THE AIDS EPIDEMIC'S MANY FACES

A sharp drop in the number of deaths from any epidemic disease is undeniably
good news, and so it is with a recent U.S. government report that AIDS
deaths in this country in 1997 dropped by almost half from the year before.

Analyze the data a bit more closely, however, and it's clear these
statistics merit only the most cautious of celebrations.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, deaths from AIDS
nationally in 1997 were 46.4 percent fewer than the 31,130 in 1996.

In Chicago the drop over several years has been even more dramatic: from
1,300 in 1992 to just 90 last year, according to the AIDS Foundation of
Chicago.

The sharp reduction is a direct result of the development of powerful, and
extremely expensive, chemotherapies that sometimes push the amount of human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in an infected person down to virtually
undetectable levels.

For individuals with AIDS--many of whom had quit jobs and sold
life-insurance policies and personal belongings in expectation of early
death--the new drugs have meant, quite literally, a new lease on life. No
wonder some are whispering about a "cure."

>From there on, however, the current AIDS picture is far less promising. For
the past few years, the number of new infections has remained constant at
about 40,000.

But because there is still no cure, the high infection rates, combined with
the declining number of deaths, add up to an ever-larger population living
with the disease and potentially infecting others.

Make no mistake: Both financially and in terms of the number of individuals
affected, there is no end in sight to the AIDS crisis.

In the United States, a number of factors contribute to the dishearteningly
high rate of new infections.

Sex and drugs are still the chief causes of the disease, so implementation
of proven public health strategies, such as condom distribution and
clean-needle exchanges for intravenous drug addicts, are often derailed on
moral or religious grounds, while the disease continues to spread.

Complacency, too, is luring even the groups most affected by AIDS. Some
quarters of the gay community are returning to unsafe sex practices, as
AIDS--astonishingly--is beginning to be viewed as just another treatable
venereal disease.

Most baffling of all, some AIDS fundraisers, so-called "circuit parties,"
are degenerating into sex-and-drug bacchanalias that can only contribute to
the next wave of infections.

HIV has been one of the most elusive targets ever confronted by medical
researchers. It would be the most ironic of mutations, however, if it now
fooled us into believing that it is no longer a threat.

Checked-by: Don Beck