Global Impact: SJCRH

Hope, Gauri Patel, Patient Art Gallery, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, photo by jch.

Fundraising dinner for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, fourth of five narratives read between courses of the meal.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, an epidemic threatened the work of St. Jude Hospital. Young patients undergoing chemotherapy contracted a rare, often fatal pneumonia caused by a fungus called Pneumocystis carinii. In response, St. Jude launched a new infectious-diseases research department that eventually was able to address the problem. By 1974, a new drug therapy known by the acronym TMP-SMZ proved to cure and even prevent this pneumonia. It became routine treatment for all chemotherapy patients.

By the early 1980s, many otherwise healthy homosexual men were dying of the same pneumonia. Researchers knew that this pneumonia occurred only in immunocompromised people, which set them on course to diagnose this “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” (AIDS) and to prove AIDS to be caused by Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

As the AIDS epidemic spread, up to 75% of AIDS patients were found to have this pneumonia, a major cause of death. The TMP-SMZ drug therapy went on to become the primary therapy for AIDS patients, as well as the additional drugs proven at St. Jude, called Dapsone and Mepron.

Thirty years later, the World Health Organization reported that the St. Jude drugs, at that moment in time, were being administered to 140,000 Americans living with HIV/AIDS, and to more than 4-million people worldwide.  This fact alone shows how the impact of St. Jude research cannot be overstated. As a doctor has said, “One child saved at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital means a thousand saved elsewhere.”[1]

NOTES

[1] Dr. Michael Debakey, as quoted by Walter T. Hughes, Jr., On Hallowed Ground: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 2018, p. 107.

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