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AIDS hysteria blinds us



    IN his letter, Edan Milton Hughes bites blindly at the policy pronouncements leveled forth from the AIDS bureaucracy (AIDS still out of control, Examiner letters, Dec. 4). But given the lack of hard data, he misses the apple.

    While there are anecdotal claims that unprotected gay sex is up, there is no tracking of HIV sero-conversion. With AIDS incidence and deaths relatively stable (and protease Inhibitors about 50 percent effective at best) and no evidence of the rate of change of HIV sero-conversion, it is premature to conclude that AIDS is out of control.

    The state is preparing to make HIV a reportable disease, and this will allow policy to be based on science rather than prejudice. But for all the admonishments, lecturing and specious programs offered by the AIDS prevention bureaucracy, gay men's sexuality and public health is held hostage to policy makers more concerned with politics than science.

    And worse than holding our sexuality hostage to phantom epidemiology is forfeiting our privacy by allowing heterosexuals to determine what is right for us, as this would be as wrong as judging all African American men by the recent unsafe impregnation by Willie Brown and Jesse Jackson.



Marc Salomon

The City

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