Aids Epidemic

The cost of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in dollars and cents will become a major political issue within a year, California Assemblyman Art Agnos was telling the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in a San Francisco hotel. Outside, the San Francisco Chronicle was reporting that the AIDS epidemic is spreading so rapidly that it threatens to overwhelm the city's financial ability to cope with the deadly virus. Agnos, a leading author of AIDS legislation in California, was participating with three medical AIDS experts in a panel discussion on the worldwide epidemic.

For a government official, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop made an astonishing request one day last week. At a Washington news conference, he actually called upon American parents and educators to abandon their reluctance to discuss sexual subjects with young people. What makes Koop's appeal so astonishing is that the American public has long been allowed to pretend to their children that sex is nonexistent. Now here comes Koop, asking the nation to deal with reality before it's too late.

This is how it comes into consciousness: A statistic is printed in the daily paper. The number of heterosexually transmitted AIDS cases has increased by 200 percent in the past year. A secret blood test is taken of women applying for marriage licenses in Alameda County, California. Out of 2,000 women, O.5 percent of them have been exposed to the virus. An NBC special features AIDS victims. Several of them are from "the general population. " A cover story is published in The Atlantic about heterosexuals and AIDS.

Despite the growing concern of public health officials, there is still little or no evidence that the AIDS epidemic has entered mainstream heterosexual America. For three years now, ever since it was established that acquired immune deficiency syndrome could be transmitted through heterosexual sex, epidemiologists have been bracing for the second wave of the epidemic, in which the lovers of people in the high-risk groups pass the disease on to people who have nothing to do with high-risk groups.

Filmmaker Spike Lee has a provocative theory about AIDS: He says it's a government plot targeted at gays, blacks and Hispanics that went out of control. "I'm convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn't just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out. So, now it's a national priority. Exactly like drugs became when they escaped the urban centers into white suburbia," he wrote in a long advertisement for Benetton that appears in the Nov. 12 issue of Rolling Stone.

The AIDS epidemic may be on the decline in heterosexual and homosexual populations, social scientists at the University of Chicago say in their broad new study of American sexual habits. By interviewing more than 3,000 randomly selected people, the researchers said they had gathered evidence needed to produce the most accurate trail to date of where AIDS is and where it is likely to spread. Because the incidence of promiscuous sex is declining, the researchers believe there are relatively few paths for the disease to spread beyond gay men and intravenous drug users.

Think of the urgency Americans would feel if a disease - any disease - turned tens of millions of American children into orphans in the space of a few years by claiming the lives of their parents. It would be an intolerable calamity. That's exactly what the AIDS epidemic in Africa is. The 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, has released another report that illustrates the frightening dimensions of AIDS. The report said 20 million African children will lose one or both parents because of AIDS by 2010.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Russia's HIV/AIDS epidemic is not only how rapidly it is spreading. It is also how many children from HIV-infected mothers have been abandoned and left to be cared for by the state. Efforts by the authorities to place them in kindergartens or schools are in most cases unsuccessful. They have become the children nobody wants, a sad reflection of attitudes in a naturally caring society. Russian law states that abandoned children should spend their first three years in "baby houses," or orphanages that serve as kindergartens where children are taught to talk, walk and interact with other children.

Was a monumental effort to conquer polio responsible for unleashing the world AIDS pandemic? That is the question that will be addressed tomorrow and Tuesday at an extraordinary meeting of the Royal Society of London, one of the world's most distinguished scientific bodies. At issue is whether a massive trial of an oral polio vaccine developed by Hilary Koprowski, former director of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute, inadvertently triggered the AIDS epidemic, which has stricken 53 million people, most of them in Africa.

One of the most insightful characterizations of the AIDS epidimic is that "we are now experiencing the calm before the storm. " The comment was made by the Rev. J. Jerome Cooper, pastor of the Berean Presbyterian Church, who said that he recently became convinced of the need for religious leaders to become actively involved in the education of people about AIDS. Mr. Cooper said that he had held to the popular view of many religious leaders that AIDS was sinful, or that it was a problem of homosexuals and drug users, and they deserved what they got. But Mr. Cooper has come to realize that he was wrong, that his was not a Christian attitude.

