This story originally appeared in the December 9, 1986 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
AIDS is not a disease of homosexuals or intravenous drug users alone: it threatens millions of sexually active Americans regardless of age, gender, race or place of residence.--Newsweek, November 24, 1986
I really haven’t accepted the fact that it’s something that can actually happen.--Boston Globe, November 12, 1986, quoting a 20-year-old
The news about AIDS just keeps getting worse. Just look at the latest newspapers or peruse the weekly news magazines and you’ll be struck by the developing consensus of dire predictions and mushrooming fears about the future of AIDS in America. Ever since official AIDS projections for the next five years were released, in June, journalists and scientists have been busy creating a ghastly vision of the future.
Here is a commonly offered scenario: the year is 1991. Four million Americans are infected with the fatal AIDS virus, and as many as half of them will eventually develop the incurable disease. In this year alone, 54,000 citizens – homosexuals and heterosexuals, drug users and teetotalers – will perish from AIDS as it becomes one of the nation’s leading killers, second only to heart disease. The high cost of treating AIDS sufferers is crippling the Medicare system, several major insurance companies have already been bankrupted, and the economy has plunged into deep recession. Every man, woman, and child in the country now undergoes regular AIDS testing and carries the results around on identification cards. Sex outside marriage is illegal. It is a felony for an infected person to have sex with a noninfected person. All pregnant women must submit to an AIDS test – if the results are positive, abortion is mandatory.
This futuristic nightmare that sounds like a combination of 1984 and The Andromeda Strain is now just a gruesome fiction. But there is a growing sense that this scenario, sketched out in the August 10 issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine by Neil R. Schram, MD, chairman of the Los Angeles City/County AIDS Task Force, may be tomorrow’s reality. Newsweek’s November 24 cover story begins in strikingly similar fashion, with a future president declaring a national state of emergency to combat the virulent epidemic that by that time –1991—has taken nearly 200,000 lives and shows no signs of slowing its deadly advance.
Could this possibly come to pass? An increasing number of experts, eyeing a growing body of evidence, believe it could happen, particularly since so many people now potentially at risk are failing to heed the gathering storm clouds and are averting their gaze from a very disturbing set of facts, statistics and projections.
The Centers for Disease Control now report 28,246 confirmed AIDS cases and 15,853 deaths. Official estimates put the number of Americans already infected with AIDS at 1.5 million – most of them unaware of their condition. All of them are capable of infecting others for the rest of their lives. The US Public Health Service projects a total of 270,000 cases by 1991, but there is a widespread belief that that number is low and that it does not take into account people with ARC (AIDS-related complex), who may already outnumber AIDS patients 10 to one. Heterosexual transmission accounts for 1060 of the current reported cases and the CDC says the disease can be spread from male to female and female to male through vaginal intercourse. In AIDS-ravaged Africa, where as many as five million people may already be carrying the virus, 50 percent of the victims are women, and heterosexual sex is believed by leading researchers to be the primary means of transmission. The only people currently considered at no risk for AIDS are those who’ve been in a mutually monogamous relationship since 1977, provided neither partner received a blood transfusion or injected illegal drugs. Unless you are in that no-risk category, “safe sex” now entails using a condom (and they can break) for vaginal, anal, and even oral sex.
Until science produces an effective treatment or vaccine, the only obstacle in the path of this potentially rampant AIDS devastation is a massive campaign of public education. But because the Reagan administration has failed to provide any kind of leadership (with the exception of recent, belated efforts by the surgeon general) to avert a national health disaster, the news media now find themselves in the unusual position of not only reporting on AIDS but playing what may be a decisive role in the battle against the disease, as reporters scramble, in this vacuum of leadership, to alert the slumbering masses to the deadly invader before it’s too late.
