William Heyward

Dr. William Heyward's Fight Against AIDS

AIDS is considered to be a pandemic, currently effecting over 38 million people around the world. In the early 1980's, scientists started recognizing that a disease was affecting, and killing, thousands of people in the United States. At first there was no name for it. The press started calling it the Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID disease, but research soon proved that one did not have to be gay to be affected by the disease.

Who is Affected by AIDS?

AIDS is a disease that does not discriminate. It affects everyone, from the wealthy, to the poor; from the devout, to the non-religious. It is spread through sexual contact, shared needles, and any time a person with AIDS mingles any part of their blood, urine, or tears into an open orifice or wound on another person.

Dr. Heyward and AIDS

In 1990, Dr. William Heyward took his study of AIDS to the next step when he took over the Directorship of the project known as SIDA, which has also been called Project AIDS. This Directorship took him to Zaire, and then later to Brazil, Honduras, the Ivory Coast, Thailand, and many more places. He helped to create field stations so that the CDC could study the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus in order to see where it was going and how it was being transmitted the most.

Dr. Heyward then began working with the World health Organization in order to create an HIV Vaccine, so as to stop the spread of this terrible disease before it went any further. He helped to organize the HIV vaccine trial in Thailand, Rwanda, Brazil and Uganda. He had to stop working on the HIV vaccine for awhile while he helped to get the Ebola epidemic under control in Zaire.

In 1996, however, he returned to the United States in order to work with the CDC in developing an HIV vaccine and a program to see the trials through. He retired from the CDC in 2000, but continued working on the HIV vaccine in his new position at VaxGen, Inc. He organized a phase three trial of the HIV vaccine in Thailand and helped other people, such as the Walter Reed Army Institute, to begin their own trials of the HIV vaccine.

Dr. William Heyward is one of the many soldiers in the fight against HIV and AIDS.