Selma Dritz

Selma Kaderman Dritz (June 29, 1917 – September 3, 2008) was an American physician and epidemiologist who worked in San Francisco, where she began tracking the first known cases of AIDS in the early 1980s.

Dritz was born in Chicago and studied medicine at the University of Illinois and then went on to obtain an MPH (Master's degree in Public Health) at UC Berkeley School of Public Health 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 Rare form of pneumonia and a Rare form of cancer; Kaposi's sarcoma, both of which were afflicting gay men, both of which had up to this point only affected elderly Mediterranean men.

Dritz played an instramental roll in tracking the new disease HIV. Her no nonsense approach to epidemiology moved mountains and paved the road to the treatment of HIV. In short Selma Dritz saved countless lives.

Paul Volberding, former president of the International AIDS Society who helped found the first AIDS 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... 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.

Dritz's 1943 marriage ended in divorce in 1973.

She died in 2008, aged 91, at the Claremont House Retirement Center in Oakland, California. She was survived by her three children (Ronald Dritz, Deborah Dritz and Ariel Mumma), and two grandsons.