Rupert Whitaker

Last updated

Rupert Whitaker
Born
Rupert Edward David Whitaker

(1963-06-10)10 June 1963
Known for AIDS advocate

Rupert Edward David Whitaker OBE (born 1963) is a British psychiatrist, immunologist, and patient advocate. He is one of Europe's longest-surviving people with HIV, having contracted the disease in 1981. Following the death of his partner, Terrence Higgins, from AIDS in 1982, he co-founded the Terrence Higgins Trust, a charity set up to provide services for people with HIV. In 2007, he founded the Tuke Institute, an international organisation researching the health-effectiveness of medical services.

Contents

Early life

Whitaker came out as gay in 1978. He left Lord Wandsworth College in Long Sutton, Hampshire in 1980, aged 17. In 1981, he matriculated at the College of St Hild and St Bede at Durham University to study philosophy and psychology, and during this period his partner Terry Higgins became one of the first people to die from AIDS in the UK. Whitaker became ill and transferred to the University of London, and was not expected to live longer than 12 months. [1]

The Terrence Higgins Trust

In 1982, Whitaker became involved in raising awareness of HIV, then a little-known disease referred to 'Gay-Related Immune Deficiency'. Following his involvement in a conference organised by London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, he worked with Martyn Butler and Tony Whitehead to develop the Terrence Higgins Trust into a registered charity, helping to establish its educational, mental health, and buddying services, and raising awareness in the media. The Trust was the first European HIV charity to be founded, and is currently one of the leading HIV charities in Europe.

Training and practice

Following the completion of his first degree in 1984, Whitaker was awarded a fellowship to the University of Toronto, Canada to train in psychiatry and bio-behavioural science around HIV. He received a scholarship and fellowships to continue university education and training in Canada and the US for a further 11 years. He received his doctoral qualifications in psychiatry, neurology, and immunology with a 100% grade point average.[ citation needed ] This was followed by three post-doctoral fellowships in immunology, neurological and social psychiatry at Tufts New England Medical School, University of Michigan Medical School, and the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.

Dr Whitaker continued his work in social justice around health during his studies and led the international response to anti-HIV immigration and travels laws in the USA. Based on his published research in public health with Richard Edwards, he prompted the International AIDS Society to boycott the US as the location of any future IAS conferences until the laws were changed. The bans were lifted in 2009 and the subsequent IAS conference was held in Washington, DC.

Dr Whitaker has been an Expert Adviser to the Department of Health UK and a member of numerous committees for specialised commissioning and expert advice on medical research and health service delivery, while also acting as a referee for the British Medical Journal, Blood, AIDS, and being on the editorial board for the International Journal of User-Driven Healthcare. He has published over 70 academic and policy papers in the fields of psychiatry, immunology, neurology, and public health, most as first author, and has had honorary senior fellowships at various universities. Currently, he acts as an international forensic expert in psychiatry and public health for the Courts, with cases in the UK, Iran, Australia, and Poland, specialising in disability, personal injury, clinical negligence, and occupational health. In 2015, he extended his work to speaking engagements, having often given lectures and speeches at Universities and Charity events in the US, UK, and mainland Europe. His main topics for speaking engagements cover integrated patient-centered health services, software and app design for health, and creating accountability across health systems.

Personal health

In 1993, following his third post-doctoral fellowship, Whitaker was diagnosed with AIDS at the age of 30. Shortly afterwards he had a stroke, which left him with visual, communicative, cognitive, and mobility problems. This required brain surgery that left him with epilepsy. This was followed by a number of years of intensive rehabilitation. In 2006, he was again given less than six months to live because of medications for HIV interacting with his stroke-associated brain-injury, which was misdiagnosed for two years. Due to his extensive experience of health services during this time, including a number of episodes of malpractice, he founded the Tuke Institute in 2007.

The Tuke Institute

The Tuke Institute is an independent research organisation of international scientists, clinicians and other professionals that promotes a biopsychosocial framework for integrated health-services. A significant proportion of its contributors have chronic illnesses themselves and wish to change health-services for the better. The Tuke Institute researches patient-centredness with the primary focus on how best to help patients get well and stay well. Its methods include measuring an individual's health from the patient's perspective, measuring the effectiveness of a health-service in terms of functional health outcomes rather than biomarkers of disease, and policy and software-development to empower patients to participate in the co-delivery, audit, and governance of services. The institute also provides traineeships for graduate students wishing to gain experience in the translation of health-science into policy and practice.

