ANOTHER VOICE
The vital question of whether Aids can be transmitted by insect bites
AUBERON WAUGH
One might have thought that it was a fairly uncontentious measure which would pass through the appropriate committee of the state legislature on a show of hands, but there has been no enthusiasm for this course of action in the legislature. Civil rights groups, as the state's homosexuals and junkies are quaintly called in this context, are bitterly opposed to it.
One understands why. A 22-page pam- phlet produced by the National Democra- tic Policy Committee in favour of making Aids a compulsorily communicable disease takes up nearly half its pages with arguing the (disputed) case that Aids can be communicated by insect bites. This would remove some of the moral opprobrium attaching to it, you see. The trouble is that none of us ever really believed that syphilis could be caught from lavatory seats. Only clergymen caught it that way.
We always knew that there were 'inno- cent' ways of catching Aids — from blood plasma and ordinary transfusion, transmis- sion from mother to baby, from accidental transfer of blood, spittle or tears. But we also knew that in Britain and America, at least, by far the most efficient, and by far the most frequent method of transmission was through sodomy or through re-used unsterilised needles which effectively meant when used by junkies. Incidentally, I now learn that the reason for the disease's enormous hold on Central and West Africa is .probably the use of unsterilised hypodermics by the medical profession, rather than because sodomy is the most popular form of contraception in those parts, as I previously believed.
So long as we talk of 'innocent' and `guilty' methods of contracting the disease and so long as the guilty methods account
for 95 per cent of confirmed cases in America and Britain there will always be a moral stigma attached to the illness, and a parallel tendency to be sensitive about it. Is it thought morally more reprehensible, or more ridiculous, to be a sodomist or a junkie? I do not know, but I well under- stand the anxiety of responsible health administrators to play up the possibility of alternative explanations.
On the other hand, there is growing evidence that once the epidemic has estab- lished a broad enough base by efficient means (i.e. sodomy and dirty needles) it proceeds to spread by less efficient means — normal heterosexual intercourse, mother-to-child, etc, and possibly even insect bites. Medical reticence does not allow us to know how many of the 15 women who have so far developed Aids in this country were heroin addicts, or how many had submitted to anal intercourse.
The fact that so few women in Britain have so far caught it — 14 of those 15 have died — does not, according to Dr Charles Farthing of St Stephen's Hospital, mean that a whole lot more are not carrying it around, waiting to develop. He says: 'We know that 50,000 people are infected with the virus in this country.' Other people know that 20,000 or (most popular) 30,000 people are.
I do not know how any of these figures are known without a compulsory screening programme, if only of a random sample. Estimates for those infected who will even- tually develop the disease vary from 30 per cent over six years to between 50 per cent and 100 per cent over 20 years. Up to now, I have tended to pooh-pooh the idea of a pandemic which will destroy all human life on earth. Too many people seemed to want it, if only as an escape from the drudgery of everyday life. If a couple of hundred thousand homosexuals and drug addicts were going to die world-wide, (15,000 have already died in America) and a couple of thousand innocent victims with them, that was certainly sad. No, seriously, it was jolly, jolly sad, and the Church of England was quite right to be concerned about it. But the risk seemed avoidable. Now, with the accumulation of evidence which sug- gests that the disease is broadening its base, we might take a look at prospects in a bull's market for the pandemic, always remembering that bullish evidence is still, numerically, pretty small and pretty ques- tionable: in New York, one woman has developed the disease for every two men, but this is explained by heroin addiction; in central Africa, numbers are even, but this is explained by medical unhygiene as well as by the anal-contraceptive tendency.
Chief of the bulls is Dr John Seale, who practices in Harley Street and gives press conferences at the Royal Society of Medi- cine in Wimpole Street. I now have the text of a press conference he gave earlier this month, but I am not sure that his case is helped by the hyperbolical language he employs, talking of a 'biological equivalent of the nuclear bomb' which will 'render the human race extinct within 50 years, along with the dodo, the dinosaurs, etc.' He brought in Churchill and the horrors of that 'merciless megalomaniac, Stalin . . . preparing to extend his monstrous empire across Western Europe.'
Now anti-communism is an admirable thing — I feel rather the same about the SDP, which seems an even closer threat but I did not really see that it had much to do with Aids until, in a later passage, Dr Seale revealed: 'There is some circumstan- tial evidence to suggest that a few Amer- ican citizens may have been deliberately infected with the virus, in New York city, by Government agents of the Soviet Union in about 1975.'
Moscow has apparently long been claim- Mg that Aids escaped from a germ warfare laboratory in America, but Dr Seale's references to 'an arrogant maniac like Colonel Gaddafi, General Amin or the Ayatollah, pressing one of their greasy little fingers on the nuclear button' may not succeed in convincing people that his mind is entirely on the problem of Aids, or to accept it as 'the great lie, more deadly than any perpetrated by the evil genius Joseph Goebbels, that the Aids virus infects only the sexually depraved, the morally de- generate, and a handful of unlucky, inno- cent victims'.
However, if the officially accepted esti- mates of 1.5 million people infected in the United States, 30,000 in Britain, are even remotely correct, it seems to me that there is a very good case indeed for compulsory screening and investigation into how every potential victim became infected. If it is genuinely spreading outside the 'high risk' groups, this seems the least we can do, and the sooner the better, if people are to be persuaded to alter their habits of a lifetime.
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