Elizabeth Glaser was an American AIDS activist and child advocate married to actor and director Paul Michael Glaser. She contracted HIV very early in the modern AIDS epidemic after receiving an HIV-contaminated blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth. Like other HIV-infected mothers, Glaser unknowingly passed the virus to her infant daughter, Ariel, through breastfeeding. Ariel was born in 1981 and died in 1988. The Glasers' son Jake, born in 1984, contracted HIV from his mother in utero, but has lived into adulthood.
In August 1981, Elizabeth contracted HIV through blood transfusions she received due to complications before the birth of the couple's first child, Ariel. She did not find out that she had unknowingly passed the virus on to Ariel through breast milk, and that her son, Jake had contracted the virus in utero until four years later, when she, Ariel, and Jake tested positive for HIV in 1985. Her husband, Paul, tested negative for the virus. Ariel Glaser had developed advanced AIDS at a time when the medical community knew very little about the disease, and there were no available treatment options; she suffered some of the same ostracism from her school as Ryan White experienced. Early in 1987, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally approved AZT as an effective drug to extend the lives of AIDS patients, but the approval only extended to adults. With their daughter's condition rapidly deteriorating, the Glasers fought to have her treated with AZT intravenously. However, the treatment came too late, and the child eventually succumbed to the disease late in the summer of 1988.
Legacy
Mourning the loss of her daughter and determined to save her surviving child Jake, along with other HIV-positive children, Glaser co-founded the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation in 1988, with friends Susan DeLaurentis and Susie Zeegen. Glaser's work raised public awareness about HIV infection in children and spurred funding for the development of pediatric AIDS drugs as well as research into mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The foundation is a major force in funding the study of pediatric HIV problems and tackling juvenile AIDS, both domestically and globally. Her book In the Absence of Angels, written with journalist Laura Palmer, was described as "a handbook of how the connected make waves in America". Glaser entered the national spotlight as a speaker at the 1992 Democratic National Convention where she criticized the federal government's under-funding of AIDS research and its lack of initiative in tackling the AIDS crisis. This speech is listed as #79 in American Rhetoric's Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century. The AIDS Memorial Quilt contains five panels with Elizabeth Glaser and her daughter Ariel Glaser's name on each of them, three panels with Elizabeth Glaser's name alone on each of them, and two panels with Ariel Glaser's name alone on each of them. In 2000, Alpha Epsilon Phi adopted the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation as their national philanthropy. Ariel later had a Beanie Baby named in her honor with the logo being a picture she drew when she was five. Elizabeth Meyer Glaser died at the age of 47, from complications of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, at her home in Santa Monica on December 3, 1994. Her son Jake is now an adult who often speaks publicly on behalf of AIDS patients. Jake remains relatively healthy due to a mutation of the CCR5 gene that protects his white blood cells.
