Basic HTML Version
PAGE 12
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 10, 1986
Today my paper count has almost doubled. The reason being that
God is blessing my paper route, because I have kept his law of
tithing.
ON THE WORLD SCENE
Dan R. (age 14)
(Harleysville, PA)
--Richard Rice, Mail Processing Center
AIDS UPDATE; THE NEVER-TO-BE-MARRIEDS; "COHABITATION" SWEEPS FRANCE
Aids Update
A focus
.
on major social trends this time. First of all, the
ravaging effects of the AIDS epidemic continue to mount.
The complex
syndrome is evolving so rapidly that AIDS victims are now contracting
several different terminal ailments in addition to those contracted when
the AIDS epidemic began five years ago.
As a result, many newer AIDS
victims do not meet the original criteria for defining AIDS.
These
individuals are instead classified, for now, as having AIDS-related
complex, or ARC.
It is estimated that 21,000 Americans (mostly homosexual men) meet the
traditional criteria for AIDS established by the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) in Atlanta. Another 100,000 to 200,000 people have the AIDS
virus and have developed a disease outside the AIDS category--in other
words, ARC.
Another one million to two million currently healthy
Americans have antibodies to the Human T-lymphotropic virus, type III
(HTLV-III virus). The CDC estimate that 5 percent to 25 percent of these
will progress to AIDS and another 25 percent to one of the ARC illnesses.
An article in the May 3 0 WALL STREET JOURNAL analyzed the spread and
mutability of the AIDS syndrome:
AIDS--often called a tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon--is causing
far more real illness than official figures convey.
About
21,000 people, mostly homosexual men, have met the technical
definition of AIDS, and more than half of those have died. But
like an iceberg's unseen bulk, ARC patients•••outnumber AIDS
patients by an estimated five to 10 times. Between 10 percent
and 25 percent of them are expected to develop full-blown
AIDS.... [ARC sufferers are excluded from the official toll as
well as from some benefits, including the instant disability
status accorded AIDS sufferers under Social Security.]
"The
difference between AIDS and ARC is semantic.
It's a
construct," says Patricia Christen, a spokeswoman for the San
Francisco AIDS foundation•••• The syndrome itself is evolving
scores of new forms; and doctors under-report its occurrence
out of sympathy� discretion••••
When the epidemic began five years ago, doctors at the CDC
defined AIDS as an immune disturbance with certain infections,
such as pneumocystis carinni pneumonia (often called pep
pneumonia), or certain malignancies such as Kaposi's Sarcoma, a
capillary cancer.... Clinicians from Boston to San Francisco
now realize that AIDS is a hydra-headed complex of diseases,
--
-
-