San Francisco Chronicle - September 8, 2008
David Perlman, dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

She died Wednesday after 10 days of hospice care at the Claremont House Retirement Center in Oakland where she had been living.

Dr. Dritz was an infinitely compassionate epidemiologist, and as AIDS began taking its toll in 1981, the patients she encountered moved her deeply.

"We can't let those kids die," she would say again and again as the epidemic spread without any known treatments.

Hired as assistant director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control in the city's public health department in 1968, Dr. Dritz was the go-to person when outbreaks of food poisoning hit the city, or when hepatitis epidemics felled scores of people in local colleges and high schools.

But soon she was tracing other problems: Dysentery, syphilis and gonorrhea were affecting young men in the city's predominantly gay neighborhoods. She noticed that the number of cases in the community was rising and warned other physicians every chance she got, and she began counseling many of the young men she came to know.

Her three children teased her: "Den mother of the gays," they called her, as the late Randy Shilts recalled in his book "And the Band Played On."

In May and early June 1981, she and Dr. Erwin Braff, the director of her bureau, took note of a few cases of an unusual and mysterious form of pneumonia that was killing young men in the city's gay community. Dr. Dritz relayed that information to the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and it became the first clear data, along with five cases reported days earlier in Los Angeles, of what was to become the AIDS epidemic.

Soon, Dr. Dritz recorded cases of a mysterious form of skin cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma among gay men, and because the patients she knew trusted her, she was able to trace their contacts and counsel them about what was then called "safe sex."

"Gay plague," and "gay cancer" were terms that were thrown around in those days, and Dr. Dritz rejected them all but accepted the term that finally became official - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome - long before HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was discovered.

Dr. Dritz was an invaluable source of information about the epidemic's progress to her colleagues who were studying the epidemic at UC San Francisco and to the physicians in the community treating AIDS patients.

"She was an absolutely wonderful person, and played an incredibly important role during those early days of the epidemic," said Dr. Paul Volberding, former president of the International AIDS Society who helped found the first AIDS clinic at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980s.

"Dr. Dritz was the most important person to whom the Centers for Disease Control came for the details of the AIDS situation here, and the information she gathered was invaluable for the CDC epidemiologists in understanding how the epidemic was spreading," he said.

She was, in effect, one of the early heroines of the AIDS era, and when Shilts' book was made into a movie, actress Lily Tomlin was selected to portray her.

Selma Kaderman Dritz was born in Chicago, earned her medical degree at the University of Illinois and her master's degree in public health at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health in 1967 - just before she joined the San Francisco health department, where she remained throughout her career.

As a child, she devoted herself to music, and began a career as a concert pianist before deciding that becoming a doctor was a better way to help others, her children recalled.

Dr. Dritz's 1943 marriage to Dr. H. Fred Dritz ended in divorce.

She is survived by her son, Dr. Ronald Dritz of Berkeley; two daughters, Deborah Dritz of Berkeley and Ariel Mumma of Salt Lake City; and two grandsons, Kyle and Cass Drewes.

There will be no memorial service, but contributions in memory of Dr. Selma Dritz may be sent to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, 995 Market St., No. 200, San Francisco, CA 94103.

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