Honours

In 2004, Whitaker was awarded a Police Commendation for bravery in the apprehension of an armed and violent robber.

He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to charity and public health. [2]

Related Research Articles

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). NIAID's mission is to conduct basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terrence Higgins Trust</span> British HIV and sexual health charity

Terrence Higgins Trust is a British charity that campaigns about and provides services relating to HIV and sexual health. In particular, the charity aims to end the transmission of HIV in the UK; to support and empower people living with HIV, to eradicate stigma and discrimination around HIV, and to promote good sexual health.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Higgins</span> Welsh prominent early AIDS death (1945–1982)

Terrence Lionel Seymour Higgins was among the first people known to die of an AIDS-related illness in the United Kingdom.

Douglas D. Richman is an American infectious diseases physician and medical virologist. Richman's work has focused on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, since its appearance in the early 1980s. His major contributions have been in the areas of treatment, drug resistance, and pathogenicity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney</span> Hospital in New South Wales, Australia

St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney is a leading tertiary referral hospital and research facility located in Darlinghurst, Sydney. Though funded and integrated into the New South Wales state public health system, it is operated by St Vincent's Health Australia. It is affiliated with the University of Tasmania College of Health and Medicine and the University of New South Wales Medical School.

HIV/AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981. As of year-end 2018, 160,493 people have been diagnosed with HIV in the United Kingdom and an estimated 7,500 people are living undiagnosed with HIV. New diagnoses are highest in gay/bisexual men, with an estimated 51% of new diagnosis reporting male same-sex sexual activity as the probable route of infection. Between 2009 and 2018 there was a 32% reduction in new HIV diagnosis, attributed by Public Health England (PHE) to better surveillance and education. PHE has described an "outbreak" in Glasgow amongst people who inject drugs, and has campaigns targeting men who have sex with men in London and other major cities. London was the first city in the world to reach the World Health Organization target for HIV, set at 90% of those with HIV diagnosed, 90% of those diagnosed on HAART and 90% of those on HAART undetectable. The UK as a whole later achieved the same target. Under the Equality Act 2010, it is illegal to discriminate against someone based on their HIV status in the UK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pride Chigwedere</span> Zimbabwean physician-scientist

Pride Chigwedere, a Zimbabwean national, is a Harvard trained physician-scientist working in global health. He is most notable for leading a team of Harvard researchers who demonstrated that South African President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS policies led to more than 300 000 deaths. While South Africa's policies were condemned by many, Chigwedere's contribution was in developing and applying methods to quantify the impact of the policies thus demonstrating the calamitous consequences of AIDS denialism. Generalized, he developed an approach for evaluating public health practice and highlighted the need to develop a framework for accountability in public health. Drawing from the analogy with medicine, he has proposed the concept of public health malpractice to capture negligence that causes harm as a useful first step towards accountability in public health. A response to Chigwedere's work by AIDS denialists led by Peter Duesberg was initially published by the non-peer-reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses followed by a retraction because of poor quality of data, undeclared conflicts of interest, and potential effects on global health.

Michael Stuart Gottlieb is an American physician and immunologist known for his 1981 identification of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) as a new disease, and for his HIV/AIDS research, HIV/AIDS activism, and philanthropic efforts associated with HIV/AIDS treatment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey P. Nadler</span> American physician

Jeffrey P. Nadler is an American Infectious Diseases and HIV/AIDS expert. His most recent position has been as Acting Director and Assistant Director of the Therapeutics Research Program, Division of AIDS (DAIDS), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) where he oversaw NIH/NIAID-sponsored national and international HIV/AIDS research.

