Dr Jacques Leibowitch, one of the pioneers in the fight against HIV, died Wednesday at the age of 77, deplored associations fighting against AIDS on Thursday.
“ Search, understand, care, innovate, imagine! All his life, Jacques Leibowitch will have continued to do so in the field of the fight against HIV and the care of sick people ”, notes the Seronet site launched in 2008 by the association AIDES. " Less well known in the media than many of his colleagues, less in progress due to an unconsensual temperament, the doctor was nevertheless among the first in France to take action on AIDS. He was one of the pioneers in the fight against HIV since 1981, ”recalls Seronet.
A true " spur " for research, brilliant, passionate and sometimes excessive, even angry, " Leibo ", as it was nicknamed had flashes, evoking the track of a retrovirus at the onset of this evil then still mysterious, in favor of use therapeutic combinations to treat the sick ... He was also concerned about the contamination of blood intended for transfusion. The alert to the emergency screening was given at the end of 1984 by a study by Dr François Pinon, head of the blood transfusion station at one of the most important hospitals in Paris, Cochin Hospital. The latter told before the Court of Justice of the Republic having successfully used at that time an artisanal screening process, not industrially reproducible, developed by Dr. Jacques Leibowitch.
" Of great humanity, he was raised in the ideal of the left of 36. He has always been close to his patients and has never ceased to fight the slowness of the institution, " says one of his friends, François Hebel director of the Cartier Bresson Foundation. In particular, he fought to alleviate the treatment of people with HIV. He died Wednesday night of cancer.
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