Dr. Heyward Fighting HIV

Dr. William Heyward was born simply William L. Heyward in Atlanta, Georgia. He received his bachelor of arts in Chemistry in 1972 from Emory University in Atlanta Georgia. William Heyward then went on to attend the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia, graduating in 1976 with his medical doctorate. He did his internship and residency in Internal Medicine and then began working with the CDC in 1979. His job with the CDC would take him around the world and would last over 20 years.

Alaska

Dr. Heyward began his long career with the CDC by working in Anchorage, Alaska. He was sent there to work as a Commissioned Officer under the United States Public Health Service in order to research botulism, Haemophilus influenzae type B, hepatitis B, and other infectious diseases. In 1981, Merck, a pharmaceutical company, released the hepatitis B preventative vaccine. Dr. Heyward was one of the parties responsible for vaccinating over 1700 Alaskan natives in an effort to stop hepatitis B from spreading more than it already had. It was later discovered that the hepatitis B vaccine worked to prevent thousands of Alaskan natives from contracting hepatitis B. Dr. Heyward also did work in Alaska studying liver cancer and finding that he could detect the possibility of liver cancer early. By treating the disease early, many people were cured.

Dr. Heyward first began studying HIV and AIDS in Alaska. At the time he started studying the virus, little was known about it. Many people believed that only homosexuals or those who engaged in drugs that required needles would contract the deadly virus. Dr. Heyward studied the virus in Alaska and found that he wanted to know more about it, and about how to cure it. He attended Johns Hopkins University and received an M.P.H. degree in epidemiology in 1987.

The Next Steps

After he received that degree, Dr. William Heyward traveled to Brazil, Zaire, the Ivory Coast, Thailand, and a number of other places while working with the CDC in an effort to study and stop the virus from spreading. He set up field stations in Thailand as well as the Ivory Coast so that HIV and AIDS could continue to be studied in an effort to find a cure.

By the time Dr. Heyward retired from the CDC in 2000, he had helped by working with the CDC to study and conduct HIV trials in a number of different countries. He was also called to Zaire in order to study the Ebola virus. After his retirement, Dr. Heyward began working for VaxGen; the pharmaceutical company that believed it had found a viable HIV vaccine. His career ended with VaxGen in January of 2004. A few months later, however, Dr. William Heyward proved that he wasn’t done yet. He began the clinical Research Organization, or Quattro Clinical Research, in an effort to consult with pharmaceutical companies that are trying to cure infectious diseases, such as HIV and AIDS. Dr. Heyward is one doctor who never says quit!