Downer Remains on Front Line of Fight Against HIV/AIDS - Higher Education: With each word, her lilting voice can serve up the warmth of her native Jamaica. But when the topic is HIV/AIDS and the young people the disease threatens, it almost always grows large and urgent. Goulda Downer, Ph.D., a health scientist, has ferried her share of frantic college students to clinics testing them for the virus that causes AIDS. She has sat with others eagerly awaiting or dreading results that could change their young lives in an instant.
The first time that Downer, a nutritionist, saw AIDS patients it was in 1987, when the disease was new and deadly. She says many of them were wasting away from malnutrition because they couldn’t eat. Since then, Downer’s curiosity about the disease and focus on the role that food and nutrition play in AIDS management has kept her on this path.
