Spotlight: Dr. Alfred DeMaria

Honoring our Friend, Dr. Alfred DeMaria

This month a celebration was held at the Massachusetts Department of Health Jamaica Plain location to mark the renaming of the site as the Dr. Alfred DeMaria Jr. Campus.

Al DeMaria has been a pillar of our state’s public health and infectious disease community, and this honor recognizes his commitment to a broad array of emerging infectious diseases like AIDS/HIV, Lyme Disease, and ME/CFS over forty years. MassME joins Al’s colleagues, legislators, and friends in congratulating him on this recognition of his service.

Al has been a staunch supporter of MassME over many years, and a personal friend of our first President, Bonnie Gorman. In 2018, Al helped MassME to organize, and then hosted, the first awareness-raising event for ME/CFS ever held by a state’s department of public health. The event was moderated by Rivka Solomon with guest speakers Jen Brea and Ron Davis.

Here is Bonnie’s tribute to Al DeMaria.

THANK YOU AL!!!

Al has been our Guardian Angel and unsung Hero since the early 1980s when I was trying to get a diagnosis. He made my early diagnosis and has been sharing his expertise ever since. 

Al was a personal friend.  I met him in the early 1970s when I recruited Harvard Medical School (HMS) students to volunteer in developing a network of community health centers in Roxbury.  We have been forever friends since then. He even recruited me to work on his prison health program, since I had a license.

He was responsible for all of the firsts for our organization. Al supported developing our own advocacy, education, and support groups to mirror AIDS advocacy. This led to the development of the MA CEBV Association (now Mass ME). He has been advising and promoting the organization ever since.

Al recognized and acknowledged this illness, first known as CEBV (Chronic Epstein Barr Virus) from the very beginning, which meant the world in the early years of denial. He posted official fact sheets on the illness in the mid 1980s – the first from any public health department in the country. And he continued to promote the reality of the illness in Massachusetts and nationally, publishing journal articles and participating in many Medical Education programs and Grand Rounds across Massachusetts and beyond.  

Al worked with Tony Komaroff MD and HMS after NIH grants came to MA in the 1980s.  He advised on and promoted ME/CFS at the federal level to the CDC, the NIH, and HHS.  

He was our Guardian Angel and unsung Hero for forty years.  Thank you, Al!!!