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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, FEBRUARY 15, 1985
PAGE 9
In the United States, the attempt to control the appalling upsurge in the
incidence of AIDS is being frustrated at every turn by homosexual organiza
tions and civil rights groups. As a result the epidemic is going virtually
untreated, producing a gigantic reservoir of victims in the future--consid
ering the increasing number of pediatric AIDS victims. Here are excerpts
from an article in the February 8, 1985 issue of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
In••• [al wooded suburb an hour from Manhattan, Mark Kaplan frets
over AIDS and the world's oldest profession. "I have a prosti
tute-patient with pre-AIDS and I can't get her off the street,"
agonizes the young chief of infectious diseases at North Shore
University Hospital. "One day she looked especially tired. I
asked what was wrong. She said:
'I got fined $250, and now I
have to go out and work twice as hard.'"
In 17th-century London, victims of the plague were locked in
their houses. But quarantine, the classic tool of the epidem
iologist's trade, -isn't being used in this epidemic. Efforts to
control AIDS have run smack into civil liberties, which have
never been so fiercely protected•••• Efforts to close bathhouses
and detain infected prostitutes have been criticized as repres
sive and ineffectual•••• And carrier-mothers bear infected chil
dren, against medical advice.
Now in its fifth year, the epidemic of AIDS•••has struck 8,215
people, killing 3,921. New cases may more than double again this
year, says the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Those
exposed to the virus, once estimated at 300,000, may be closer to
500,000, the Centers' James Curran told scientists recently.
Some health officials estimate that 10% of that number will get
AIDS, but many more could be symptom-free carriers. Researchers
in the U.S. and France are trying to develop vaccines, but so far
there isn't a cure. "Quarantine for AIDS isn't like a one-month
quarantine for smallpox," says Evelyn Fisher, a physician at
Detroit's Henry Ford's Hospital. "This disease is for life."
In San Francisco, where two men contracted AIDS from prostitutes,
one infected prostitute was recently released after a medical ex
amination. "There's nothing I can do," says her physician, Paul
Volberding. "Our role is to take care of people and investigate
this disease, not take people off the street. No court would al
low us to hospitalize her involuntarily."••• "If they want pros
titutes with AIDS antibodies not to work, they'll have to offer
them disability," says Priscilla Alexander, who counsels prosti
tutes in San Francisco on "safe sex" and the dangers of AIDS••••
The bloodiest political fight was waged over the brief closure of
San Francisco's homosexual bathhouses•••• The closings last Octo
ber lasted only two months. Superior Court Judge Roy. L. Wonder
re-opened the bathhouses, but ordered owners to make sure clients
practiced "safe sex," that is, using condoms••••
Drug abusers, one of the original risk groups for AIDS, continue
to frustrate and frighten public-health officials. New York has
190,000 intravenous-drug users, 80% of whom� probably infected