A DV AN C E S_ Newsletter of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

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PROFILE

June Osborn, MD
Chair, National
Commission on AIDS

Editor’s note: The following interview with
June Osborn, MD, chair of the National
Commission on Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome, originally appeared
in the 1990 first quarter edition of
AlDSline, the national newsletter of
RWJF’s AIDS Health Services Program.
Osborn, who is dean of the School of Public
Health at the University of Michigan, and
professor of pediatrics and communicable
diseases at the University of Michigan
Medical School, also serves as chair of the
national advisory committee for the RWJF
AIDS Health Services Program. AlDSline
writer Coimbra Sirica interviewed Osborn
about her work with the foundation
program, her views on the epidemic’s
progress, and her goals for the commission.

Q: How did your role on the AIDS
Health Services Program (AHSP)
advisory committee affect your work
on the commission?

A: My background is as a virologist and
a pediatrician. While I’m a public health
dean, and have many faculty who are
expert in this kind of thing, AIDS was
not my area of expertise. The program
gave me a wonderful opportunity to
learn in an effective way about what
surely turned out to be the most
important issues in the AIDS epidemic.
Q: What are we learning from the
foundation’s program?

A: We're learning that each community
is as individual as a set of fingerprints,
and that whatever solutions we come up
with in treating AIDS, we have to take
advantage of that individuality.

Because of the pervasiveness of the
epidemic, we need to arrive at some
generalizations about what needs to be
done to improve health care. If we
ignore what makes each community

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Osborn

unique, however, those generalizations
could be completely misleading.

Q: What progress do you think we can
look for in the battle against AIDS?

A: I think we need to do a far better

job than we have done on two fronts
having to do with education.

First of all, we must educate the
general public. People have learned to
parrot back at us the catch phrases we
use, but that does not mean they have
learned or understood the information.

On the second front, we must
approach education on the community
level. In my view, this has much greater
potential for prevention, because you
are dealing with individual choices
about behaviors and lifestyles.

Q: Why should AIDS be funded at such
high levels when it must compete
with other illnesses that may even

kill greater numbers of people?

A: The “AIDS is only one disease”
argument is misapprehension. There's
an enormous amount of spin-off that’s

Randall Hagadorn

RWJF staff honored retiring president Leighton E. Cluff, MD, at a June banquet in New Jersey.
Cluff relocated to Gainesville, Fla., after a 14-year tenure at RWJF, serving as its president

 

 

likely to come from AIDS research. My
guess is that we'll gain more insights
about poorly-understood neurologic
diseases, immunologic diseases and
malignancies than will emerge about
AIDS itself.

Funding for AIDS health care and
prevention will continue to grow,
whether we want it to or not. We’re
going to have to pay. If we don’t, we will
pay with people dying in the streets.

It’s a question of finding ways to
alter and refine our approach to health
care in a sufficiently thoughtful way
so that it has a positive impact on
everything. After all, the problems AIDS
has highlighted have been there all
along. They just haven’t been addressed.
So if we do our job well, we will have
an impact far beyond AIDS.

In response to the other side of your
question, AIDS is different from other
chronic diseases. It’s communicable. It’s
increasing dramatically and radically. It
is very quickly becoming the leading
cause of death in people between the
ages of 25 and 44. And that’s an age
group that shouldn’t be dying in the
last part of the 20th century.

Unless we take AIDS seriously, it’s
going to get worse and worse. You can't
say that about any other disease.

Q: What, in a nutshell, would you like
to see the commission accomplish,
and what leverage do you have?

A: I think we have to recapture national
attention and develop a compassionate
and caring consensus about the
epidemic. We've seen growing
complacency, and people thinking

that the epidemic doesn’t pertain to
them, or that the situation is improving.

It is not getting better. It’s about to
get much worse.

The commission has the power of
persuasion, and nothing else. We're
going to try and use that as effectively
as we can. &