Elizabeth Glaser

Elizabeth Glaser ( Meyer; – ) was an American AIDS activist and child advocate married to actor and director Paul Michael Glaser. She contracted HIV very early in the AIDS epidemic after receiving an HIV-contaminated blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth. Like many other HIV-infected mothers, Glaser unknowingly passed the virus to her infant daughter, Ariel, who died in 1988.

Life Elizabeth Glaser was born November 11, 1947, in New York City and raised in Hewlett Harbor, New York. She became the exhibit director of the Los Angeles Children's Museum.

Glaser graduated in 1965 from what is now the Lawrence Woodmere Academy.

Illness In 1981, very early in the AIDS epidemic, Glaser contracted HIV after receiving an HIV-contaminated blood transfusion after giving birth. Like other HIV-infected mothers at the time, Glaser unknowingly passed the virus to her infant daughter, Ariel, through breastfeeding. Ariel developed advanced AIDS at a time when the medical community knew very little about the disease, and there were no available treatment options. Members of the public reacted with fear, and Los Angeles preschools would not allow Glaser's then-4-year-old daughter to attend.

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 succumbed to the disease late in summer 1988.

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.

On December 3, 1994, Elizabeth Glaser died at the age of 47, from complications of HIV/AIDS, at her home in Santa Monica.

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.