Obituaries in Brief: Selma Dritz

The physician Selma Dritz, who died on 3 September aged 91, tracked the city's first Aids cases as the disease took hold in the early 1980s.

An epidemiologist, she was born in Chicago, and although she first considered becoming a concert pianist, she joined the San Francisco public health department in 1967, remaining there until her retirement. Her assiduous work from 1981 studying the first cases of HIV and Aids made her something of a heroine to the Aids community, and in the film of And The Band Played On, Randy Shilts' book about the early spread of the disease, the part of Dritz was played by Lily Tomlin.