County Epidemiologist to Leave in June

Dr. Thomas J. Prendergast, Orange County’s high-profile epidemiologist for 13 years and an early leader in the county’s fight against AIDS, is leaving in June to become deputy director of public health in San Bernardino County.

Prendergast, 49, said Tuesday that he is moving to San Bernardino County because there is a better chance for advancement there.

Prendergast said San Bernardino’s health officer, George Pederson, has talked of retiring soon and promised Prendergast his job. “He said once I get settled up there, he’ll trade jobs,” Prendergast said.

Prendergast acknowledged that promotion to health director there is by no means assured. But, he added, “the point is I’m doing it because I’m anticipating becoming the health officer. . . . It looks like a better route for a career advancement” than staying in Orange County.

As the county epidemiologist, Prendergast studies the incidence of disease and devises strategy to prevent or control outbreaks.

As such, Prendergast took the lead in tracking AIDS cases here and setting up some of California’s first programs to test for the AIDS virus.

One such program was regular testing of prostitutes at the county jail for the AIDS virus, said county AIDS coordinator Penny Weismuller. Prendergast, concerned that prostitutes would transmit the disease as they had syphilis, instituted that program in 1985.

He regularly treated AIDS patients himself at the county clinic. Associates said he was good at explaining acquired immune deficiency syndrome in language the public could understand and was effective in explaining that the disease could not be transmitted through casual contact.

When a hemophiliac boy named Channon Phipps and a teacher named Vincent Chalk were barred from school in 1986 and 1987, respectively, after they contracted AIDS, Prendergast “was involved in educating parents and staff at the schools and really that eased the acceptance of (the two) back into school,” Weismuller said.

On other fronts, Prendergast helped establish a large county tuberculosis clinic to treat thousands of Indochinese refugees who flooded the county in 1979-80. He also assisted several professors at UC Irvine College of Medicine in setting up a cancer registry that tracks the incidence of the disease here.

Orange County’s health officer, L. Rex Ehling, praised Prendergast’s work here and said the move to San Bernardino was good for Prendergast.

Meanwhile, in his final months in Orange County, Prendergast said, he is to assume the new title of deputy health director in a departmental reorganization that has not yet been implemented.