Mary Ann Koenig | 25 Jun, 2020
Dr. Gerald Pierone of Vero Beach had a front-row seat to one of history’s most critical epidemics in 1986.
It was the heart of New York City at Mount Sinai Hospital, and Pierone was completing an infectious disease fellowship when the AIDS epidemic exploded. As daily patient counts climbed, Pierone and his colleagues confronted an unprecedented disease with a stark mortality rate and an unrelenting ferocity. Nearly 95 percent of those infected were dead within two years.
“In those days we really didn’t have effective treatment,” Pierone says. “You saw all these young men come in and they would be dead within six months or a year. It was a really, really tragic time.” Today, Pierone divides his time between two distinct medical disciplines, infectious disease treatment and research, and aesthetic cosmetics. It might seem incongruous that Pierone is both a member of the Infectious Disease Society of America as well as a
