Dr. Mark Whiteside was researching, treating and even screening for a deadly illness before the world knew what to call it.
It was 1982 and Whiteside was a tropical disease doctor doing research in Miami Beach. He had gone to college to study environmental biology and hadn’t planned on becoming a medical doctor. Then he got accepted to medical school in Missouri and began a series of internships and residencies that ultimately led him to South Florida and the field of tropical disease.
He and a colleague came up with a thesis that HIV, the as-yet-unnamed virus that causes AIDS, had started infecting and devastating gay communities in New York City, San Francisco and South Florida, was one of tropical origin.
“That was really our lead-in to AIDS,” Whiteside recalled to the Keys Weekly on Nov. 25. He has spent the past week attending the Key West and Monroe County commission meetings, where he was honored with proclamations in honor of his retirement from the Monroe County Health Department after 40 years.
“My colleague Carolyn had even developed a screening program for the disease among at-risk groups, typically men who have sex with men, all before it had a name. So in ’82 we brought our screening protocol to Key West, where we could tell whether a patient was at low, medium or high risk, and we started early, counseling them about sex practices that allow the virus to enter the bloodstream.”
At the time, health care workers — along with the rest of the world — were terrified, he recalled.
“But the health care workers we found down here in Key West were among the most caring and compassionate that I had encountered,” Whiteside said.
He moved to Key West in 1987, joining forces with Dr. Jerome Covington to open an HIV/AIDS clinic at the dePoo Hospital on Kennedy Drive.
It was the start of a tough and taxing 20 years.
“In my 40 years working with HIV/AIDS, the first 20 years were bad, really bad, but the last 20 years have been good. I never would have believed back then that we’d make the advances we have,” he said. “Now, HIV is like any chronic disease. You can’t get rid of it, but you can certainly manage it, suppress it and live with it.”
In patients receiving treatment, HIV is no longer detectable in the bloodstream, thanks to the advent of medications known as highly active anti-retroviral therapy, or HAART.
And the latest advancement, known as PrEP, pre-exposure prophylaxis, can prevent HIV from infecting a person.
“Down here in Key West, we now have one of the best HIV suppression rates in the country because we’re a smaller population and can keep track of our patients,” Whiteside said, sharing the credit with other local HIV/AIDS doctors, including Covington and Dr. Jerry Jackson.
In addition to the AIDS epidemic, Whiteside has been on the frontlines of the flu, H1N1, Zika, dengue and COVID.
He’ll officially retire on Jan. 31, but he and his wife, Lilla, will remain in the Keys, though he plans to continue his independent research on chemical and electromagnetic pollution while pursuing his longtime passions of birds and butterflies.
“Besides being one of the most respected doctors in Key West, Mark Whiteside has had a side mission in helping people learn about the birds and wildlife of the Florida Keys, because education is one of the best ways to protect wildlife,” said Keys Weekly birding columnist Mark Hedden. “He was my unofficial birding mentor when I first started out, always willing to answer any of my dumb questions. He once talked me into going on a boat trip to look for birds off the coast of North Carolina in the middle of February. I have almost forgiven him.”
Whiteside, a Midwest native, turned 74 in January.
“I can honestly say I couldn’t have picked a better place to live and work than the Florida Keys.”
Looking back on his 40 years with the county health department — the past 16 as its medical director — Whiteside calls his career “a long series of accidents, especially for someone who hadn’t really planned on becoming a doctor.”
