observed that there were more children with HIV/AIDS in that one hospital each year than there were in all the hospitals in the United States.
Treatment for pregnant women and children with AIDS had become widely available in the United States, but Ammann believed that these treatments would never reach the poorer parts of the world without an advocate. He became that advocate by founding Global Strategies in 1999.
“He was out to prove there was no place that was beyond the reach of HIV care,” said Dr. Joshua Bress, medical director of Global Strategies.
Through his travels, Ammann took photographs that he turned into surreal montages. His debut as an artist came in 2017 with the opening of “HIV: A Plague of Violence Against Women,” an exhibit at the UCSF Parnassus Library. “My dad was about making a positive difference in people’s lives, whether it was a doctor, a neighbor, a lifelong friend, or someone he just met on the street or in the airport,” his daughter said.
Survivors include his wife of 61 years, Marilyn of San Rafael; son, Scott Ammann of Fairfax; daughter, Kim Ammann Howard of Albany; and four grandchildren. A celebration of life will be held in coming months. Donations in his name may be made to Global Strategies, 828 San Pablo Ave., Suite 260, Albany, CA 94706.