AIDS: Journalism in a Plague Year

Viewpoint

Time was, all we had to worry about was plain old V.D. Then, when V.D. became a "sexually transmitted disease," the media swung their klieg lights into place and we got "scourges" or, even better, "plagues." They move so fast that last year's upscale sex virus, herpes, has now gone the way of E.T. In its place, most of us have been hearing alarming things about AIDS, acquired-immune-deficiency syndrome.

Rarely has a disease inspired so much concern, hysteria and misinformation. The news about AIDS has touched off a dread once reserved for leprosy. In several cities, there have been reports of nurses who have refused to be in the same room with AIDS victims.

Beyond the hysteria, there is cause for legitimate concern. Rarely have our best medical minds--experts whose professional tender is their antiseptic caution--made such statements as "the most serious public-health problem of the century." In its short history, AIDS has killed more people than any disease we've seen for a long time: More than 650 have died--nine and a half times as many as died from Legionnaire's disease and toxic-shock syndrome combined over a comparable period.

While we don't know what causes AIDS, we do know its symptoms: unexplained weight loss, prolonged fever or prolonged swollen glands, night sweats, unexplained fatigue, persistent diarrhea or cough, recurrent infections you can't shake.

We know, too, that it moves fast. Only three years ago, there were 55 reported cases. Today, there are more than 30 times that number. If it continues to spread at that rate, in three years, there will be 50,000 cases. And 39 percent of those will result in death in the first year.

Properly speaking, AIDS may be not a disease but a syndrome that does to the human immune system what Attila did to Europe. People with AIDS can contract a constellation of exotic infections and cancers that they would normally fight off. Looking at a patient's blood cells under a microscope, doctors see the wreckage of a crippled immune system. What they don't see is what wrecked it.

"We simply don't know at all what we have," admits Dr. Harold Jaffe, chief epidemiologist of the AIDS task force at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). No smoking gun has been found in any AIDS case--no virus, no bacterium, no Andromeda Strain to point to.

The media can hardly be faulted for seizing on AIDS: Involving sex, love and death, it makes herpes look like, well, just a cold sore. The problem is that in the media's feeding frenzy, a lot of careless things have been said.

A year ago, when the coverage began, it was embarrassing. Magazines such as US and New York splashed "Gay Plague" headlines across their pages in inch-high type. Then came The Saturday Evening Post's contribution: "Being Gay Is a Health Hazard." Grabby, sure, and it sold copies, but wrong on both counts: AIDS is neither confined to gays nor highly contagious.

Scarcely was their ink dry when Esquire fingered AIDS as an accessory before the fact in "The Death of Sex." Next, Rolling Stone me-tooed with an article titled "Is There Death After Sex?" Was Playboy alone in feeling that the reports of the death of sex had been greatly exaggerated?

Recently, Newsweek, in what purported to be a sober, detached look at AIDS, made some astonishing statements: AIDS, it told us, is "incubating in an untold number of victims" whose "contaminated blood" might spread the disease.

Now, wait a minute. What Newsweek describes is ghastly, to be sure, but what does it have to do with AIDS? As to contaminated blood, that's a loaded word. Contaminated, we ask, with what? Remember, this is a syndrome for which there is no known cause, no proven agent, an unknown means of transmission and, hence, no way to know whether or not a person's blood supply actually carries it.

As to "incubating in untold numbers": "Untold" is journalese for "We dunno," and what does incubating mean in a disease whose course nobody understands? Without any scientific proof, those statements may be more inflammatory than informative.

The point is that nobody knows: not the doctors, not the patients, not the media. We're being presented with everybody's conjecture as fact, and conjecture does a lot of damage when people's lives are at stake. We'd like to cite some facts.

About AIDS' being a "gay" disease: It's not. There's no such thing. Germs swing both ways, and they don't care whom their hosts sleep with. True, the disease was first reported among gay men, but recent figures show that three in ten AIDS victims aren't gay. Straight women and men, some recent Haitian immigrants, I.V.-drug users, hemophiliacs, even a few practitioners of the world's oldest profession have come down with AIDS.

About "catching" it: You're not in imminent danger. Yes, AIDS may be infectious, but no scientist worth his pipettes thinks you get it the way you catch a cold. You don't get it by being in the same room with somebody, by sharing a phone, a plate or an elevator. After three years and more than 1600 reported cases, no health worker--not one--is known to have caught AIDS from a patient. Those who would have us shun people with AIDS as modern-day lepers simply haven't done their homework.

Perhaps the worst half-truth is the sex-equals-AIDS equation. Yes, it looks as though AIDS can be transmitted through intimate contact, but apparently it's not how much sex you enjoy but the number of partners with whom you share it that increases the risk. In fact, if you're a heterosexual male in good health who isn't Haitian, doesn't inject drugs or enjoy women by the platoon, you're in the lowest-risk group for AIDS. Sure, you could take steps to lower your risk, but you could also die of boredom.

As to the "plague," remember that fewer than one one-thousandth of one percent of sexually active Americans are known to have AIDS; 99.999 percent of us don't have it.

We're not saying that AIDS isn't a problem. We're saying that it's so much of a problem that it calls us all to scrupulously separate fact from speculation. That is crucial, because many would seek to confuse the issues, to make political capital from the human suffering of those with AIDS. Let there be no doubt: Those politicians are playing for high stakes with AIDS.

Those who would make our moral decisions for us have already taken aim at AIDS, and scare articles have graced the pages of the Moral Majority Report. One Texas New Right group has moved to regulate what two consenting adults do in their bedroom by calling for a law that would make illegal not only oral sex and anal intercourse but holding hands or kissing in public--all in the name of hygiene, of course. A group in Maryland has stated that the gay victims of AIDS are "working assiduously and irresponsibly to spread" it and has charged that gays have "tainted" blood. Stop us if you've heard that one before.

It's no accident that some of the people most at risk for AIDS--gays, I.V.-drug users--are those on the New Right's political hit list. And, lest we forget, that list potentially includes anyone who is at all sexually active. The New Right, after all, is hardly bullish on folks who make their own sexual decisions.

What we need are not sermons but facts, and those facts cost money. Yet, until very recently, our labs have been starved for money to fight AIDS. Two years after its emergence, AIDS, which had killed 350 people, had received fewer real dollars than had Legionnaire's disease, which had killed 71 people in a comparable period. Last year, President Reagan effectively cut 20 percent of the CDC's funding. Next year, he hopes to reduce by one quarter the number of over-all research projects at the National Institutes of Health. For a time, it looked as though the only way to interest Reagan in AIDS would be to convince him that we could give it to the Russians.

More recently, sanity has begun to prevail. Where four Government health agencies shared only $5,505,000 in fiscal 1982 for research on AIDS, $14,532,000 was made available in 1983.

The bottom line is that while we don't yet have a cure for it, the syndrome is being taken from the sexual/medical ghetto and studied in the light of serious research. For now, that will help separate phobia from fact. To those who do otherwise, who fan fears for reasons of commerce or politics, we say: May a plague fall on your houses.