INFECTED BY THE AIDS PANIC

Americans have become obsessed by the spread of Aids. While death has not lost its sting, sex has

undoubtedly lost its zing. By Nicholas von Hoffman

AMERICANS don't love their children more than anybody else, but they may be more pugnacious about them. American parents always seem to be up in arms about something to do with their children and their children's schooling, so that when thousands of parents turned out to picket the admission of a pupil suffering from Aids into a classroom the event itself wasn't unusual, only the topic. However, for this year at least, Aids is the overriding public obsession. A small, geometrically shaped, protein-clad, microscopic speck of genetic instruction, the Aids virus is bid- ding fair to depose the Russians from their place as the number one enemy of the number one democracy.

Eleven thousand school children in New York continue to be held out of school as lawyers battle in the courts to force the authorities to remove and quarantine the unknown Aids children. In Indiana a haemophiliac boy who contracted the dis- ease through a blood transfusion has been barred from school by the administrators and it is his parents who have gone to court seeking his admittance. In Washington DC student X is learning his lessons alone in an isolated classroom. Student X has tested positive for ARC or Aids-Related Com- plex, meaning that he has been exposed to Aids. It is presently thought that about 20 per cent of persons having ARC will contract Aids, but then a lot of things have been said and thought about this disease.

While the schools feel their way to one policy or another for dealing with Aids, the controversy over the proper way to handle it runs amok on television, where parents, doctors, epidemiologists, licensed moral- ists, school administrators and journalists carry on nauseous arguments over whether or not infection can be spread if a child having the disease bites or buggers a child who doesn't. The emotional tone of debate was caught by a headline in the Washington Post the other day: 'Worry about survival of society first, then Aids victims' rights.'

In Los Angeles they see it the other way round. There the city council recently passed, without a dissenting vote, an ordi- nance making it illegal to discriminate against Aids patients in employment, hous- ing or health care. Now try and enforce it, fellas. Fear of the disease will nullify all ordinances. In San Francisco a television crew refused to photograph an interview with an Aids patient and in New York City, after the Roman Catholic archdio- cese there had arranged to convert an old convent into a hospice for Aids patients, the project had to be abandoned because neither parishioners nor neighbours would stand for it.

A few Aids patients have attempted wrongful dismissal actions or some such when they've lost their jobs or been chuck- ed out of their apartments but the unhappy truth is that the poor devils have died before their cases were adjudicated. As of now there have been about 13,000 clearly diagnosed Aids cases in the United States. Of these about 6,000 are already dead, and doctors hold absolutely no hope for those still alive. Nevertheless 6,000 deaths over about four years is not in itself a large figure. Nearly ten times that number are killed every year on the highways here, but the trend lines are grim. The number of reported cases has been doubling every 12 months, but the future is not always a repetition of the past, so that, surely, at some point along the line the curve will begin to flatten out. How many will have died before the levelling off occurs is anybody's guess and it is possible before it is over that Aids will bring boom times to the mortuary business.

Regardless of those eventualities, there is only a remote connection between the medical facts and the public temper. The medical facts, as offered by physicians with high-sounding titles and most imposing accreditations, are that Aids is a lethal but relatively rare venereal disease which prin- cipally afflicts homosexuals already suffer- ing from advanced satyriasis. But the public temper is made febrile by the way news about Aids is disseminated, by the announcements which reshape the same set of already known facts into shocking formulations, such as that the disease is now the largest killer of unmarried men between the ages of 24 and 44 in New York or San Francisco. Since men in that statis- tical category in those cities have a low mortality rate and are likely to be homosexuals this 'largest killer' stuff is hardly surprising, but these kinds of rephrasings turn a sad situation into a cause for panic. There are people on television comparing Aids to the bubonic plague.

Some of this is merely hometown brag- gadocio. Whatever it is, good, bad or indifferent, there is a strain in American culture which wants more of it than any- body else. We do like to get into the

due to a system which amplifies anything having to do with disease and morbidity. Where once American doctors stayed out of the newspapers and off the television for fear of being ostracised for unethical con- duct, now they love to find a reason for holding press conferences and making startling announcements. The most pre- liminary research findings, which once would never have been allowed outside the lab, are now immediately made public as shifts in professional opinion about the best way to treat this or that condition. A few days ago it was announced to the world that a committee of American doctors had concluded that henceforth the treatment of choice for certain kinds of breast cancer in women over the age of 50 would be hormones. A generation ago this was news which never got outside the clinic or the examination room, but now it's on the front page of every major metropolitan newspaper. The lead articles in almost every issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association are translated into lay language and slapped on television. Doctor docudramas, cinema verde doctor shows, doctor soap operas vie with the cop shows for domination of American television and wherever they are made Aids is written into the script.

