Ruben Sher, pioneer of AIDS treatment in SA, dies at 78 
Tamar Kahn

CAPE TOWN — Prof Ruben Sher, one of the first South African doctors to identify the threat of HIV/AIDS, died earlier this week of complications following surgery for a faulty pacemaker. He was 78.

Sher, an immunologist , first found out about HIV during a visit to the US in 1982, when the disease was cutting a swathe through the gay community. At the time HIV was largely unknown in SA , but Sher believed it was already present.

On his return to work at the South African Institute for Medical Research (SAIMR) he contacted Dr Dennis Sifris, who had many gay men in his practice. They collected blood samples from 200 volunteers, and stored them until HIV tests became available in 1985. More than a tenth of them were positive.

In 1986, Sher and Sifris started a weekly HIV clinic at Johannesburg Clinic, which saw the bulk of the city’s first AIDS patients. Sher and SAIMR director Prof Jack Metz set up an advisory body to the apartheid government and traversed the country, educating the medical fraternity about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“He was the first person in SA who tackled the embryonic AIDS problem,” said Des Martin, former president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society.

“He was the person we all looked up to. He was the face of the medical and scientific community’s response to the disease — a forthright spokesman who challenged the stigma surrounding HIV.” he said.

Judge Edwin Cameron, who sought Sher’s advice when he found he was HIV-positive , said : “He was a lion for justice in the bleak early years of the epidemic when there were alarmist cries for people with HIV to be isolated and rounded up.”

Sher wrote in the Sunday Times several years ago, describing caring for HIV patients before antiretrovirals became available.

“It was devastating we saw people dying in front of us and we could do very little. AIDS was (then) a death sentence. And unlike the death penalty under apartheid, where you could always go to Bloemfontein and appeal, there was no such place,” he wrote.

Sher was a critic of the government, both during and after apartheid, comparing its sluggish response to AIDS to the holocaust and the atom bomb. Today an estimated 5,41-million South Africans have the disease.

“He was a caring, compassionate doctor, and many gay men with HIV sought him out,” says Treatment Action Campaign chairman Zackie Achmat.

Born in Johannesburg, Sher studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, after serving in the Israeli air force. He is survived by his two sons from his first marriage to Miriam, Alan and Phillip, his wife Jean, her son Graeme, and their daughter Gail.