HIV’s Greatest Foe Went Down With MH17

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HIV’s Greatest Foe Went Down With MH17
Dr. Joep M. Lange, a Dutch researcher whose work toward finding prevention and treatment for the disease is unmatched, and partner Jacqueline von Tongeren were killed in the crash.


Dr. Joep M. Lange, who died in the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, was one of a handful of brand-name AIDS experts. Of course eulogistic hyperbole is expected after this sort of tragedy, but Lange truly was every inch the visionary, charismatic, and good guy the hurried obituaries suggest.

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Lange started his career examining how best to measure, and therefore predict, disease progression and response to treatment. He and a handful of others developed the HIV “antigen” test, a first-generation attempt at measuring the amount of virus in the bloodstream. Within a decade, his approach led to the routine measurement of the HIV “viral load,” a test performed as routinely as a cholesterol HDL both to diagnose infection and monitor treatment response.

But as he worked on the epidemic locally in Amsterdam and Western Europe, Lange also was thinking globally. Through international meetings, he learned what HIV threatened to do worldwide; therefore, in the early 1990s, he took over oversight of clinical research in the WHO Global AIDS Program. As he wrote in 1993, referring to the newly recognized scale of the epidemic in Africa, “It is clear that countries most struck by the HIV epidemic are unable to cope with the enormous burden of care required.”

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Joep Lange’s death leaves a large void in the world of AIDS treatment. Others, though, trained on Lange-ian principles, will rill rise and fill the gap. What will not be restored so easily, soon or perhaps ever, is the remarkable gift he gave to doctors and patients across the world: an unflagging optimism in the face of a raging epidemic, and a belief that humans can and must work together for the public good.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/18/the-aids-battle-lost-a-hero-on-malaysia-airlines-flight-17.html