Call Aids What You Will, It's Not In The Same League As A Plague

August 4, 1985|By HOWARD Means of the Sentinel Staff

WASHINGTON — Whatever else acquired immune deficiency syndrome may be, and it has been called everything from a judgment of God to the decade's most overblown story, it is not a plague.

Plagues kill indiscriminately and in enormous quantities. The conglomeration of plagues in 14th century Europe that became known as the Black Death killed perhaps 25 million people in Europe, a fourth of the population. In some countries three of every four people died of it. The London mortality rolls for September 1665 show 31,159 deaths by plague. In all about 70,000 Londoners died of it that year -- 15 percent of the population -- and another 300,000 fled the city.

Fourteen years later the plague of Vienna killed at least 76,000 people; at least 83,000 died in Prague in 1681.

Two centuries later an outbreak devasted India: Nearly a million people died in 1903 and again in 1904.

AIDS, by contrast, is a disease of sharp discrimination: 73 percent of its victims are homosexuals. A killer, it has not, in fact, killed that many people in the larger scheme of things.

As of late July the Centers for Disease Control had recorded a little over 12,000 cases of AIDS nationwide since the spring of 1981, when the disease was identified, and 6,079 deaths. To put that in some perspective, most estimates hold that the use of air bags in cars would save more lives annually than have been lost to AIDS over the last four years.

None of this is to diminish the importance of AIDS. It gets attention beyond its numbers -- if the rural Southwest, not New York and San Francisco, were its epicenter, AIDS would be heard about much less -- but it is a terrible disease nonetheless. If the projections of 40,000 cases by 1987 hold true, AIDS is also a dire epidemic in the making.

Nor, I think, is it boorish pedanticism to point out the difference between AIDS and a true plague because more than semantics is at work here. A plague mentality is settling on AIDS.

Witness the 13-year-old boy in Indiana who has been banned from school: He contracted the disease during his treatment for hemophilia. More and more the shoddy, heartless way in which his case has been handled is the rule with AIDS victims, not the exception. A plague might justify that kind of suspension of humanity; AIDS doesn't.

Witness the supposedly liberal-minded people in my supposedly liberal- minded line of work who routinely walk out of restaurants if they suspect their waiter of being homosexual.

Witness, too, the assault now being staged on the blood bank system. One of the nation's greatest forces for public good, the blood bank also depends on a fragile coalition of trust -- trust that it can pick safer donors than individuals can pick for themselves. Destroy that trust as the fear of AIDS threatens to do, set up a series of supposedly pure-blood banks -- members only -- as church groups in the South and a country club on Long Island, among others, want to do, and eventually the blood-bank system itself will be destroyed.

It's a fear that the numbers don't support. Since 1981 about 60 million pints of blood have been moved through the system. Over that time, about 300 people have contracted AIDS through transfusions or, like the Indiana boy, through another blood-bank product -- factor 8, used by hemophiliacs.

Certainly all those cases are tragic, but again, in the larger scheme of things, these are insignificant numbers. If saving your life is the issue, you would do far better to take one less drink before driving than to insist that the blood you receive comes from family or fellow church or country club members.

But, finally, numbers don't have much bearing where AIDS is concerned because, on the whole, it's a subject we approach with precious little reason. Nor will we so long as we think of AIDS as a plague, and not a disease of almost fanatical discrimination.

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