Igor Grant is an American psychiatrist. He is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is Director of the HIV Neurobehavioral Research Program (HNRP) and the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR). Grant is the founding Editor of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society and founding co-editor of the journal AIDS and Behavior. His work focuses on effects of HIV and drug use, particularly alcohol, medical marijuana, and methamphetamine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Frascino</span> American physician, immunologist and advocate

Robert James Frascino was an American physician, immunologist, and advocate for HIV-positive people. He was one of the first physicians to specialize in HIV during the outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s. After an occupational exposure to the virus in 1991 left him HIV-positive, his health declined, and he had to retire from his work as a physician in 1996. At that time, he became active in HIV/AIDS education and advocacy. In 1999, he co-founded the Robert James Frascino AIDS Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises money to benefit AIDS patients in need of treatment and to fund HIV/AIDS educational programs worldwide. A concert pianist, Frascino performed annually with other musicians at A Concerted Effort, a benefit concert for his charity. From May 2000 until his death, he responded to questions from the public in two informational forums on TheBody.com, an educational resource on HIV/AIDS run by Remedy Health Media.

Julio S. G. Montaner, is an Argentine-Canadian physician, professor and researcher. He is the director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the chair in AIDS Research and head of the Division of AIDS in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and the past-president of the International AIDS Society. He is also the director of the John Ruedy Immunodeficiency Clinic, and the Physician Program Director for HIV/AIDS PHC. He is known for his work on HAART, a role in the discovery of triple therapy as an effective treatment for HIV in the late 1990s, and a role in advocating the "Treatment as Prevention" Strategy in the mid-2000s, led by Myron Cohen of the HPTN 052 trial.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voluntary Health Services hospital, Chennai</span> Hospital in Tamil Nadu, India

Voluntary Health Services, popularly known as the VHS Hospital, is a multispecialty tertiary care referral hospital in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, reportedly serving the economically weaker sections of the society. It was founded in 1958 by Krishnaswami Srinivas Sanjivi, an Indian physician, social worker and a winner of Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awards and is run by a charitable non governmental organization of the same name. The hospital is situated along Rajiv Gandhi Salai at Taramani, in Chennai.

Suniti Solomon was an Indian physician and microbiologist who pioneered AIDS research and prevention in India after having diagnosed the first Indian AIDS cases among the Chennai sex workers in 1986 along with her student Sellappan Nirmala. She founded the Y R Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education in Chennai. The Indian government conferred the National Women Bio-scientist Award on her. On 25 January 2017, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri for medicine for her contributions towards diagnosis and treatment of HIV.

Igor Koralnik is an American physician, neurologist and scientist. He is one of the first physicians to study the neurologic complications caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and is a leading researcher in the investigation of the polyomavirus JC, which causes progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a disease of the central nervous system that occurs in immunosuppressed individuals.

Professor Ravindra "Ravi" Kumar Gupta is a professor of clinical microbiology at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Cambridge. He is also a member of the faculty of the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen J. Challacombe</span>

Stephen James Challacombe FRC(Path), FDSRCS, FMedSci, is professor of oral medicine at King's College in London, best known for research in oromucosal immunology and for developing the Challacombe scale for measuring the extent of dryness of the mouth. He led the team that laid out research challenges of global health inequalities and oral health, particularly relating to the oral manifestations of HIV.

Raman Gangakhedkar is an Indian public health expert and epidemiologist. He served as Head Scientist of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research before retiring on 30 June 2020. He is a recipient of the 2020 Padma Shri award, the fourth highest civilian award in India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mkunde Chachage</span> Tanzanian researcher and lecturer (born 1984)

Mkunde Chachage is a lecturer and researcher in immunology at University of Dar es Salaam Mbeya College of Health and Allied Sciences. She is also a researcher at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mbeya medical research centre. She conducts research in clinical immunology as well as infectious diseases of human including Tuberculosis (TB), HIV and helminths infections.

Graeme John Stewart,, MB BS, PhD, FRACP, FRCPA is an Australian consultant physician, medical researcher in the field of immunology, and a community health advocate. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Westmead Institute for Medical Research, University of Sydney.

References

  1. Emily Dugan, "HIV: Thirty years after the first diagnosis, Britain heads for 100,000 cases", The Independent, 23 October 2011.
  2. "No. 63714". The London Gazette (Supplement). 1 June 2022. p. B16.