David Weldon: “I am a physician. I did my internship and residency in San Francisco in the early 1980s. I remember when I got there as…”

“I am a physician. I did my internship and residency in San Francisco in the early 1980s. I remember when I got there as a young intern being told that there were people coming in with strange conditions. And I remember the first article that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and came out of the Veterans' Administration Hospital in Los Angeles that initially described AIDS. After serving some time with the Army in Georgia, I went into private practice in Florida, and I did indeed practice infectious disease with the only infectious disease specialist in the county, a county of about 400,000 people, who saw AIDS patients. I had the opportunity to treat lots of AIDS patients and get up in the middle of the night, go into the emergency room, admit them to the hospital. And I have to say, I had the sad experience of seeing a lot of young people in the prime of their life die from complications of AIDS. So, needless to say, I am very interested in any effort that we can pursue to help control the spread of AIDS.”