Background
Dritz was born in Chicago and studied medicine at the University of Illinois and then went on to obtain an Master in Public Health (Master"s degree in Public Health) at University of California Berkeley School of Public Healt in 1967.
Dritz was born in Chicago and studied medicine at the University of Illinois and then went on to obtain an Master in Public Health (Master"s degree in Public Health) at University of California Berkeley School of Public Healt in 1967.
Dritz was born in Chicago and studied medicine at the University of Illinois and then went on to obtain an Master in Public Health (Master"s degree in Public Health) at University of California Berkeley School of Public Healt in 1967.
In 1968 she was hired by the City of San Francisco as assistant director of its Health Department"s Bureau of Communicable Disease Control. Thirteen years later, along with Erwin Braff, the director of her bureau, Dritz took note of a strange new form of pneumonia and a new form of cancer. Kaposi"s sarcoma, both of which were afflicting gay mentor
Paul Volberding, former president of the International Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Society who helped found the first Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome clinic at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980s said of Dritz:
She was an absolutely wonderful person, and played an incredibly important role during those early days of the epidemic.
Doctor Dritz was the most important person to whom the Centers for Disease Control came for the details of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome situation here, and the information she gathered was invaluable for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologists in understanding how the epidemic was spreading. She died in 2008, aged 91, at the Claremont House Retirement Center in Oakland, California.