Dr Joseph Sonnabend, a pioneering HIV/AIDS researcher, has died at 88 after suffering a heart attack earlier this month.
South-African born Sonnabend moved to New York in the 1970s during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, during which time he volunteered at the Gay Men’s Health Project in Greenwich Village, and started a private clinic for treating sexually transmitted infections.
He was known for being among the first clinicians to recognise the emerging HIV/AIDS epidemic in his gay male patients who were falling ill due to immune-deficiency.
In 1983, Sonnabend collaborated with two gay friends to write the first booklet on safer sex in the AIDS era: How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.