The federal government's Center for Disease Control, conceived of as a place for epidemiological research, endlessly dis- seminates news about illnesses, with week-

ly, daily and sometimes even hourly press releases on the seesaw battle between man and microbe. There is no malady that human beings are heir to that the Center doesn't issue bulletins on. As the Weather Bureau charts suspicious — looking low pressure pockets off the coast of West Africa so the Center reports on the out- break of mumps in the Peruvian Andes. We are a society under siege by communist spies and malevolent bacteria.

Without Aids the disease cult in Amer- ica already held sway in the fascinated imaginations of tens of millions. When President Reagan went to the hospital for his operation the cult executed a coup d'etat on network television. Only a people brought up with the Center for Disease Control could have watched this, the major entertainment medium, without throwing up over their television dinners as the doctor/correspondents put their anatomic- al dolls on their desks and walked us through the operation — cutting through the skin, then muscle fascia and then, ye gods, there it was in colour, a three- dimensional plastic replica of the Chief Magistrate's large intestine. Television sta- tions invited their listeners to send — this is honest to God true — stool samples which would be tested for signs of 'colonic can- cer', just like Mr Reagan's.

Given the prevalence of the cult of disease it followed that America would take Aids to its heart from the start. The homosexual world with something serious

to worry about changed first. Business in the sex clubs, the steam baths and the tubs plummeted. Many, if not most, have gone out of business. Prominent homosexuals have been giving interviews for several years now saying that, under advice from their physicians, 'gays' are becoming monogamous. Whether they are or not, the men who came out of the closet a few years ago to make defiant proclamation of their sexual orientation (ugh) are finding themselves in an awful predicament. Los Angeles city council or no, heterosexuals are in flight and sometimes the results are pitiable. The stories of destitute homosex- uals, young men, invariably without medic- al insurance, trying to make it through to what is assuredly not the kind of death any of us would wish for ourselves, are true.

The richest reputed homosexual to be felled by Aids is Rock Hudson, of course, and if the occasion were not so sad the repercussions would be hilarious. There was, for instance, the denial by Linda Evans, the big-boobed blonde in Dynasty, that she was suing Hudson for kissing without telling that he had this little health problem, in a love scene shot some months ago. Even if Ms Evans isn't holding that kiss, which is being shown repeatedly on television, against him, the incident has given rise to endlessly nauseating televised discussions among the stars about 'ex- changing bodily fluids'. Comedian Joan Rivers has said that mouth-to-mouth os- culation, the standard Hollywood greeting for 50 years, is out and has been replaced with a quick brush kiss heretofore reserved for saying hello to one's enemies.

Miss Rivers's comments were born out by the news clips of the attenders at an aid to Aids benefit at which the stars raised a million dollars to pay for research. Cher, Burt Lancaster, Cyndi Lauper, Burt Reynolds, Shirley Maclaine, everybody was there, all seemingly with two friends who had come down with the malady, one alive and one dead. Betty Ford, whose breast removal and drug addiction prob- lems are more familiar to millions than their own medical histories, was given the first annual 'commitment to life' citation awarded by the Los Angeles Aids Project.

Even non-Hollywood heterosexuals without two friends are no longer so smug. They are getting the disease. Some are drug addicts who get it from dirty needles, some are infected through blood transfu- sions and 133 are women who may have contracted it through their bisexual bed partners. However, the latest news from calamity's friend, the Center for Disease Control, has it that examinations of the blood of 92 prostitutes in Seattle showed five of them to be Aids carriers. And ten out of 25 hookers examined in Miami turned out to be the same, so it is possible that Aids is now loose in the exclusively heterosexual population. The word among the Yuppies is that sex is out. Making money is safer and more fun, and while death has not lost its sting, sex has lost its zing.