Growing up gay in the 1960s was scary. I knew enough to keep quiet — no small feat for an Irish-Catholic kid with the gift of gab — and I also learned to lie. I was terrified that the truth would cut me off from my family and my future. Homosexuality was, at best, a tragedy. Ah, the good old days. Things are different now, and not just on TV. President Obama, bless him, has affirmed that people like me have as much right to civil marriage as other Americans.

Sunday Flyer's heartfelt participation Philadelphia Flyer Ian Laperriere is scheduled to be part of a hockey clinic Saturday at KidzFest, a fund-raiser for fighting pediatric heart disease, cancer, and premature birth. The day's events, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., will include children's games, face-painting, arts and crafts, and kid-friendly food at Challenge Grove Park near the intersection of Bortons Mill and Caldwell Roads in Cherry Hill. Lisa Hurly founded KidzFest five years ago after she lost her 5-week-old son to complications from heart disease and premature birth.

Thirty years ago, five cases of an unusual pneumonia, all among young gay men ages 29 to 36, were reported by the Centers for Disease Control. Gay and bisexual men, injection drug users, hemophiliacs, newborns, and soon women with no apparent risk factors rapidly appeared in the literature. Marked increases in cases were reported from the nation's major cities, Philadelphia among them. As I began my internal-medicine residency in Philadelphia in 1985, HIV had been identified and the test to detect the virus was licensed.

In December, after Republican congressional leaders fulminated and conservative public outcry crescendoed, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington yanked an artwork from a large exhibition called Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture . The work was a video distilled from a David Wojnarowicz film, A Fire in My Belly - made in 1987 at the height of the AIDS epidemic - that contained a brief segment depicting ants...

Nearly three decades into the AIDS epidemic, scientists may have finally come up with the first product to block HIV infection since the condom. It is in the form of a gel developed for women. The gel incorporates the antiretroviral drug tenofovir, which is already used as part of the "cocktail" given to AIDS patients. It likely will first be made available in South Africa, where women often are unable to insist that their partners remain faithful or use condoms, said Quarraisha Abdool Karim, a researcher at Columbia University and the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa, the group that conducted the study.

By Amy Nunn, Gary J. Bell, and Robert K. Burns Starting this weekend, some 30,000 activists, scholars, and people living with HIV and AIDS will gather in Vienna, Austria, for the International AIDS Conference. While the conference focuses on the global AIDS epidemic, it's important to remember that nearly 1.1 million Americans are living with HIV. Moreover, one in four is unaware of his or her status and more likely to unknowingly spread the virus. Philadelphia is one of the six major cities with the nation's highest HIV infection rates.

It was a routine Tuesday for Samuel Dalembert: He participated in a clinic for a group of youngsters and ran some errands. Then he heard the news. The 76ers center learned via a message left on his cell phone that an earthquake earlier in the day had devastated his home country of Haiti. Before the Sixers hosted the New York Knicks last night, Dalembert said he had made an attempt to schedule a flight to Haiti, but he soon found out that no planes were going in or out of the country.

When Stephen Gluckman was first asked to help Botswana stem its AIDS epidemic in 2001, the University of Pennsylvania infectious-disease specialist expected to be there only three months. But then he set foot in Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone and was touched by what he saw: a crowded facility with patients on mattresses in the halls, people sicker than any he had seen in Philadelphia, and many babies infected with HIV passed on by their mothers. They were the face of Botswana, a country in the center of Southern Africa with one of the world's highest HIV/AIDS rates.

Fifteen years ago, the answer to slowing the AIDS epidemic seemed so simple. Hundreds of chemicals were known to destroy the AIDS virus in a test tube. The idea was to find one that would work in a vaginal lubricant so that no-chafe sex would also be safe sex. "A microbicide sounded like a no-brainer," recalls Rowena Johnston, vice president of research at AMFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. "One or two years, take our bows, move on. " Since then, more than $1 billion has been spent on global research and development of scores of potential microbicides, including lime juice, grain alcohol, and a seaweed extract.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is coming to the United Nations next week. If he holds a news conference, he will, of course, be challenged on Iran's suspect nuclear program and his unrelenting rhetoric about Israel. But here's a question that might get at the Iranian president's vision for his country: "Why have you jailed two Iranian doctors who pioneered the treatment of Iranian victims of HIV/AIDS?" Kamiar and Arash Alaei, who are brothers, worked a near miracle by starting a broad AIDS awareness and treatment program in an Islamic republic that emphasizes a puritan image.