Selma Dritz, 1988
Selma Kalderman Dritz was born in Chicago and earned her Medical Degree at the University of Illinois. In 1967, she went on to earn her Master’s in Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. She was hired as the Assistant Director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control in San Fransisco’s Public Health Department in 1968.
For most of her career, Dr. Dritz focused on everything from hepatitis to food poisoning. But she soon worked on the cases of dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea that were affecting predominantly gay neighborhoods. In 1981, she took note of an unusual form of pneumonia that was killing young gay men, sharing the information with the CDC in Atlanta. This, along with cases reported in Los Angeles, became the first known data of the AIDS epidemic. Not long after that, she began recording cases of a rare skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma among gay men.
A map demonstrating the tracked cases and their spread across the US.
At the time, AIDS had yet to be identified as a virus or a communicable disease. Dr. Dritz is credited with being one of the first people to understand that AIDS was spreading through sexual contact. Because of the trust she had built over her years working in and around the gay community, she was soon able to trace potential contacts. “Dr. Dritz was the most important person to whom the CDC came for the details of the AIDS situation here, and the information she gathered was invaluable for the CDC epidemiologists in understanding how the epidemic was spreading,” said Dr. Paul Volberding, former president of the International AIDS Society.
Selma Dritz in front of a chalkboard, 1982.
Dr. Dritz was passionate about working to stop the spread of AIDS, counseling the contacts she traced about the importance of safe sex. Even after she retired in 1984, she still spoke publicly about what she saw as foot-dragging by government officials. To a reporter in 1993 she said, “We’ve made some progress, but if we could have moved more quickly a decade ago, things would not be as bad as they are now.”
Dr. Dritz’s monumental role in the AIDS epidemic was memorialized in the 1987 book And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts and, in its 1993 adaptation to film, was played by Lily Tomlin. Dr. Dritz passed away in 2008 at the age of 91. A continued look into her life and legacy is possible through the Selma Dritz Papers, an archive kept by the University of California.
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