Alan Berkman

Alan Berkman

Obituary Alan Berkman Physician and activist who helped expand access to HIV/AIDS treatment. Born in Brooklyn, NY, USA, on Sept 4, 1945, he died of c...

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Obituary

Alan Berkman Physician and activist who helped expand access to HIV/AIDS treatment. Born in Brooklyn, NY, USA, on Sept 4, 1945, he died of complications of lymphoma, in Manhattan, NY, USA, on June 5, 2009, aged 63 years. For more about Alan Berkman and to watch a video of him see http://alanberkman.com

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The slogan of the 12th International Conference on AIDS in 1998 was “Bridging the gap”. But “medical apartheid”, as Alan Berkman came to call it, was the reality for many developing countries. In South Africa and other nations hard-hit by AIDS but without the means to pay for treatment, prevention was the only option being discussed. “There was no ‘bridging the gap’, no one was even talking to what the issues were, it was just hopeless”, recalls Berkman’s wife, Barbara Zeller, who is also an AIDS physician. So Berkman, a physician and activist who had been released from federal prison only 6 years before, took on the challenge of making treatment available to everyone with HIV/AIDS, no matter where they lived. “Treatment was key. Not that other issues weren’t important. But treatment offered people in Africa hope”, he told Body Positive magazine in 2002. Berkman and his fellow activists first targeted the Clinton Administration’s punitive trade stance towards countries trying to produce or import generic antiretroviral drugs. After the administration dropped the policy in early 2000, a “cascade of additional events” changed everything, according to Asia Russell, director of international policy at Health GAP (Global Access Program), which Berkman founded in 1998. “He was a living embodiment of the idea that when you see injustice being done it’s not enough to have sympathy for

the people who are suffering as a result, it’s imperative to take action. Alan was very much focused on the future and on using the resources he had to change lives, to change policies,” Russell says. Berkman said he realised he needed to be “in solidarity with people that were suffering from…social injustice” in 1967, in his last year at Cornell University, while hearing civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael speak. After training at Columbia Medical School in New York City, Berkman worked for a decade as a community physician in the Bronx and Lower East Side neighbourhoods of the city. He treated injured inmates at the Attica prison uprisings in 1971, Native American protesters occupying Wounded Knee in 1974, and increasingly sided with the more radical elements of dissent. In 1981, after Black Liberation Army and ex-Weather Underground members robbed an armoured truck and killed two policemen and a guard, Berkman treated a woman involved in the robbery for a gunshot wound. He didn’t turn her in, and went to jail for refusing to testify. After being indicted as an accessory to the crime after the fact—and now facing a 12-year sentence—Berkman went on the run. In 1984, police apprehended him and a friend in a car with two guns and keys to a dynamite-stocked garage. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. During his first 6 months of incarceration, Berkman was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, and struggled to get treatment. He served 8 years, half in solitary confinement. “I think his time in prison actually just made him…stronger in terms of what he believed in and what he saw as the change that was needed and how he himself committed to doing that”, says Quarraisha Abdool Karim, associate scientific director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa and director of the Columbia University Southern Africa Fogarty AIDS Training Program. Abdool Karim worked closely with Berkman on building capacity for AIDS research, treatment, and prevention in southern Africa. Berkman was released on parole in 1992. He took up a postdoctoral position at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University in 1995, where he developed an intervention to reduce risky sexual behaviour among homeless men with mental illness. He also worked as medical director of the Highbridge-Woodycrest Center, a residential health centre for people with AIDS. He joined Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, becoming vice chair of the department of epidemiology in 2007. Berkman battled Hodgkin’s for the rest of his life. He developed B cell lymphoma in 1998 and had two stem-cell transplants; he died within 2 weeks of the last procedure. He is survived by his wife, daughters Sarah Zeller-Berkman and Harriet Clark, and a grandson. “He felt like his life had made a contribution, certainly”, Zeller said.

Anne Harding [email protected]

www.thelancet.com Vol 374 October 3, 2009