Aids Epidemic

Your excellent article on The Children of AIDS on Aug. 23 helped to highlight the pain and anguish families with AIDS face and the devastating impact their death has on their children. It is important to place the impact of AIDS on children and families in perspective. In order to understand its true impact, however, one must consider the "head start" that it has received due to a profound neglect of human welfare in this country. Poverty, unemployment and income disparity are not new social problems in this country.

Since the AIDS epidemic began in the 1980s, 22,000 Philadelphians have been diagnosed with AIDS; half of them have died. Today, 20,000 people in the city are living with HIV. Without assistance, education, treatment, and most important, awareness, the number of deaths and infections grows. As the years pass, the public looks at AIDS as another disease we wished didn't exist. This month, Philadelphia FIGHT - an AIDS service organization that provides HIV primary care, consumer education, advocacy, and research on potential treatments and vaccines - hosted the 10th annual AIDS Education Month with six other local groups.

The chairman of the White House AIDS commission said yesterday that the Reagan administration has reacted too slowly and has committed too little money to battle the killer disease. In a draft report on the AIDS epidemic, Retired Adm. James Watkins also bucked administration policy by calling for strong federal anti-discrimination laws to protect people infected with the virus. "The commission is deeply concerned about the federal government's slow response to the HIV (AIDS)

It certainly figured that, given the public's horrified fascination with AIDS, a pocket guide to this fatal disease would emerge on paperback bookshelves. Fear not, it has arrived in the form of "The AIDS Epidemic: How You Can Protect Yourself and Your Family - Why You Must. " If the title alone doesn't frighten you to death, the information and worst-case scenarios of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome undoubtedly will. Authors James I. Slaff, M.D., and John K. Brubaker describe the facts, projections and possible social, political and economic consequences of AIDS, which destroys the body's immune system and the ability to fight infection.

Who better to lend counsel to a newly created presidential commission on the AIDS epidemic than someone who, as one commission member described, "has borne its brunt" and been "forced to deal with the harsh realities" of the disease? Yet the Reagan administration has rejected recommendations from experts in the field and members of the gay community to include an acknowledged homosexual on the commission. That refusal has generated concern among some panel members, who say they will not participate unless the administration reverses itself.

One year ago, Randy Shilts, the author of And the Band Played On - Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, predicted that AIDS would be the major issue discussed during this year's presidential campaign. Shilts was wrong. AIDS is just about invisible in this election. It is not mentioned beyond a token sentence in some of Michael Dukakis' and George Bush's longer speeches. If it is raised, the candidates quickly reply that they have no differences on the topic, and thus there is nothing more to discuss.

The global battle against AIDS lost one of its most impassioned warriors, Jonathan M. Mann, former director of the World Health Organization's international AIDS program, in the crash of Swissair Flight 111 off Nova Scotia. Along with his wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, he was en route to WHO's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, for scientific meetings on the global AIDS epidemic, which has claimed more than 13 million lives since the first cases were reported in the early 1980s.

After a whirl of publicity, several pharmaceutical companies have announced they are lowering their prices on anti-HIV/AIDS drugs for African and other developing countries. Merck & Co. will make two of its AIDS drugs available in Africa at 10 percent of their U.S. cost. The price for Crixivan will be $600 per patient per year, compared with $6,016 in the United States. Stocrin, which costs $4,730 in the United States, will be available in Africa and other developing countries for $500 per patient per year.

Plagues aren't what they used to be. Take the Black Plague. Nobody would call the 14th century the good old days, but back then, people had something that is sorely missing lately: They were scared. Seeing so many of their relatives and friends die so hideously drove people out of their minds with fear. Just being accused of spreading the disease was enough to get a person killed or even start a war. Even the Pope was afraid. Clement VI shut himself in his apartment and stayed between two roaring fires that his doctors thought would keep the sickness at bay. While the fires had nothing to do with the Pope's survival, being isolated from the rest of humanity probably did. In a world before miracle drugs, fear kept some people alive.

Calling for an end to the fear and hysteria of the AIDS epidemic, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy yesterday unveiled a $900 million legislative proposal to intensify research, education and treatment of the fatal disease. "AIDS has become a global health crisis," said Kennedy (D., Mass.), who chairs the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. "If we fail to do all that is within our power to conquer it, our failure will be measured in countless lost lives. " Kennedy's bill calls for a $450 million national AIDS education, prevention and risk-reduction program; $100 million to develop better treatment and care for AIDS patients, and an estimated $350 million for medical research to find new treatments and a cure.