The Santa Cruz County Medical Society has recognized Thomas Deetz, M.D., an internal medicine and infectious disease specialist at the Santa Cruz Main Clinic, with its 2009 Excellence in Health Care Award.

The award is the highest recognition the 104-year-old physician society gives out, and Dr. Deetz is the fifth physician to receive the award since it was first presented in 2005.

The award honors Dr. Deetz's three decades of community service, and especially his work during the height of the U.S. AIDS epidemic.

In 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first warning about a relatively rare form of pneumonia among young gay men in Los Angeles, Dr. Deetz was a young physician who had completed his fellowships in infectious diseases just a few years earlier. In 1982, when Dr. Deetz saw his first AIDS patient, he was one of only two infectious disease specialists in Santa Cruz County.

"Nobody knew what we they were dealing with at that time," Dr. Deetz says. "From that first patient in 1982, the numbers increased dramatically until we were seeing a steady stream of inpatients at the hospital."

Today, AIDS is largely a manageable disease with life expectancy after diagnosis being close to that of an individual without AIDS. However, in the early 1980s, there were no effective treatments, and the life expectancy for someone who had developed symptoms of the disease was only 9 months, Dr. Deetz explains.

"All of us experienced losses of patients and also people we knew in the community," he says. "It was devastating."

Dr. Deetz presented seminars to keep the local medical community informed about the latest findings about the causes and possible treatments for AIDS. He also got many of his dying patients legal access to experimental drugs not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Infectious disease experts, such as Dr. Deetz, suspected very early on that AIDS was transmitted through blood, but some of the opportunistic diseases that AIDS patients came down with were more easily transmitted and dangerous in their own right.

"If my family was worried for my safety, they never expressed it," Dr. Deetz says. "It is a little like being a fireman or a policeman. It is part of your job, and you take all the precautions you can."

Looking back, Dr. Deetz calls the journey from the first case to the first effective treatments in 1995 "a remarkable medical success story." However, it is a bittersweet success.

"You also remember all of the people who died that might have been saved if we had had a treatment just a little sooner," he says

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